i read somewhere that the 3.8 catalyst drivers were coming out today. anyone know when they are coming out?
thanks

They are out.

Anybody tried the new catalyst 3.8 yet???? Impressions???? problems solved???? yep???? nop????? sorry for my english, I'm spanish spoker.

They do not fix a single issue I am having.

First impression is that they have fixed something.....

Iam able to run aquamark3 without any crashes now.

I'll do some further stress testing in different games/3d applications tomorrow.
Until then i will pray

Looks like 3.8 didn't fix anything. But, for those of you who are still having a FSB problem, I've been increasing the fsb manually from 133. This has been successful so far. Considering i hadn't tried this before, i'll say it probably would've worked without the new driver. I'll tell you what i can get the fsb up to stabily on my 2700+.

Problems are still here..
every damn game I try just keeps on hitting me back to win XP pro after some minutes (30 - 45 minutes)...

just ran aquamark3, did it fine, got an score of over 25000.

temp of my cpu is over 60c when running games, is this to high? (p4, 3,0 ghz with an arctic cooler on it)

I just can't figure out what the problem is...
p4p800
1024 mb RAM
ati radeon 9600 pro (sapphire)

I am having the exact problem described by all in this thread, except with a Radeon 9200. I don't know enough about the differences between the 2 cards to know if this is my problem as well - could an expert out there let me know if it is worth paying attention to this thread or am I in my own world of hurt? My system is as follows:

Asus P4P800
Pentium 4 2.6Ghz HT 800FSB
1024MB PC3200 DDR
Powercolor Radeon 9200 128MB

Affected games seems to be all, but verified ones include:
Alien vs Predator 2
Star Trek Elite Force 2
Call of Duty Demo
Freelancer
Independence Wars
Morrowind
Rogue Squadron

The new drivers have fixed all my problems with EVE-online, which is good news. I can even run with everything back to normal, although 8X is still not working. It will run Windows very slowly for a good 20 seconds until the screen refreshes and it sets it back to 4X. I'll do some more testing with Morrowind later, see if that's fixed as well.

My conclusions on the FSB tests are these:

Rock Solid at 165mhz fsb w/ 3.8 catalyst installed. Not as good as 166mhz fsb (which absoloutly will not run) but acceptable. I definetly think there is a compatability issue w/ my mainboard and this card. In retrospect, i did have a gforce4 mx440se that gave me some problems too.

But, in conclusion:
2700+ running at 2145mhz w/ a 165mhz fsb
AGP aperature at 128mg
AGP 4X (the max my board will allow)
via 333 chipset
Fast write ON
ALL setting turned up to maximum quality and picture perfect results with rock solid stability!

I did some further testing. I only have Neverwinter Nights installed right now. Can play for, say, 10-15 minutes, then it either dumps me back to XP with some error message to save my work and then reboot - or it reboots outright.

Since I did a fresh install of Windows, this may not even be the effect of the 3.8 drivers. For example, right now, I have DirectX 8.1 installed; not 9.0

Will upgrade to 9.0 tonight and see what happens.

Oh, yes, this is with the usual workarounds (no fast writes, hw acceleration decreased one notch, no hardware mouse cursor in NWN).

Haven't heard back from ATI again, either, after the FAQ. So far, ATI hasn't exactly convinced me with their new cards.

Hi. My name is Nori

I have the Sapphire 9200 (not the SE) and have the problem with hang.
Good thing all of you guys seemed to find out it was the video card cause I was having on PC that I just built, and....you know.....I did not know what the freaken problem was!!! everything from HDD, MB, CPU, SOUND, everything was new, so I had to try everything!!! spent my last freaken 5days like....10 hours a day trying to figure what was wrong.....seriously.

I even swapped my $70 antec PSU to $100 enermax and stuff like that.....god.....

Well...I put on my old Gforce4 MX440, and seems the problem is bling gone!!! man how can a video card out of a box with no tweaking have this much problem!!! Im starting to assume that the problem is with heat.
I have no fan on my Sapphire Radeon 9200, and big ass heatsink and fan on my GF4MX440. Ive pretty much tried everything posted earliar, but still got problem.

Man.....Ive never heard such a problem like this since the old win98 times. I hope ATI starts to do some debugging by them self.

Well here is my setting.

