Problem with AGP driver agp440.sys

[orbach]

I was running with AGP driver (agp440.sys) installed and everything was fine (AGP speed 8x fastwrites Off) except Half Life 2 would not run. One suggestion I found in the forums was to drop the AGP speed to 4x, which I did (using the ATI control panel, SmartGart) and HL2 started to run fine. I tried to set the BIOS AGP speed to 4x from 8X (I should have left it alone) and the display became corrupted the moment I booted into Windows. If I set the speed back to 8X it booted fine. I booted in Safe mode, uninstalled the ATI driver and installed the latest 5.3 Catalyst driver and still had the same problem. I finally decided to remove the AGP device using Device Manager and reinstalled the Catalyst 5.3 driver and everything worked fine. HL2 runs well except for some unrelated audio problems.

I was wondering how the Catalyst driver could work at all since I have an AGP video card (Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB) and had removed the AGP driver (agp440.sys) and realized the driver is running in PCI mode, ie AGP reads and writes are Off, which I understand has lower performance. So I decided to reinstall the AGP driver, set the Bios AGP speed to 8x and lower it to 4x with SmartGart, and found similar display corruption on reboot.

Decided to start from scratch by removing the Catalyst driver, rebooting to verify it was gone, and reinstalling the AGP driver (the Intel INF utility, I have the 865PE chipset on an Abit IS7-E mobo). To my surprise, the moment the Intel INF installer loads the AGP driver the screen becomes corrupted. I tried clearing the CMOS, setting the BIOS AGP speed to 4x, reboot, then back to 8x, reboot, and nothing seems to work. So I am currently running without the AGP driver in PCI mode. Remember that before I started I had the AGP driver and everything was as it should be. I must have installed the AGP driver on a fresh Windows setup and now that I removed it cannot reinstall it without causing display problems.

How can I fix this problem and enable the AGP slot? My system:

Abit IS7-E mobo 865PE chipset
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
512MB Corsair DDR PC3200
Sony DRU700A DVD/RW
Lite-On LTR-52327S CD/RW
Antec 350W PSU (I know it's low, but it used to work!)

Thanks for your help

 

[tk11]

I'd try deleting both the agp driver and graphics driver with device manager. reboot and install both drivers fresh. *Should* be working at agp 4x...

 

[orbach]

Thank you very much for your reply, I appreciate your help.

I tried that. Well, I removed the Catalyst driver using its Software Uninstall facility, rebooted, Windows finds new display hardware and asks for a driver. I cancel out of this installation and removed the AGP device with the device manager.

At this point I reboot and Windows finds new display hardware again and asks for a driver. I cancel out of the driver installation again and look at device manager which reports an unknown display adapter, like it should. I also verify that the AGP device is *not* in device manager. The only uninstalled device that device manager reports is the Radeon 9800. It does not report AGP as unistalled, it just isn't listed.

I install the Intel chipset drivers (INF) and it proceeds to install. My windows system for some reason does not recognize driver signatures so it asks me if I want to install each driver (Intel INF drivers). I go through each driver about 10 of them, until it asks to install the AGP driver. When I say Yes, and installs the AGP driver the display immediately becomes corrupted.

Wierd isn't it? I have upgraded the Intel INF drivers before without problems and with the Catalyst driver installed. I wonder if the registry is to blame. I find entries in the registry for agp440, even though the device driver is not installed:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Services\agp440
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet002\Services\agp440
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\agp440

Unfortunately I have no idea what these registry entries mean.

 

[orbach]

I found the problem. The PCI Bridge device used the wrong driver (pci.sys). I removed this device (PCI-to-PCI Bridge) and installed the Intel INF utility and a different PCI Bridge device driver was installed. Now Half Life 2 runs at AGP 8X even though it crashed after a while (I had run through the whole game without crashing while in PCI mode).

 

[bsobel]

Just a note, the agp440.sys is the last driver loaded before the OS switches into graphics mode. Therefor a lot of people think that it is the root cause of an issue, in most cases it's not.

 

[orbach]

Right. I learned a little about how drivers are installed in Windows, as upper and lower filters in a chain of drivers. In my case, the AGP driver is an upper(?) filter to the PCI Bridge driver. It pays to view the driver chains in device manager by selecting View by Connections and verifying the installation of all drivers on top of the suspect driver.