Hello all. I am encountering problems only with Age of Mythology. UT2003 runs stable and very well.
My system stats:

Windows XP Home (SP1a and all patches and updates)
DirectX 9.0b
MSI KT3Ultra-2R (latest BIOS and Drivers)
ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (Cat 3.9)
TerraTec Aureon Fun 5.1

So it's a bit strange. I have a lot of games, including AoE, AoK, UT, UT2003, Unreal II, Warcraft III, Diablo II, Starcraft and only AoM shows problems.

Still cant understand how the card works on some pc's and not others ?? surely this points away from the 9600 pro drivers ?
Also wot agp drivers do i need for my MSI K7N2 Delta m/b ?? is it the nforce drivers ?? i already hav them.
Thanks

This is so .....strange.... with enable mouse trails Age of Mythology runs! No crashes, just a flickering mouse. This indicates a conflict of mouse and ati driver. Suggestions?

Hello everybody after some frustrating days with the ATI radeon 9600 pro i finnaly got the solution! Everything works fine now no more freeze ups, Wolfenstein doesn't crash anymore. I did crash with the Cat 3.4 driver also.
Well the solution is: I ripped the blasted card out of my computer and threw it in the river. And placed a nice Asus V9560 Geforce Fx 5600 128mb on my board. Aaaaaaah what a relieve...

i'd rather keep my 9600 Pro thats working fine with 3.5 drivers, fastwrite on, agp 8x then buy a crap gforce fx card where the closest card in price is a 5600 NON ultra which plays dx9 games terribly which is why i upgraded my card... for dx9 games. If i wanted a fast dx8 card, id find an old ti4200.

Jack,
The Hyperion drivers are the same on both the MSI, and VIA sites.
I'd recommend always using the ones from the VIA site, as they are likely to be the same as the board manufacturers, and perhaps more up to date when new versions are released.
But this is only applicable with motherboards manufatured by non-OEM companies like ASUS, Abit, FIC, MSI, and the like.
Applying the Hyperion drivers to a Dell, or Compaq could bork the system because they use custom chipsets that often mix and match parts.
That doesn't really apply to you in this case, but it's important to mention.

Dale.....good observation. Some posters have been trying to make that point for the last 30 or so pages.

Driver note:
At the chance of sounding hypocritical......I also found that the 3.9's are as unstable as hell on my system.
I rolled back to the 3.8's and have had no problems.
Generals runs like a rock with the 3.8's, but locked up with the 3.9's every so often. The VPU recovery did a good job resetting the game, and allowing me to keep playing, but it's annoying as all hell.
Must be something in there for the new XT stuff that's destablizing the AGP bus.
I'll keep trying new driver revs, but so far the 3.8's have been the best for me.

It's too bad that, as someone mentioned earlier, they can't write the drivers to take into account for individual cards. It seems like they are trying for a jack of all trades (and master of nothing) driver that works equally well on all versions of Radeon.

Hopefully the 3 VPU reports I sent out can help out for later driver revs.

It's a good idea modelled after Microsofts error reporting system.
I read the other day that it is actually a requirement for the next version of Windows..."Longhorn".

Ok,

so directx 8.1 has the same problems for me, and uninstalling directx 9 didnt work. The Mouse trails thing seems to work..................thanks for that but seems to have the same effect as lowering the hardware acceleration, in that you get the flashing mouse in AOM and C&C Generals, however UT2003 runs far better, played for 2 hours or so on various maps without a crash. (probably the directx)

Does anyone know of a P4 motherboard that runs PERFECTLY well with this card????

I would rather spend money on a new board than NVIDIA. It has to be a driver issue, no doubt about it as far as im concerned

well if MSI continues to use the same hyperion drivers, im just going to get them off the MSI site... does it make a difference?

RE: UT crashing to desktop.

UT crashes to the desktop - yes but that's because of the driver. It works in software rendering mode - but UT never crashed/froze even once WITHOUT the VIA driver. So UT on the radeon 9600 pro card works. (Its the Ut2003 that freezes). So the via chipset driver needs to fix this. This is the only game I found broken. I tried other games like Test Drive 5, Need For Speed Porsche 2000, Age of mythology, Cricket 2002 all seem fine...

And... Return to castle wolfenstein never even crashed once - with or without via drivers.

A game that seems to be broken with DirectX 9 is Tiger Woods PGA Golf and FIFA 2000. (Both from EA - maybe EA uses some old DirectX things that were dropped in DX 9 - don't know).

Also Ut2k3 still hasn't froze.

The jerking is awful - but only in CTF-Face3 map (occasionally though). Other maps there are slight jerks during the starting of a match - then its absolutely smooth.. No probs.
Oh, and btw, i have 512 MB DDR RAM.

Still testing if ut2003 hangs in CTF-Face3.

The via drivers were really useful - even though some OLDER games i need to run in software rendering mode. Also Tomb Raider Angel of darkness that relies on DirectX 9 still hasn't crashed a single time after the via driver.

Still testing... though.

Btw - has anyone ruled out the possibility of a VRAM fault??

