New card suggestion :(

[machiko]

Hi all,

Recently had my Radeon 9800XT fry out on me which lead me to buy what I thought was an exact same one again, opening it found it to have a different case design and installing it gave me a far choppier gameplay experience even at low res. Old one had like turbo engine type artwork on the fan case, the new one has a small blue gargoyle.

I'm at a loss why a card with the exact same specs wont run as well once CPU gets to 100% load with lots of people onscreen, old card reached 100%CPU and then seemed to shoulder the load better on the card since it was far less noticeable that FPS was dropping.

Anyway to the point does anyone have any suggestions of cards that you can buy right now that will enable me to play things like Dyna(30-40+people), DA camps etc without it looking like a flipperbook.

Looking at the range of cards available and hoping they will play FFXI which is a horrible game in terms of compatability is pretty daunting. Pc specs below if it helps ^^

+ AMD Athlon 64 3200+
+ 1GB PC3200 RAM
+ Radeon 9800XT 256Mb DDR DVI/TV-out

[Lordwafik]

Hi all,

Recently had my Radeon 9800XT fry out on me which lead me to buy what I thought was an exact same one again, opening it found it to have a different case design and installing it gave me a far choppier gameplay experience even at low res. Old one had like turbo engine type artwork on the fan case, the new one has a small blue gargoyle.

I'm at a loss why a card with the exact same specs wont run as well once CPU gets to 100% load with lots of people onscreen, old card reached 100%CPU and then seemed to shoulder the load better on the card since it was far less noticeable that FPS was dropping.

Anyway to the point does anyone have any suggestions of cards that you can buy right now that will enable me to play things like Dyna(30-40+people), DA camps etc without it looking like a flipperbook.

Looking at the range of cards available and hoping they will play FFXI which is a horrible game in terms of compatability is pretty daunting. Pc specs below if it helps ^^

+ AMD Athlon 64 3200+
+ 1GB PC3200 RAM
+ Radeon 9800XT 256Mb DDR DVI/TV-out

the reason your card is different looing is because a different manufacturer was involved.

did you uninstall the drivers from the old card and install the drivers that came with the CD for your current card?

[machiko]

I clicked on the 2 "?" adapters in device manager and installed the vga and secondary drivers from there, then installed a number of different catalyst all giving the same effect. :I

[Lordwafik]

if you already haven't, and only if you have your manufacturer's drivers, uninstall everything related to the card from the control panel then reinstall. If you don't have manufacturer's drivers, get download and install Catalyst but once again after uninstalling your previous drivers.

[machiko]

Thx for the help, tried all of these things and still plays very badly regardless of what resoloution I put the game to. Lots of people onscreen and even the 4 lights outside of windy moghouse make me lag like crazy :/

Even tried a fresh install and same end result.

[Shuemue]

try www.omegadrivers.net

[mootsfox]

Are you sure you bought a 9800XT?

[Cyn]

I got so tired of dealing with the athlon/radeon setups that I used in the past and went with an asus/intel/nvidia rig this most recent time. Happy to say I've not had any problems at all in the year and a half or so that I've been using it. With my 7950GT and 2ghz Core2, I run pretty much everything in full-out settings (including tweaks to GUI and 2048x2048 regedit) in 1920x1200. Before with radeon even if I could get the system to maintain stability, I never got the performance that I felt like I was paying for.

Not that this really helps your current situation all that much lol. But If you do replace the whole thing in the future, I'd consider just avoiding ATI altogether.

[mootsfox]

I got so tired of dealing with the athlon/radeon setups that I used in the past and went with an asus/intel/nvidia rig this most recent time. Happy to say I've not had any problems at all in the year and a half or so that I've been using it. With my 7950GT and 2ghz Core2, I run pretty much everything in full-out settings (including tweaks to GUI and 2048x2048 regedit) in 1920x1200. Before with radeon even if I could get the system to maintain stability, I never got the performance that I felt like I was paying for.

Not that this really helps your current situation all that much lol. But If you do replace the whole thing in the future, I'd consider just avoiding ATI altogether.

Nvidia is for noobs

[machiko]

I've tried the latest Omega drivers, the drivers that came with the card, multiple catalyst drivers including the ones said to work best by SE and the ones that worked well with the old card all with pretty much the same poor performance.

I bought it on Ebay as a supposedly new card since they are almost impossible to buy anymore, it says it's a 9800XT in device manager and on the sticker on the card.

This is a picture of it, it also has no overdrive tab which again is kinda suspect however.

http://i11.ebayimg.com/03/i/000/f9/d6/d5e0_1.JPG

Listed specifications:

Chipset GPU Radeon 9800XT
Core clock 400Mhz
Memory Clock: 500Mhz
PixelPipelines 8
Memory Size 256MB
Memory Interface 128-bit
Memory Type DDR
3D API
DirectX DirectX 9
OpenGL OpenGL 2.0
Interface : AGP 4X/8X
Ports :VGA & DVI &TV-Out S-Video Out

General Features:

RAMDAC 400 MHz
Max Resolution 2048x1536 85Hz
SLI Supported No
Operating Systems Supported Windows 98/ME/XP/2000/2003

System Requirements

* Intel Pentium 4/III/II/Celeron AMD K6/Duron Athlon Athlon XP or compatible with AGP bus configuration. 128MB of system memory
* AGP 4X/8X Slot

My old card looked different and had like turbine engine type design on it with a big red ATI sticker on the fan, as I said ran FFXI very well even in crowded areas, dyna and WG AH were never a problem and it was always smooth.

http://www.games-fusion.net/images/r.../9800xt(4).jpg

Could it be that I need more ram(currently 1 gig) or a new PSU (350W atm) with this version of the 9800xt?

I have tried everything I can think of to get it to run as my old 9800XT did and it just wont co-operate More than an alliance of people or the lights outside my moghouse in windy makes it stutter horribly and dyna is almost unplayable.

[Cyn]

I got so tired of dealing with the athlon/radeon setups that I used in the past and went with an asus/intel/nvidia rig this most recent time. Happy to say I've not had any problems at all in the year and a half or so that I've been using it. With my 7950GT and 2ghz Core2, I run pretty much everything in full-out settings (including tweaks to GUI and 2048x2048 regedit) in 1920x1200. Before with radeon even if I could get the system to maintain stability, I never got the performance that I felt like I was paying for.

Not that this really helps your current situation all that much lol. But If you do replace the whole thing in the future, I'd consider just avoiding ATI altogether.

Nvidia is for noobs

I am not even going to pretend like I have much of a clue when it comes to computers. So anything that is user-friendly and reliable gets extra points for me.