Need help with ATI drivers

[Cassius105]

Hi

i have a Saphire Radeon 9700 pro that i got about a year and a half ago

been performing well and never had a problem with it untill now

i generaly dont upgrade drivers unnecesarily because i find that if you keep switching drivers it usualy breaks stuff so i only upgrade when something doesnt work

the Far cry demo keeps crashing on loading so i decided to try updating the graphics drivers (im currently on 3.6 or might be 3.7 i cant remember and im not at my computer so cant look)

installed the new drivers and iv found that all of the drivers from 3.8 onwards have an error with my card in that smart gart disables AGP

i know that there is nothing wrong with my card or AGP slot because with the 3.7 and below drivers AGP is enabled in smart gart and the card performs very well

anyone got any ideas why the later drivers have taken issue with my AGP when it is working perfectly fine?

thanks for any help

 

[Matthias99]

It's not ATI (well, at least not *all* their fault); it's your motherboard drivers (I've had this problem before). What you need to do is to uninstall ATI's drivers, then uninstall your chipset drivers, then use Driver Cleaner in safe mode, then install the latest chipset drivers, then reinstall the ATI drivers. You may also need to reinstall DirectX. That should fix it so that it 'sees' the correct AGP settings again.

 

[Megatomic]

You should try uninstalling the drivers, rebooting into safe mode and running driver cleaner and cab cleaner, and then reinstalling the new Cats when you reboot into windows (as normal) again. That might fix things for you.

1. Download and install Driver Cleaner
2. Uninstall the Catalyst drivers via Add/Remove Programs in the Control Panel
3. Reboot into safe mode and run driver cleaner and cab cleaner (included in driver cleaner)
4. Unplug your network cable if you have a broadband connection
5. Reboot as normal and install the new Cats (4.5 works great for me)
6. Reboot when prompted
7. Test with your game
8. Fixed?
a. Yes - :beer:
b. No - We'll try to figure something out...

Good luck.

 

[Megatomic]

Dern, Matthias beat me. I took too long typing.

Anyway, uninstalling and reinstalling the chipset drivers is also a very good idea. I just did this entire process (chipset and video) when I switched from a GF4 to a 9600XT. I had a perfect install right from the get go.