HELP! ATI Driver Problems & GTA3 Slowdowns

[NYR56]

Driver Issue:
I have tried using some of the newer drivers for my ATI
Radeon 64DDR VIVO card, including the new official WHQL certified drivers, but they all make my computer act freaky. When I open IE, it keeps reloading the pages, and will not let me actually ever get to the page. When I try to play CS/TFC, it says it cant authenticate with WON, and I get errors (Little balloon popups from the systray) related to files not being able to be written to the temporary directory. Im currently using the 6022 drivers, which work fine, but all the newer ones act like this, including the official 6071. I would like to fix this if possible, so I can upgrade my drivers. The problem seems really weird to me, so if anyone has an idea, please help me out. Thanks.


GTA3 Issue:
GTA3 is unplayable with any settings! I have tried 640x480x16 with frame limiter and sync on and all the visual options for my card off, but still no go. It lags out after a few minutes. Someone suggested Rage3D tweaker but that crashes my system . Is my computer just too old? This is the first game to ever be this bad.


System Stats:
800mhz Athlon
640MB SDRAM
ATI Radeon 64DDR VIVO
WinXP

Thanks for any help you can give! Im very frustrated.

 

[MytMowse]

You should get a newer card, a lot of ppl are having problems with that game and older cards since it's so "heavy", even friends of mine with geforce 2 have problems. So you might want to get a nice cheap OEM 3d card, doesn't matter what one you want just as long as it the latest.

You can also try getting Direct X 9 beta. I heard from ppl who had problems with the game and once they installed direct x 9 beta it ran a lot better.

 

[NYR56]

Well I got DX9 and it didnt fix anything. I know the card isnt so great anymore. but shouldnt it be able to run 640x480x16 with no visual settings on? It runs fine for the first minute but then stops, why is that? Id rather try all posibilities before I buy a new card, since Id rather wait and buy a great one for my next computer.

 

[Jolt2]

Go to the Rage3D site and do a seach on their forum board for GTA3. I was just their and read about this problem in the Radeon 8500 section. Their is more info there.Rage3D

 

[NYR56]

I was posting over there actually also, and apparently the problem was my graphic aperture size was set to 256MB, while it should have been 64MB. I heard it should be half your RAM, and I have 640MB of RAM so I thought that was kind of weird. Well, Im running great on 1024x768, so Im happy. Thanks for the help though.