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HD 2600Pro $30 Revive those old AGP boards

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I just got mine today but haven't installed it. Working on another system atm. Opened the box. Not much to scream about. 4pin molex to 6pin VGA, CD, guide, DVI to VGA adpt, and a sticker. Card looks good tho. Installing soon.
 
nobodyknows said:
Not in my opinion.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?cpu=GeForce+6800+GT

6800GT scores 426

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?cpu=RADEON+9800+PRO

9800 Pro scores 326

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/video_lookup.php?cpu=Radeon+HD+2600+PRO

2600 pro scores 256
Click to expand...

That benchmark is crap.

4890 > gtx285

gtx295 = 4870

4670 > 9800gtx ???

You can even count the errors

If you ever seen it its a fly through of an island with 1999 style graphics .
 
Oh man, Now I see what you guys are talking about. Under XP the card was fine but when I was fiddling with the one I installed with win 7 It has been a nightmare. Constantly flickering out and then recovering itself from an error. anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this. I tried the hd audio thing someone mentioned with no luck. Perhaps an older driver would be a better choice?
 
Well I ended up pulling my card and putting my 6800GT back in. This Radeon just didn't seem to handle Hulu/Flash material as well. Maybe I'll give it another shot if they ever add Flash hardware support to it, but as it is now it was noticeably worse than my 6800GT with both the last normal release and the beta. Even the video in Boxee played worse.
 
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Well if its a driver issue ok but the ATI 2600pro should spank the 6800gt in Flash/Hulu and HD youtube as it does most decoding on chip and doesn't rely on the CPU as much.
 
I would have thought the this card would be better for Flash as well, I just know in my system it's not. The 10.1 beta was stutter city, the previous release was smooth but had broken vsynch over just the top quarter or so of the image. If these are driver bugs I'm not holding my breath waiting for ATI to fix them.
 
I have a 6800 128MB card in an Athlon 3800x2 box and it handles 1080p, MKV and hulu just fine. I really don't see the need to update- especially with the driver issues.
 
Macgyversite said:
Well if its a driver issue ok but the ATI 2600pro should spank the 6800gt in Flash/Hulu and HD youtube as it does most decoding on chip and doesn't rely on the CPU as much.
Click to expand...
HAH! As if.

Truth is, ATI could get these cards to accelerate flash, after all they do support UVD in hardware. But they don't. These cards are worthless crap.
 
speaking of which, i have a 6800 gt that i dont use anymore, and a few other computer parts (a64 3400+, etc). are these still sellable? i always had suspicions that my gpu was starting to get messed up, but it was probably the hard drive. eventually something messed up and i wanted a laptop, so i gave up. 🙂
 
Adobe's release notes (PDF) say "Hardware video decoding of H.264 content in Flash Player 10.1 is supported on AMD/ATI products with UVD2 with the ATI Catalyst™ Software Suite, starting with version 9.11 for the ATI Radeon™ family of products, and driver release 8.68 for the ATI FirePro™ family of products."

The HD2600 does not support UVD2: UVD enabled GPUs

So you can't realistically expect these cards the accelerate Flash, given all the documentation to the contrary.
 
LOL. Good find Steve.

Some tips for a better running 2600Pro. Get your Task Manager up and running. Check your processes. Make sure your CPU isnt being taxed when it should be idling. It actually wont show which process is sucking up the CPU cycles. From what I read its the windows hardware install trying to find an ATI component that isnt there.

Anyway I got mine working in a Nforce 3, XP system. Dont let the ATI HD Audio to install and disable the "Microsoft UAA Bus Driver for HD audio" in device manager under the System devices. I think if you disable the UAA bus first and then install the drivers and ATI Suite the ATI HD audio wont install I think.

You can install the 9-12 driver suite. It will install except for the driver. Manually install the driver by pointing the install to the "C drive", ATI folder, Support folder etc etc.

I tried 3 sets of drivers. They all work but the benchmarks were better with the drivers that were on the CD. Youtube, Flash , whatever I threw at it ran fine with all 3 drivers.

I swapped out a 7800GS just to see what it could do. Its not as fast as a 7800GS but its only a few FPS behind.

The lagging or chugging or whatever might just be the CPU being used by the system install manager.
 
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Steve said:
Adobe's release notes (PDF) say "Hardware video decoding of H.264 content in Flash Player 10.1 is supported on AMD/ATI products with UVD2 with the ATI Catalyst™ Software Suite, starting with version 9.11 for the ATI Radeon™ family of products, and driver release 8.68 for the ATI FirePro™ family of products."

The HD2600 does not support UVD2: UVD enabled GPUs

So you can't realistically expect these cards the accelerate Flash, given all the documentation to the contrary.
Click to expand...

Except for the fact that flash acceleration IS supported on the HD3200 integrated (780G chipset), which only supports UVD, not UVD2.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14261/1

According to that link, the integrated graphics in the 780G was nearly directly lifted from the HD2400 discrete video card chipset. Which, of course, only has UVD1. So if the integrated version of the 2400 can do flash acceleration, there's no reason whatsoever that the discrete versions of the 2400 and 2600 cannot do it too.

So it's purely a driver limitation imposed by ATI to try to push their newer graphics cards.
 
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I got the card in and didn't have any issues getting up and running.

My setup:

Athlon64 3500+
Asus A8V-E Deluxe
4x512MB of DDR
80GB 7200RPM WD drive
Windows 7 x64

Previous card was a 6600GT 128MB. Dropped the new card in and booted. Win 7 came up as 1024x768 connected via DVI to HDMI adapter going to my Westinghouse 32".

I used the drivers off the Visiontek website for Windows Vista. Installed and rebooted and the display went to 1366x768, what I used before.

I installed the Win 7 codec pack and x64 add-in.

No problems at all with .mkv, .wmv, or .ts 720P or 1080P files. My wireless can't stream 1080P content fast enough unfortunately, so I have to copy those from my WHS to get them to play. I had to play around with my sound drivers to get DTS and DD5.1 to push from mobo's coaxial out to my receiver.

Vast improvement over my 6600GT as far CPU usage. I was watching a 720p .mvk file with 5.1DD. After the initial push of content from the WHS to my HTPC, the CPU usage was around 5-10%... this is compared to 50-75% with the 6600GT.

Overall this card worked well for me. Hopefully it will give my HTPC another year or so before I need a new build.
 
In the end someone found a fix for the Flash Player issue? I wanted to buy this card to be able to watch HD content from YouTube, but now I'm not sure. Please help me!!!
 
The fix is there. Read my above post. Its your CPU cycles being consumed by the driver trying to decode the on-board sound that can't be used on AGP cards. At least thats my take on it. Whatever the case is. Follow my above post.
 
Macgyversite said:
The fix is there. Read my above post. Its your CPU cycles being consumed by the driver trying to decode the on-board sound that can't be used on AGP cards. At least thats my take on it. Whatever the case is. Follow my above post.
Click to expand...

OK thanks, I'll try that. But I didn't understand which drivers did you use, can you tell me the version of your current drivers and also your flash player version?
 
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