By saturating the VRAM - ie memory test?

RE: DirectX 9.0b

The version of DirectX i'm using is DirectX 9.0b - and no as far as I know its not possible to uninstall directx (unless by uninstalling Windows and reinstalling it).

So i can't revert back to DX 8.
There is a remote chance in being a direct x problem as UT2003 so far i had was running with directx 8. I installed dx 9 along with the Tomb Raider game that came with the card.

And can someone please tell me what voltage levels must the card get for VCORE, VCC18 and VDDQ lines?

DirectX:

There are several pages about uninstalling directx. Look for "directx buster" in the net.

But I guess thats not the problem for ATI cards. That was mentioned several times in this forum.

Is here anybody testing with 3DMark03? I´m testing and there are only crashs/freeze or shotdown.

I dunno if this will make a difference.....a colleague and I bought the Tachyon 9600 Pro and it was locking up all the time on BF1042 and all the high GFX games.......I have (after finding out its hidden in the Gigabyte BIOS) INCREASED rather than reduced the aperture size, to 256. I know the response on this site and from ATi was to reduce it to 64, but I have had NO problems at all now and have been playing DC 0.5L for the last 3 hours and NOTHING, NADA, ZIP NO problemos.

Maybe worth a shot....and thats with 3.9's too....

Please for the lazy people they won´t read the whole forum!
In some cases this will help

1) upping AGP voltage
2) reducing FSB speed
3) Switching to AGP 4x (or lower) with fast writes off
4) and in some occasions by using an old driver (3.4 and 3.2 seem to be popular)
5) AGP driver is a solution in some cases

This not

1) DirectX
2) Talking about different cards with same chips
3) main memory (over 128)
4) enumerate different systems doesn’t make any difference (Pentium, AMD…)
5) BIOS update on MB (mostly)
6) Operating system ( over win 98)
7) Power (over 350W)

For the gamers, look for game update and please stop bugging talking about “different” games.
I propose to use the same benchmark, so we can compare our results. I propose 3dMark03. Open minded for different benchmarks.

Gigabyte BIOS ?? I can't see such a thing. My monitor won't show anything as soon as a i reboot - so the first thing i see is the Asus logo - i think the gigabyte bios comes before this.

How do i got INTO the gigabyte bios? What key must i press when i reboot?? Can someone please tell me this?

Also - regarding "don't talk about different games" I think we must. Because for some ppl. benchmarks 3d Mark works fine - but it is in the games that actually freeze.

Also my system has finally stabilized - NO CRASHES FOR THE PAST 3 DAYS!!

Here's my current state: AGP 4x, Aperture size 64 MB, Fast Write Off, VIA chipset installed (this is THE THING that got it working i think).

But ... still not satisfied. Why? Sometimes i suspect there is somekind of memory leak - yes. Some maps in ut2k3 jerk a lot. I tried lowering detail, etc. no use - still it jerks. And sometimes after I finish playing a ut2k3 map - the interface is hell slow. Then without quitting if i play another map - the interface is back to its old speed...
Some memory mess-up surely... But the via chipset seems to prevent the freeze - but couldn't prevent the jerks i guess.

Anyway - going to try 8x soon and see how stable the games are in that.

Also regarding the power (over 350 w) - i have 300 W PSU
PSU is ruled out completely (if you know your PSU is sufficient for your system) - as someone mentioned they have a 550 W PSU with the same problem.

Ramshankar:

take a look at sisoft sandra homepage. Download benchmark. This will test the whole system, so your VRAM too.

you can uninstall directx 9 without reinstalling windows.

I am running windows XP pro, download a program called directx 9 uninstaller from a site called major geeks.
I have done this, you need to do it in safe mode and you also need the windows cd, but i am back to directx 8.1, and having no problems with ut2003 after a good 3 hours of playing on various maps.

running at AGP8x, however still having the same problems with Age of Mythology and C&C generals so i guess there is another reason for them not working.

Games:

Yea,but it won´t do very much talking about each game. Not all people got all the games.

This is a hardware forum.(Shown on the top of your browser)
So maybe, game forums are more helpful for specific games.

And i meant a new benchmark, with topical game testings to compare. There are several to download.

FAO - Ramshankar.....

The Gigabyte BIOS is specific to the GIGABYTE mobo that I have. In my Gigabyte BIOS in standard features, there was no settings to change the aperture size of the memory to the AGP slot. I found out I had to do a ctrl F1 and the extra options appeared.

You have an ASUS board I beleive, so your BIOS SW and layout is going to be specific to the mobo manufacturer.

Check with the ASUS website maybe.....

I changed the aperture settings to 256 and I think in theory, it regulates the amount of memory allowed onto the AGP slot....(I think....)......

wow i just read a page full of uselessness... READ MESSAGES BEFORE POSTING. And whoever said that wolfenstein doesnt freeze and its not a driver problem... uhh I tried wolfenstein with 3.6-3.9 and get freezes everytime but it doesnt with 3.5 so obviously there is a driver issue with wolfenstein.