Problems with 4850HD...please help

[admorris]

Let me start by saying that I am by no means a power gamer. I do like racing games (Dirt, Grid, GTR2) so I thought I would upgrade my 8600GTS to the 4850HD Visiontek. I have a HP 5000+ with 2 gigs ram, upgraded to 550W PSU. Before installing new card I uninstalled all drivers for my previous card. A couple of problems came about. 1. I no longer have sound and 2. 3d and 2d graphics look like shit. There are noticeable jagged edges in the cars at 1680x1050 where there were no edges with my 8600gts. Frame rates do not appear to have improved and actually got worse in DIRT. 2d text looks a bit blurred and washed out. I know this is a complete newb post, but I would appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction on what I may have done wrong.

much much appreciated in advance.

Alan

 

[taltamir]

ok, lets start by making sure your drivers are all installed right. Go to add remove programs, if there is anything nvidia there remove it (unless you have nvidia motherboard drivers, in which it gets more difficult)
After that, get driversweeper, boot up in safe mode, and do a cleanup for nvidia.

Then get the latest drivers from AMD and install them. 8.06 version of catalyst.

 

[admorris]

Alright, did that and there were no nvidia drivers to uninstall. I updated on AMD's site using the "hotfix" but still no sound. I have upgraded and installed probably 20 video cards and have never come across this problem of losing sound. I have a feeling that it is something really simple I just am not doing or seeing. I am running Vista 32 bit btw if that makes any difference.

when I got to Control Panel, Sound it says under "playback" - Digital Output Device (HDMI) working with a green check mark. There are no other devices underneath that. There should be some other devices under there shouldn't it? I am not running any HDMI hookups.

 

[shangshang]

Are you running the Audigy2?

Regardless, I think it appears that you are only outputing "Digital only" sound. Perhpas you need to output analog sound too (maybe by unchecking the "digital" check box?). But I don't see how upgrading a video card could have affect your sound card settings though. But check anyway.

I'm still thinking about your grahics issue though.

 

[admorris]

I truly am stumped. I have no "check" box for digital or analog for that matter. Atleast not where I can see. I even uninstalled my "realtek" audio drivers and found my originals and re-installed them to no avail.

When playing music I can see the levels going up and down underneath the speaker icon, but no sound. It's just not making it to the speakers.

I think you are right with the digital vs. analog, but how do I get my computer to see analog?

 

[admorris]

Thanks for the help, I just broke down and went and bought a Sound Blaster sound card. All is fine now. I'm thinking somehow or another my bigger PSU must have blown the onboard sound...who knows.

thanks again for the help.

Alan

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: admorris
when I got to Control Panel, Sound it says under "playback" - Digital Output Device (HDMI) working with a green check mark. There are no other devices underneath that. There should be some other devices under there shouldn't it? I am not running any HDMI hookups.

That's the problem. Your system default sound output device is set to the HDMI sound output on the new Radeon card. This may have happened when you installed the drivers. You should be able to just re-select the Realtek audio device to get your onboard output back. If that device isn't present, then perhaps you uninstalled your onboard audio drivers accidentally?

 

[QuixoticOne]

The ATI card *has* built in high definition sound, which, unfortunately, is really just a digital output only scheme that is designed to feed into a HDMI interfaced HDTV. Unfortunately, when you install the ATI card drivers, it installs the HD / HDMI sound drivers as well, and that may well become your default output device despite it being VERY unlikely that such would be a user's expectation / preference.

You just need to go into the control panel under sounds / hardware devices, and set the default sound device for playback and recording back to whatever it was before, e.g. your motherboard's built in sound chip or whatever.

Unless you plan to have a HDMI interfaced monitor / HDTV with sound, you could just disable the ATI HD sound device in which case maybe the system would be smart enough to default to one of the others on your system... but to be sure, you should manually set it to be what you want.

 

[Martimus]

When you install the AMD HDMI sound drivers they become the default sound drivers. All you need to do is open the audio properties tab in Control Panel, and change the "default device" to whatever sound device you had before on the "audio" tab (Or you could use the HDMI sound on the video card).

edit: Sorry, it seems that Larry and Quixotic already answered your question.

 

[shangshang]

Hmm this is weird. When I intalled my 4850, it installed the ATI HD audio device (which btw wasn't easy to get it installed because I had to intall the Microsoft KB888111 first), but my Audigy2 stayed as the default sound device. As a matter of fact, the Ati HD device does NOT even show up as a device in the "Sound" category in Control Panel. The Ati HD device DOES show up under Device Manager though.

