I apologize Ben, I wasn't refering to you then.

I sent an email to Ati, refering to this thread.

No problem. I just wish that I could play the game. It is extremely fun and ATI and EA Games should do something about this

Are all these games on the list from EA or different manufacturers?

Many of them are. I've got almost no problems with Flight Simulator 2002, which is a monster hog when the settings are maxed.

Did you hear about the whole EA/nVidia "The Way it's Meant to be Played" program?

Supposedly EA will code their games to offer better visuals when run on nVidia cards. It's bulls**t anti-competitiveness. Code for Open GL or directX and let the cards determine the quality and performance.

Oops, I see that I should watch my potty mouth!!
The B.S. was automatically *'d.
Fair enough!!

This is rediculous, ATI cards are supposed to be better made and yet EA teams up with nvidia. My bro owns an ATI 9700 Pro and has no problems with Generals so I guess ATI fixed it from the 9600 Pro.

If anyone has contacted either parties (EA or ATI), please post a summary of the support they have offered. So far I have gotten nowhere.

The 9700 came out before the 9600.

It's ATI's weird sort of naming system that is competeing with nVidias equally odd system.
The 9500 and the 9700 were launched late last year, while the 9600 and the 9800 were launched in the spring of this year.

I guess this means newer isn't always better.

Just played the Aquanox2 demo. Ran beautifully, with every fancy option turned on. It ran flawlessly and looked great. Microsofts Flight Simulator 2002 runs like a top as well.

So I ask that if my system can run these games flawlessly, then what's the problem with Battlefield 1942 and Generals?
I say drivers and game code are the real culprit, with our systems just being the unlucky combos that aggrivate these flaws.

I see more AMD/VIA setups or older PIII than any other system showing issues with this card.

I'm always looking for a good excuse to upgrade, but I'd prefer to do it when I please, and not because some tech told me to.

Well, does anyone know if they are gonna come out with a driver to fix the problem, because I think it would be incredibly stupid to replace a brand new video card because of some dumb game designer.

Ok guys, I'm not sure if my post worked.....but 3.7 should be coming out in a few days. So don't worry, they are fixing the problem. Just wait until that s**t comes out and we will be coo!

Brother I sooo hope so.


As an interesting aside......I ran the 3DMark2003 benchmark and before I got started I noticed that it said that Sideband Addressing was enabled.

I've looked a lot throught the BIOS in my A7V333, and I cannot find a means of turning it off. I toggle that mysterious "AGP performance control" setting and noticed no difference. I still want to know what the heck it does.

I know that 3.6 has an option to turn off Fast Writes, but is there a way to turn off Sideband Addressing. I'm running 3.5 as requested by my freindly FIC tech support agent.

I've heard from a lot of people that Sidebanding is also a contributor to making a system unstable.

Just another peice of the puzzle I hope.

At least you could install 3.5 i'm stuck on 3.4 or at least I think that's what it is. It's the CD from the box. This really sux balls man!

I tried the CD from the box, it was 3.3, but it still caused Generals to crash.

To all the 9600 pro issues. I just bought a new one and all is well with c&c and the rest so they must have fixed it. I'm running an abit nf7-s, 1 gig Crucial 3200, adm 2800 barton running at 38 celcius. I've run c&c for 7 hours no problem.

That doesn't help us out very much though............

Hi Ray,

The mainboards of people experiencing the problem I described include (for further details, see the link to the discussion thread in my previous mail in the history below):

Asus P4P800 deluxe
Asus A7V600
Asus CUSL2-C <-- mine, with latest available BIOS (been out for about a year now)
MSI KT3Ultra2 (VIA KT333)
MSI Mainboard with VIA chipset (MS 6590 - KT4A Ultra)
Asus A7V333

Thanks,
Simon de Groot.