Antec Sonatacase(that comes with PSU)
MB - L4VXA2
CPU - Celeron 2.4
Ram - Kingston PC2100 256mb x 2
Video- Sapphire Atlantis 9200
HDD - Seagate Barracuda 80gb

well, this was supposed to be my quiet bedroom webbrowsing pc, but as crashing like this, its not gonna be good for anything!! darn it!!

Im glad I found this post since I earlier predicted problem was in my cheap ass CPU and MB.
Well, Im gonna try changing my heatsink on the 9200, and see if this problem still occurs. Good luck to all other!!!

P.S. by the way, if there is anyone with similar setting, tell me how youre doing! thanks!!!

You might void your warrantee if you change the HS.
If it is in fact the card itself then you'd be S.O.L.

I must admit that everyone should download the 3.8 drivers.
They have an error reporting feature that I just witnessed during my C&C Generals Zero Hour gameplay. Sort of borrowing a page from XP's error reporting system.
The game hung....I said crap.....an error reporting box came up, and the game "unfroze" and kept playing.

It uses your email client to sent a small file to ATI's support desk and hopefully will provide realworld feedback for future driver revs.
Plus the idea of resetting the GPU and resuming gameplay is cool.

BTW. I dug a bit and seen that your MoBo is VIA based.
Have you downloaded the latest chipset drivers for it?
http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=300
It help me and a few others out.
Also, has anyone sent an email to Maximum PC yet?

I don't think Maximum PC cxares what I think, I am not their target audience (different country).

;-)

I'vew changed so many things, it's hard to say which has had what effect. I can play NWN, for a little while. But Aquamark, 3DMark still crash, I sometimes get bluescreens... I am now convinced it's definitely the graphic card. Hopefully ATI will sort out the problems soon.

hmm I dont know about you guys but the drivers I have problems with are the catalyst drivers 3.6-3.8 and those drivers just happen to include the WDM drivers for AIW cards... is that maybe why i'm getting freezes with the newer drivers?

I had to go back to 3.7 (if you can believe that!) because morrowind has corrupted pixal shaded water. has anyone else seen this?

Hi,

it's interestingly to find so many ATI users here with these bad freeze problems...

I am new to ATI and not pleased about these silly drivers bugs. I try to use in a new PC (Nforce2 board, AMD XP 2500+, DDR-RAM, Win2000) a Sapphire Radoen 9600-pro card. The board's BIOS sets AGP to 8x by default. That's been a problem: any 3d software froze the system after 10+ seconds, be it in fullscreen or in a window.
I've read here that many people had to set AGP to 4x so I did it too: the 3d stuff I've tested so far works then, however *only* with Catalyst v3.6, which is a shame.

I noticed the following with Catalyst v3.8 and AGP 4x:
* Jedi-Knights-2 works well.
* Jedi-Knights-3 starts to "flash" white pictures, and the lower part of the screen starts to blur. Very weird. The game doesn't crash however, but it's unplayable. (This also happens when I try to run the game with Catalyst v3.6 and AGP 8x but then the PC freezes.)

The v3.8 new VPU recovery tool (or how it's named) I tested with AGP 8x: any 3d software freezed the PC after 10+ seconds, but then, some seconds later, the recovery tool reset the card's CPU, the desktop does appear and a "report to ATI" message pops up. Unfortunately, when I hit the "send message" button the system froze again.

So now I run the Catalyst v3.6 driver and AGP set to 4x. It looks to work so far.

I've seen that too Chuck. Water looks absolutely terrible in Morrowind, but at least I can play it now without having to clock down my cpu. I am still having problems with 8x though, if I try to set my card to 8x the machine will reboot, after which any graphics related tasks are slowed right down (start menu takes a good 5 seconds to finish appearing), then after about 30 seconds the system sets itself back to 4x (without a reboot) and everything is fine.

I'm running an ATI Radeon 9600 Pro with an Asus A7N8X2.0 (Deluxe) mobo, both support 8x and both the card and the mobo have 8x enabled when this happens. Mobo has the newest drivers, card is running 3.8. Any ideas?

Does any of you here have 128mb Radeon 9600 (the non-pro version)? 'Coz I'm planning to buy it tomorrow after 5 months of saving up my allowance. Does the Radeon 9600 have same problems like Radeon 9600 pro? And I wanna make sure that it'll work along with my ECS mobo that has KM266 chipset (With built S3 Prosavage Video Card). Any replies will be greatly appreciated. If I discover that Radeon 9600 have the same problems that Radeon 9600 pro has , I think I'm better off buying the 128mb Geforce FX 5600. Please help...