ATI Radeon 9600/9800 Pro

[RobH]

I was wondering if anyone has had any issues with the ATI Radeon 9600 or 9800 pro (or similar) under Windows XP with the latest drivers? With both cards I get DirectX initialization errors (OpenGL stuff works fine). DxDiag fails to start the Direct3D tests.

I've had a 9800 Pro on my shelf for 2 years and I tried it in my mates machine a few months ago and got the same error as above, at the time I thought the card was hosed and that was why I was getting the errors.

However, I recently upgraded to the latest drivers in my sisters machine which has a 9600 Pro and got the same error. I thought 'oh no' I've hosed another card because I had opened up the machine to install some RAM. Anyway I ended up installing the Catalyst 5.1 drivers (which were the one's previously installed) and the card began working fine again in DirectX applications.

A strange error, I haven't had chance to investigate it futher yet because my sister needed her machine in a working order and I only have PCI-E machines now. I was wondering if anyone else had come across such an error?

 

[Big.Wayne]

I was wondering if anyone else had come across such an error?

Yeah I had some issues like that, not sure what the cause was but I just put Catalyst 5.10 Windows XP back on and everything was fine.

There comes a point when newer drivers are mainly for newer cards and installing these drivers on older cards offers no benefits and sometimes causes problems, although sometimes a newer driver can improve performance of older hardware too!

I bought a Radeon 9800 in September 2003, cost me £218 smackers (the 9800Pro was about £300 at that time!). Card is sold on ages ago and now lives in an office system!

 

[RobH]

I'm glad it's not just me, I think there is probably some underlying cause though as I don't think ATI (AMD now) would release a driver that breaks all of their old cards. I may try the 9800 Pro in my sisters machine again because it would be a nice upgrade for her, she only plays WoW and some older games, not the latest stuff.

If I was to suspect anything I think it would be something to do with the chipset drivers on the motherboard as I've had issues with AGP and the chipset driver before on older cards.

 

[Imy]

My 9800Pro used to work fine in WinXP and DirectX 9.0c

 

[Darg]

I run my 9800Pro with the latest Cat 7.10 drivers under windows XP fine in my second system.

 

[Pulseammo]

I run a 9800Pro in my main rig. I run Omega Drivers 3.8.252 currently. (Reasonably ancient at any rate). I've tried installing new drivers, both omega and official, and always get stability problems with them, especially in source engine games.

The drivers that I use now are fine, so I've given up installing new drivers now (usually I upgrade all my drivers often), it's not like I'm going to get any sort of magical performance boost out of them on new games anyway!

Like Big.Wayne said, it seems that there just comes a time when drivers just start to give up support for old cards (if anyone here still maintains a system with a GeForce 3 you'll know what I mean if you put drivers off the nvidia site onto it!). I don't think that they add card breaking bugs per say, but I think in an effort to support the new cards better, the old cards seem to get less stable.

All that said, it could just be a driver conflict for my specific system!