I too have had problems with Call of Duty on my Tyan 9600PRO, it crashed after about 10 mins, with all detail on and with 'high quality' setting in the '3D' section of the advanced display properties (4XAA + 8X AF i think) I played about with the graphics setting within the game and found that it didn't like Trillinear texture filtering, when I turned this down to billinear I was able to complete the game. I didn't install the drivers that came with the card, I just threw on the new 3.9 cats, all other games work fine. However, for some reason when the pc is first switched on it doesn't post and the graphics card beeps, if I just push the power button again it boots up fine?!? My mate has exactly the same problem with his Radeon 9700PRO, anybody else get this problem? Also I've noticed that most of the problems metioned are with VIA chipsets, I have SiS and have had no real problems apart from this. Any possible link with chipset and crashes?

My spec is:
2500XP O/C'd to 3200XP (200 fsb)
Tyan tacheyon 9600PRO 128Mb
SiS 748 chipset.
550W power supply
5.1 Live s'card.
512mb DDR3200 (400Mhz)

What "kill disk"?
My system worked fine no freezes etc.. then I the dumbass tried the 4.50 and now my system doesnt work perfectly anymore..

COD jams after 3-5min VPU recover recovers but when it happens it starts "cycle"
after first freeze/recover game freezes & recovers with 2-5sec delay does it @ 5 times.
Then game starts to slowdown and throws to windows speed is reaaly SLOW.
Mem usage OVER 90%, then when i free memory system comes back to normal...(almost)

*****When U find a solution DON'T try to chance it to better ***** (like ******* me) LOL!
EPOX MOTHERBOARDS RULE! 2500+ @ 2045Mhz wit KRA2+ temps 33/45

Hi all - having waded through the last 43 pages(!! - record for longest thread in history??) ... Don't actually have a 9600 but a 9800, but was also seeing one of the classic symptoms of this thread, the freezes in CoD (never had the mouse issue - good job really since I play alot of FPS!).

Thanks to everyone who's been working on this issue, the work here has been fantastic.

I tried a variety of different solutions, until narrowing it down to the following - AGP Write Off (in Smartgart) and ensuring that FastWrite and AGP multipliers were the same settings in the cntrl pnl and BIOS (ON and 8x respectively).

I had also done all the usual BIOS "cleaning": disabling video ram sharing, palette snooping, bios loading into RAM etc (see past posts!). AGP aperture kept at default 128Mb. Since before the "breakthrough" I had found better stability with 3.7 Catalyst than .8 or .9, had always kept 3.7 (oh btw, didn't get any improvement with Omega drivers).

Now CoD (and plenty of other games, CoD was the major problem however) runs absolutely fine, with FastWrite ON, AGP Aperture 8x (neither of these made much apparent difference to the perceived speed of the game, though I didn't benchmark - is there a fps benchmark in CoD? Apologies if I missed it in a previous post). Also kept "Enable write combining" ON. This did make a perceptible difference in speed.

System: 2800+XP Barton, 1024Mb RAM, ABIT NF7S v. 2.0 using the onboard nVidia sound (SoundStorm, nForce2 Turbo) - latest mobo drivers.

Thoughts: we seem to have two separate problem areas, drivers and something to do with CPU / mobo / card hardware/software conflict. The driver issue? 3.9 and .8 appear to be flaky for _almost_ everyone, while most people have seen improvements with 3.2, .4 or .7. Plenty of the fixes on this thread have been to do with the driver issue and if that's the problem, it is (thank God) easily resolved.

As for the hardware issue... Similar issues can be found for Halo, another DirectX9.0 game. Halo obviously is flaky as sh*t, but if you scroll through a huge number of pages of reviews on Amazon, some people flame that it's terrible and never works, and some that it's wonderful and always works. Not everyone puts up system specs, but for those that do (and similar here) people with lower spec systems seem to have the reliability edge over higher end. Also of course, alot of the hardware issues have been resolved by

reduced fsb frequency, underclocking CPU, disabling PnP OS (I'll return to this), disabling write combining, changing AGP voltage, disabling fastwrite, reducing hardware acceleration. Kinda points to the north and southbridge again doesn't it?

About the PnP OS - disabling this disables the sound. I can get Halo to play with full everything graphics without a hitch if I use the ... yup, you guessed it -nosound qualifier. Also worth noting that Halo refuses to believe that I have any hardware accel and greys out Environmental Sound, while CoD corerctly recognises that I can have EAX.

(sorry thought I'd better split the post in two)

Changing the AGP aperture and AGP frequency or changing the AGP Write / Read settings also affects the bridges, because you're tinkering with the rate / size at which you're putting video stuff in to the system memory. When poeple have found improvements is when they've reduced the size of system memory taken by card (aperture reduced), reduced the bandwidth (8x to 4x) or switched write to off, which presumably (? though don't know for sure) stops the card from writing with the AGP port to memory and therefore not using GART at all? Anyone in the GPU business enlighten me?

