My S3 Savage4 won't run OpenGL games anymore!

SeGMenT

Junior Member
Jun 18, 2001
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Hello all. I've been going on the anandtech site for quite some time now and just the other day I discovered the forums. Well, here's my problem:

When I got my Compaq computer in early 2000, games like Quake 3 Arena and any other OpenGL game would run fine. Unreal Tournament would sometimes freeze up on me in the MeTaL renderer (i think it's standard for savage4 cards). Half-Life and all those other games work fine in OpenGL and Direct3D. I was running everything in DirectX7 and then when I upgraded to DirectX8a everything was still fine.

Then I reformatted, and when I reinstalled everything, Quake 3 Arena, Serious Sam, and other OpenGL games wouldn't work!! The colors were all distorted (mostly lighting problems) and the games would freeze! Unreal Tournament works fine now in MeTaL, as well as all my other games, but none work in OGL anymore! I've reformatted twice since the 1st time, 1 was yesterday, and I've tried many different vidoe card drivers. The ones I'm using now are from www.glsetup.com.

I really wanna be able to play Serious Sam and Quake 3 again. If someone has an idea of which drivers to use or something different, please reply. Here are my system specs:

Compaq Presario (model 7940)
600mhz Athlon
Unknown motherboard (but it uses a VIA chipset, I have the 4-in-1 4.31 FINAL drivers installed too)
S3 Savage4 (with latest drivers from glsetup.com)
Windows 98 SE (with latest patches from microsoft site)
DirectX8a
Sound Blaster PCI128 (placed 3 slots below the AGP card)

Thank you in advance.
 

dietrologia

Member
Mar 13, 2001
197
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I'm experiencing a similar problem with my Stealth III S540 32 meg (PCI version). Been playing Half-Life like nobody's business and now all of a sudden it's locking up and sound looping after about 30 secs.

I have two theories and will have an opportunity to test them out this Saturday when I put a new system together:

* It's a heat issue. I admit it--I have crappy cooling throughout my case currently. I'm building a new system (but using this video card in it) and it'll have lots o' fans. I'll see how that works.

* It's an irq or registry conflict. Looking back on it... I think that my problems began around the same time I bought a USB scanner. Could be a problem with USB irq's or with the Scanner proggies themselves--my particular scanner had a lot of extra crap it installed. I tried to delete most of the fluff, but maybe this might have had an effect. Again, as I bring my new system up to speed this weekend, I'll be able to ascertain where the conflict resides.

Sorry that I don't have an immediate answer for you -- just wanted to know that there are others sharing your pain!