A better PCI 2.0 x16 card?

[DMF]

I have a ATI Radeon HD 4650, 2GB, 750 clock. O/S is Vista x64 and I'm not real anxious to move to W7. DirectX 11 and lastest updates applied.

Playing World of Warships 0.5.16 it was stable. Now at 0.6.1 the client locks up roughly every other game, sometimes crashing back the BIOS. Crashes are consistently accompanied with this log entry (when it actually writes a log entry):

Moo::RenderContext::changeMode: Unable to reset device:: D3DERR_INVALIDCALL(0x8876086c) : The method call is invalid. For example, a method's parameter may not be a valid pointer.​

WG support insists that my problem is an outdated card and/or driver. Now, ATI hasn't updated its Vista drivers since 2012. But how much could have changed?

Anyway, I realize that the 4650 isn't a gaming card. However, I'm stuck with the PCI 2.0 x16 bus on my Asus P5Q Pro mommieboard. So what's a decent gaming card for that bus, preferably cheap with more recent drivers?

 

[lyssword]

quite sure any pci 3.0 card will work with 2.0 on your motherboard, but check your motherboard support page for updates and get latest bios if it doesn't Speaking from experience, had pcie3 in pcie mobos

 

[VirtualLarry]

Just get any modern PCI-E x16 GPU, should work. Modern ones are 3.0, but should work fine on your rig. It's a P35 chipset, right? I think that's actually even PCI-E 1.1, not 2.0. I don't know exactly. I know that my Core2Quad Q9300 CPUs, in my Gigabyte P35 boards, run just fine with AMD Radeon R7 260X 2GB cards, which I think are PCI-E 3.0 standard. I can even watch 4K videos with it.

 

[DMF]

Thanks. What O/S? I'm starting to think that Vista is my real problem.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Newest Windows 10 64-bit.

 

[daxzy]

Hello fellow captain!

It is quite possible that WG added new code to their rendering engine that now does these calls and crashes your system. You can possibly try playing on a lower detail setting or disable anti-aliasing (added in a recent patch) to see if it alleviates the problem.

Asus P5Q is a P45 board, the first with PCI-E 2.0 support. Any PCI-E 3.0 card should work in your system just fine, however many of the modern ones stopped supporting Vista. I would recommend moving to Windows 10 x64. It may take some getting use to (especially coming from Vista), but if you give it a few weeks, most people like it.

That said, for new cards, I would recommend RX 460 (as low as $60 last week) or GTX 1050 (used cards offer a better deal, but supply/price varies a lot). Of course you could buy better, but your CPU will likely hold you back. WoWS is not a very demanding game, unless you crank the settings to max or run at >1440p resolution. I imagine a RX 460/GTX 1050 would probably get you playing at 1080p/medium (depending what CPU you have). I have a i7-6700K/RX 480 and can play 1080p/max settings at > 100 fps.

Recommend you follow the following subreddits:

For Computer component deals:
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/

For WoWS:
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldOfWarships/

 

[VirtualLarry]

Have you updated your DirectX Runtime recently? They update it every, I think, quarter, and if you haven't updated in the past year, then perhaps the application is calling new functions that your runtime lacks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Now at 0.6.1 the client locks up roughly every other game, sometimes crashing back the BIOS.

If Windows is crashing so bad that you are seeing a BIOS POST screen, then you may well be having hardware problems. I would start with a RAM test (overnight), and then consider replacing your power supply, if it's over 4 years old, and not "high end" (with a 7-year or longer warranty).

 

[DMF]

VirtualLarry, thanks. It's not a hardware problem; trust me. And DirectX is up to date.

daxzy, well met. I spent way too much time on POS W8+ (okay the virtualization was nice); you will have to extort me to use W10. I've resisted W7, but it seems I have little choice.

The more I do comparisons, the more I believe that my card is okay, and the degenerate Vista- driver model is the real problem. I have a spare HD in this machine and I think I'll install W7 with its drivers before I go hunting for better cards.

What's your handle in WoWs? I may take occasion not to shoot you.

 

[daxzy]

VirtualLarry, thanks. It's not a hardware problem; trust me. And DirectX is up to date.

daxzy, well met. I spent way too much time on POS W8+ (okay the virtualization was nice); you will have to extort me to use W10. I've resisted W7, but it seems I have little choice.

The more I do comparisons, the more I believe that my card is okay, and the degenerate Vista- driver model is the real problem. I have a spare HD in this machine and I think I'll install W7 with its drivers before I go hunting for better cards.

What's your handle in WoWs? I may take occasion not to shoot you.

Windows 10 is snappier than Windows 7 (scales better at lower and especially higher end hardware).

Sent you a PM.

 

[Spjut]

You say the drivers are from 2012, but the last Legacy driver is from 2013, so it's always worth a try with those if you haven't tried it already .
If you get a new card, you need Windows 7 to be safe. AMD stopped supporting Vista for all cards in 2013.

 

[SlickR12345]

PCI-E 3.0 is compatible with pci-e 2 and pci-e 1. Its backwards compatible, that is the whole point of it. Otherwise every time there is a change, literally tens of millions of cards would become obsolete.

Also any modern GPU will not actually saturate a PCI-E 2.0 slot. Maybe the GTX 1080 can saturate it, but other than that you can pretty much get any card and there won't be any issues as in getting less performance.

Again PCI-E 3.0 is backwards compatible, so any card that is able to operate at pci-e 3, can operate on lower ones.

I would also recommend you switch to Win7, its 10x times better than Vista and you can disable some of the updates, so it doesn't add the stupid telemetry and other spy crap on there. But even Vista has those types of updates and if you weren't careful you probably have them. Though for gaming Win10 is actually quite good and has DX12 support as well. Though it is essentially a spyware and you'd need to run several programs to shut down the spying.

That HD 4650 is unfortunately not supported anymore, but there are certainly newer drivers than 2012, I think the last one was in 2014. Don't take my word though .

 

[Valantar]

I have a ATI Radeon HD 4650, 2GB, 750 clock. O/S is Vista x64 and I'm not real anxious to move to W7. DirectX 11 and lastest updates applied.

Playing World of Warships 0.5.16 it was stable. Now at 0.6.1 the client locks up roughly every other game, sometimes crashing back the BIOS. Crashes are consistently accompanied with this log entry (when it actually writes a log entry):

Moo::RenderContext::changeMode: Unable to reset device:: D3DERR_INVALIDCALL(0x8876086c) : The method call is invalid. For example, a method's parameter may not be a valid pointer.​

WG support insists that my problem is an outdated card and/or driver. Now, ATI hasn't updated its Vista drivers since 2012. But how much could have changed?

Anyway, I realize that the 4650 isn't a gaming card. However, I'm stuck with the PCI 2.0 x16 bus on my Asus P5Q Pro mommieboard. So what's a decent gaming card for that bus, preferably cheap with more recent drivers?

I use an Asus Radeon Fury X in my 2008-era Asus Rampage Formula, which is PCIe 2.0. Works perfectly. Of course, I don't use an OS that has been unsupported for quite a while now. Seriously, unless you have some sort of mission critical software or hardware that requires Vista, upgrade to 7 (or preferably 10, which is a far better OS in many ways). Any card you want should work just fine. There are zero reasons not to.

I'd recommend getting a new, low-end GPU like the RX 460 or GTX 1050 (/Ti), but I don't know if they'll work under Vista.