Intuitively it feels like there's a 'timing' mismatch through the AGP port when we're trying to play a DirectX9 game which shows up when you're maxing the system, and perhaps that's why lower spec systems that aren't trying to "do everything at once" don't suffer as badly. Quite simply the time between 'events' in the computer is long enough that the slight timing mismatches aren't an issue. I have no idea why if that makes any sense to a professional graphics card engineer, but that appears to be a reasonable explanation for all the many different things we've seen in this "super-thread".

So - solutions? Dx9.1 (!)? new mobo drivers? Cat 4.0? Till these come out, tweaking what's happening through your AGP port seems to be the best option.

Thanks to everyone again

Sam

Does the ATI 9600 non-pro and the 9600XT suffer from the freezing also?

ive heard some cases with the 9600 np but not the XT yet.
whoever was asking about killdisk, do you need it? It just erases your whole harddrive and it does a better job then reformatting. You can get it at killdisk.com but you also need 2 floppy disks; 1for the killdisk and 1 for a DOS boot disk.

To G P:
I have a SIS chipset as well, but i get all the crashes associated with mouse movement in certain 3d games... strangely enough Call of Duty isn't one of them, in fact, it hasn't crashed on me once.. I'm guessing you have a newer SIS chipset then me, the problem i'm having seems to effect older sis chipsets and older via chipsets.. My chipset's SIS645dx, i'm guessing since your's is a higher number its newer.
By the way i don't get that strange beep you get on startup, it boots fine 100% of the time..

To Leslie Chun: I think i've seen at least 1 post(not on this forum) of someone saying they got the same problems on a 9600XT, but i cant be sure, still if i were you i'd hold off on buying one until you can be 100% positive it will work (or make sure the store you get it from has a reasonable return policy)

To All: well, a couple days ago i posted saying ATI claimed catalyst 4.0 was on its way in a couple weeks, well that still happened but there's more, Today i got another email from them.. this time telling me to install catalyst 3.9... AGAIN... this time they want to boot up in SAFEMODE, then trash these registry entries:
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ATI Technologies
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATI
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ATI Technologies
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\DISPLAY
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\MONITOR"
Then Restart and install the default monitor and graphics driver, THEN install DirectX (they don't seem to realize i already have DirectX installed and that you cant uninstall it...) and finally put catalyst 3.9 back on....

I guess ill do it all step by step.... if it works ill be amazed, but i'd kick my self if that was the fix and i never bothered to try it because it was so simple

did ANY of you try the call of duty catalyst patch that i posted???!?!!? Theres an actual patch for call of duty that i posted on page 42 or 43.

here it is
http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4291.html

Hi,

These posts are both a relief and a frustration.

Within the last 48hrs I took possession of a custom built system:

AMD Atalon XP3200+ 400MHZ
AUS A7N8X-DX MB
1 gig DDR 400 ram
160 gig SATA Maxtor 7200 rpm HD
ATI Radeon Pro 128
XP Home

My previous system with the NVIDIA GForce4 440 64mb gave me no grief in any of my games but now with this ATI , and if I can actually log on to a game, I can barely see a dam thing because of the darkness of the game environments regardless of what my system's or monitor gamma/brightness settings are.

I also experience the Hanging Black Screen, Black screen to desk top crash, or black screen to task bar, to system not responding.

Now I am afraid that most of what is being discussed here is equivalent to a foreign language for me so can anyone offer a step by step procedure that someone like me can understand or direct me to a patch that will resolve my issues because I want to play BF1942!!!!

Thanks

Sho Biz

The Radeon I am refering to is the 9600 pro

Sho Biz

Well i got a sapphire radeon 9600 pro atlantis 128 mb about 2 months ago and for the first 3 weeks it worked but after that started getting random lockups. I used powerstrip to lower my clock speeds to engine=330.75mhz and memory=249.75mhz (i guess the lowest i could go?) and it worked well for 2 weeks but it started up again. Ive tried my friends powercolor and my sapphire plus my other friends connect3d...all the same radeon 9600 pro and they somehow have problems about 30-60min in games (vpu recover usually fixes it but occasionly it does a hard freeze) in my computer which is:

Asus A7n8x-dx mobo Nforce2!!!! ( I THOUGHT I WOULDNT GET PROBLEMS WITH THIS THING!)
amd athlon xp 2800+
512 kingston ddr
sapphire radeon 9600 pro
IBM 40 gb 7200 EIDE

all three 9600 pros (connect3d, sapphire, powercolor) get a hardware lockup and switch to vga mode about 30 min into bf1942, however my friends got same mobos and their cards have worked perfectly since they got their cards.
I dont understand how it works in theirs but randomly in my system (which is the kickass A7N8X DX!!) the cards seem to flip out!! im sick of this im gonna buy the nvidia 5700 ultra if ati or anyone cant get an answer to this lame a$$ 5Hit

Still my card is working perfecly fine with all options enabled on my asus A7N8X deluxe rev 2.0 mobo.

then stfu and dont post here... waste of read.