I wonder why is it that I didnt have the Ati HD audio device show up, but the OP did. Hmm weird.

Admorris, maybe you can try to check to see if you could use your Realtek again like suggest above. I believe the Realtek sound device requires the MS KB888111 program installed, or else the Realtek would still show up as a "sound device" but does not work correctly. I wonder if the intallation of ATI HD somehow messed up your Realtek installation??? I ask this because you said the Sound Blaster device worked, and it may have worked because SB does NOT care about MS KB888111. I think this is your issue with sound between the ATI and Realtek devices has to do with the MS KB888111.

But what about your video? Is video still crappy?

 

[SuperSonicBoom]

Made the jump from 320GTS to BB Visiontek 4850. Much improved framerate performance!!!

Uninstalled the nvidia drivers and also used Driver Sweep from Guru3D. Still had to manually deleted the NV dlls/regisgtry keys.

Initial ATi/CCC install deleted my Onboard Realtek device drivers on my DS3 Gigabyte board. Had to download the Realtek drivesr to get my audio back. Been working ever since... Aside from this, cant complain about the 4850. Even with crappy 8.6 hotfix fan control, hottest temps i get are 75C in my Antec Nine case, fans set to medium.....looking forward to new drviers soon......The Ati Overdrive already got me at 690/ 1140....

 

[shangshang]

Originally posted by: SuperSonicBoom
Made the jump from 320GTS to BB Visiontek 4850. Much improved framerate performance!!!

...Even with crappy 8.6 hotfix fan control, hottest temps i get are 75C in my Antec Nine case,...

Run Fur Opengl test and list your temp at load (and room temp too if possible). I'm willing to bet Fur will kick the temp to over 75C easily. Dont hold your breath on new drivers though, the 4850 has been out almost a month not and AMD has yet to release an offical driver for this card on the website. Me thinks AMD drivers programmers are not reporting to work.

 

[SuperSonicBoom]

Run Fur Opengl test and list your temp at load (and room temp too if possible). I'm willing to bet Fur will kick the temp to over 75C easily. Dont hold your breath on new drivers though, the 4850 has been out almost a month not and AMD has yet to release an offical driver for this card on the website. Me thinks AMD drivers programmers are not reporting to work.

Done Furmark 1.40

79C--- good or bad?

min fps:30
avg: 83
Max: 111

got AC in my room at 78 Farenheit.

 

[Qbah]

I have a somewhat similar problem (not enteriely this issue, just similar). It's with my Realtec Onboard Audio. The thing just selects the HDMI output by itself alot of the times (and I have the speakers connected to the regular speaker line). Each time it happens I just select the proper output manually until it does it again (it's usually when using Skype, waiting for the HD4870 to do any gaming ).

As for performance, the 4850 is at least 3 times as fast as your old GPU, probably more. You should see a dramatic increase in performance.

How to select it? Just go into Sound in Control Panel and select Speakers as the default output (the HDMI is your Radeon, Realtec Digital Output is your onboard HD plug).

Works for me Will get an X-Fi shortly, the problem should be gone after that. As I'm guessing it's the sucky Realtec drivers.

 

[shangshang]

^ the issue is not the Realtec drivers. Issue is that there are 2 HD audio device sharing the "HD bus" (I don't know the exact technical term), and Windows gets confused. XP SP3 is supposed to take care of this, so will Vista.

 

[DerekWilson]

well ... AMD does use the realtek codec on their card ... so there could potentially be a driver conflict apparent when installing realtek drivers on a system with multiple realtek codecs ...

i haven't really looked into it and don't know the answer -- just that this kind of thing could create an issue.

it really should just be as simple as reselecting your default sound device as others have pointed out.

 

[admorris]

I really appreciate everyone's feedback on the problem. The only reason I went and bought the sound card is that the drivers for the 4850 apparently completely screwed my on board sound, to the point that I had no other sound options to choose from other than the default HDMI. I literally worked on this for a few hours straight with no resolve, so I figured getting a sound card would over-ride the graphics sound (which it did). As far as graphics are concerned, I think the problem is within the game DIRT. From everything I have read on that sim, it is just a poorly designed, inefficient game. GRID looks great and is much crisper without the lag. Text seems to be better as well. I ended up getting DriverSweeper, completely uninstalling the card, deleting all drivers for ATI as well as nvidia and reinstalling the "hotfix" drivers. I think that was the ticket. A lot of work for someone who doesn't even play that many games...haha

thanks again guys!