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Video card trouble with my laptop

T

tony4704

Senior member
I have an alienware 5500 laptop with an ati radeon 9700 mobile card. Problem is when I go into final fantasy XI (the reason i bought the laptop, my addiction on the go..lol) with the stock drivers that came on the driver cd, ffxi freezes. I have to either restart or reboot it. Usually happens like after a minute into the game. So I tried the Omega drivers. Everything seemed to be fixed, left my character in the game for about 20 minutes. Thesn all of a sudden everything on the screen was messed up! I coudnt see what was going on it was just all jumbled together, yet still in the game and not froze. I typed the logout command and succesfully logged out and the screen refreshed and was back to normal. The omega drivers are all set to the defaults atm, Does anyone know what could be causing this? This is really making me mad now because this is one of the main reasons I got this laptop. thanks in advance.
 
Originally posted by: tony4704
I have an alienware 5500 laptop with an ati radeon 9700 mobile card. Problem is when I go into final fantasy XI (the reason i bought the laptop, my addiction on the go..lol) with the stock drivers that came on the driver cd, ffxi freezes. I have to either restart or reboot it. Usually happens like after a minute into the game. So I tried the Omega drivers. Everything seemed to be fixed, left my character in the game for about 20 minutes. Thesn all of a sudden everything on the screen was messed up! I coudnt see what was going on it was just all jumbled together, yet still in the game and not froze. I typed the logout command and succesfully logged out and the screen refreshed and was back to normal. The omega drivers are all set to the defaults atm, Does anyone know what could be causing this? This is really making me mad now because this is one of the main reasons I got this laptop. thanks in advance.
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Download the latest drivers for your Radeon 9700 (9600) mobile card from Alienwares website. Uninstall your current video drivers, run Driver cleaner, Install drivers you downloaded from Alienware. Do not use Omega drivers. Mobile graphics processors are usually specially made for laptop vendors and might have different requirements than standard desktop video cards.
 
Well i did all this and the screen still does some F@#$ed up weird shit. Anything from what looks like when your "clipping" in an old doom game to weird scan lines. So i decided that I will try playing around with the resolutions. Even though It was running before on this old res. In ffxi you have two resolution setting. one for background and one for overlay. I forget which one it is atm but the one which i think was giving the problem was set at 1024x1024. The only other setting for this is 512x512 and 256x256. I tried kicking it down to 512x512 and believe it or not...messed up screen stuff goes away. Only problem is that it looks like crap at this low of a res and i didnt buy the system I bought so that I can kick down the resolution on my games. This system can supposedly run doom3 and farcry and all that(ffxi has way less requirements than these). I just wanna figure this out...any other suggestions people? thanks!
 
ah cancel that its still f'ing up. Just took a lot longer this times. WTF IS GOING on this is so eritating!
 
ah i fixed it. Stupid driver doctor cleaner whatever didnt do its job. There were still pieces of the omega drivers on my system conflicting with the ati ones. thanks for ur help people.
 
well i just found out that I did not fix this problem. Its back. It just seems very sporadic. I have now the latest drivers on alienwares website. I had ran this by them and they told me to download 3dmark and run it to see if its bad hardware. So I ran it with latest drivers off their website, and it ran beautifully. Problem is it still does the problem instide ffxi. But its only everyonce in a while and it seems to not matter what resolution i am in. I just downloaded latest directx 9.0b and am gonna try this, then maybe try old driver versions from their website.

It definetly does it only when I have powerplay set to optimal performance rather than optimal battery (this is when its plugged into the wall). If I kick the setting down to max battery then I never witness this problem. But the game doesnt look good with optimal battery so I dont like to play it that way. Is there any other suggestions? thanks
 
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