Jasper i know many people that have the A7N8X-DX with 9600 pros without one problem at all ever

The only question is, why is my card having problems and not yours?

I hope ATI fixes this...

Thank god other people are having this problem. I am having the exact same troubles, so I'll post my system info here in hopes that somebody can help or be helped by it.

I am probably more foolish than any of you in my purchase of my 9600 Pro because this is the SECOND time I bought it. I first bought a regular 9600 pro in October, and promptly returned it (with a 15 percent restocking fee hit) after having the problems everyone else is having in this forum. (Age of Mythology would freeze after moving the mouse). I saw the number of people having this problem, and returned it so I wouldn't have to mess with it. I vowed to wait for something better, and that's when the All in Wonder 9600 Pro came out. I couldn't resist, plus I figured they should have this stupid problem fixed sooner or later. Boy was I wrong. I bought the AiW, and I now have issues with MOST the games I own, which include the following:

Age of Mythology/Age of Titans: hangs upon moving mouse
Rainbow Six - Raven Shield: Tells me my video card is unsupported
Simcity 4: hangs 1-2 minutes into the menus
Jedi Outcast: Gives me some ambiguous error message
any DVD player: freezes if I have any background apps running or if I move the mouse too quickly

I'm sure there are more. I do own Angel of Darkness but that game was so terrible that I shut it off after it loaded the first screen. I have read it has issues with the 9600 pro as well.

My system is as follows:

ECS k7s5a
athlon xp 1600+
Windows XP Pro w/ all windows updates
Radeon All in Wonder 9600 Pro (catalyst 3.9)
Creative Audigy 2 zs (latest driver)
Maxtor 160 gb
Logitech keyboard and mouse (with their funky software, latest versions)

I have tried everything I can think of, and many of the things I have found suggested here. My chipset drivers were updated the first time I owned the 9600, and that did not work. (though I have formatted since then - not sure if those drivers are stored in the bios or the hard disk) But the point is it did not work then.

I will go try the 3.4 catalyst drivers, but if anyone has any better ideas let me know. Thanks.

THIS IS THE ATI RESPONSE
http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4219.html

3D applications may hang on some AGP 8X capable systems
The information in this article applies to the following system configurations:
RADEON 9600 Series graphics card
Certain motherboards supporting AGP 8X, including those based on Intel i865 or SIS655 chipsets
3D applications may hang under the following conditions:
AGP Speed for the system is set to 8X
RADEON 9600 Series graphics card and drivers are installed
This does NOT occur in all systems.

To work around this issue, set AGP transfer mode to AGP 4X. Steps are provided below:
Go to Display Properties > Settings > click Advanced button
Select the SMARTGART tab
Set the AGP Speed to 4X
Apply the settings change
Restart the system
INFO-BASE# 4219

KEYWORDS: RADEON for PC AGP 8X 3D APPLICATION HANG

For those of you trying to solve via based mobo problems with your 9600 beware !!

Bugged Hyperion 4.50

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.warp2search.net/modules.php?name=News&file=arti...;sid=15486

Via has removed their Hyperion 4.50 driver that was released some days ago from download page. A possible reason could be an error when the ATI control center is installed that deletes the whole filesystem !!!


An official statement from VIA is not present at the moment.

Latest stable version is Hyperion 4.49p

yeah, if you guys would read... i had to do a killdisk because i installed the 4.50 hyperion drivers.

I'm having the same problem as everybody above... I just bought my new video card 2 weeks ago. I've never been an ATI supporter in my life. After reading, however, all of the test reviews from Valve Software regarding Half-Life 2, I had to have a new ATI video card.

- Intel D815EEA Pentium III motherboard - 1.0ghz Pentium III Processor
- 512mb PC133 memory
- Asus A9600XT (ATI Radeon 9600XT) 128mb video card
- Windows XP Pro

Age of Mythology worked great for me on my old nVidia video card, but the graphics weren't all they could be. I was anxious to see how great Age of Mythology could look on my new ATI Radeon 9600XT video card. I can't even play the game now. Within second of the main menu loading, the PC hard locks and it must be turned off and turned back on. I don't even have time to click an item to start a new game before it hard locks.

I've e-mailed Asus about the problem and have heard no responses. I haven't e-mailed Micro$oft or ATI yet, but I'm sure they won't respond.

I've tried both the Asus 7.93 drivers and the ATI Catalyst drivers (latest revision only). Nothing helps. If anyone has some suggestions I would really love to hear them.

As a side note... every other game I have looks and flows much better with the ATI Radeon 9600XT card. Esepecially America's Army. But if I can't play Age of Mythology what is it really worth.

I doubt anybody has any words of wisdom as only ATI (and possibly Micro$oft) will be able to resolve the problem. But any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks,

Chad Michael Ockert
chad@ockert.ws