----- Original Message -----
From: Sapphire Euro Support
To: 'Simon de Groot'
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2003 2:02 AM
Subject: RE: Sapphire 9600 Pro lockups / freezes


The problem is there are many models and chipsets for motherboards. ASUS tends to have the biggest problems as they do not make Radeon cards. Gigabyte/EQS/ECS have the least problem as we run more tests. MSi is dependent on models.



Without knowing which motherboards we have no way of commenting.



Ray



-----Original Message-----
From: Simon de Groot [mailto:simon@blitsnet.nl]
Sent: 12 August 2003 08:41
To: eutech@sapphiretech.com
Subject: Sapphire 9600 Pro lockups / freezes



Dear sir,



Some people and I are having similar problems running a great number of games using DirectX on a Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantis. After a few seconds/minutes of gameplay the whole system freezes, forcing you to reboot. We have not had that problem with other videocards, most of us recently upgraded to the Radeon 9600 Pro, and had the problem since then.



Please before you send me the default list of possible solutions or pointing the finger at game developers (the list of problem games includes many various games of various vendors), catch up on our current situation and findings in a discussion thread on hardware analysis: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/8596.



We'd be very grateful if you'd help us out here, since we're becoming somewhat desperate.



Kind regards,

Simon de Groot.

OK guys I have the same problem...

I own an internet cafe and I have 25 computers. All computers are the same and have the same specs:

P4 Intel 2.0 GHz
DFI EC-II and TC-II Mainboards
256 MB RAM
MS Microsoft Optical Mouse (USB and PS/2 connections)
GForce 4 Ti 4200 X8 128MB

Recently due to the replacement of 15 GForce Ti4200 cause they where defective, I bought 15 extras ATI 9600 PRO (powered by ATI).

First I was supprised of the image quality that the card provited. BUT ATI has MAJOR compatibility problems. I WILL NEVER BUY ATI AGAIN.
Im an C&C GENERALS fan. After the installation of ATI all 15 computers FREEZE after 5 seconds of gaming. I DID EVERYTHIG! I installed the LATEST : ATI drivers (catalyst, cpanel, WDM drv),re-installed Direct X9b. NOTHING! I was using the patch 1.5 version of GENERALS. I contacted ATI but they didnt help they said that its not their problem and that I should try using the latest drivers of ATI and latest patches for the game. I was happy to see that there was an 1.6 patch for the Generals released. I installed it but still nothing. Game still freezes. The problem is 100% from the card. I contacted EA and after a few replies they said they couldnt help anymore and they will do something in a FUTURE patch(!). s**t! This sucks! I dunno whats wrong with this guys but when u spend your money like that you expect a better treatment as a customer! I have tryed on the SAME computers the above cards and they ALL worked FINE:

1) ATI 9000
2) ATI 8500Pro
3) GForce 440MX
4) GForce 2 GTS

I also took one of the cards and installed to my custom system I have builded myself with different specs:

AMD Athlon 1800+
EPOX 8HA+ Mainboard
512 MB Ram
GForce 4200Ti

Generals was working fine here also but when I installed the f*cking ATI 9600PRO the SAME freezing!



S-o-m-e-o-n-e with a solution?????

PLEASE HELP US SUCKERS THAT TRUSTED ATI!

I forgot to tell u I use as an O/S

WINDOWS XP Professional (NO SP)

do they have a release date on 3.7? Cuz I would like to know when to expect the update. If they don't fix it, they need to recall the cards. Hah, yeah right.

I've found through a lot of game playing recently that the card seems to run well on a lot of games.
It just happens to freeze up on the games I really like.

Realistically though, we are all suffering from Early Adopter Syndrome.

The 9600 core is unique, and I'm thinking (and hoping) that the driver writers and the game developers figure out what the issue is soon.

As I said it runs great on the majority of games out there, so it's not ATI's fault that the games are written with buggy code (Or favoring nVidia), or poorly impliment DirectX code.

Well, I ask again, does anyone know when 3.7 comes out?