Checkerboard effect when unlocking Radeon9500

[dmw16]

This may seem like a dumb question, but I thought I would ask to be sure. I tried to unlock my non-pro radeon9500. It installed and when I ran the fillrate tests in 3dmark2k3 I did see a noteable improvement (about 1000 in both single and multi fill). But when I ran the other benchmarks in 3dmark I saw a what looked like a checkerboard effect. Does this mean my card isnt able to be unlocked?
thanks,
-doug

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Unfortunately, yes. The other four pipelines aren't present or functional on your card.

Have you asked the Video forum for their opinions on the matter? I'm pretty sure there's quite a few folk who've been in the same place as you.

- M4H

 

[McCarthy]

Well, they're present. But giving errors.

Mine only checkerboards on the fillrate test, otherwise none present in any tests of 3DMark. In games I've never seen a checkerboard in MOH:AA, in Nascar2003 I have on the apron texture of a few tracks - while the rest of the track texture, cars, environment is fine. Swerve, hit the wall so the apron is out of view the checkerboards are gone - just in that texture, don't persist on the screen area. So mine isn't a perfect unlock, but it's darn close and well within what I can tolerate.

Depending on how bad your checkerboarding is you may or may not find your framerate improvements worth glitches in some games.

 

[optimistic]

There's patch for people experiecing checkerboarding with their cards. The patch does not unlock the 4 pipelines, but still increases the memory bus to 256bit. There's some performance gain with this patch, but not as much as if you had 8 working pipelines.