Problems with FFXI and the ATI Radeon HD 4850

[Luriel]

I recently decided to splurge a little on upgrading a friend's computer. He has a HP Pavillion a1310n that came with an Ati X1300 card and he definitely needed an upgrade so I bought the Radeon HD 4850 to replace this.

Every other game he has runs like a dream, NWN2, Oblivion, lolWoW with no issues at all however now when he goes to play final fantasy 11 it will initially start up fine... but after a while character and mob models will not load. The effects will still go off and names will appear but no models at all and the game becomes very laggy. Eventually FFXI crashes with a "cannot write XXXXXX memory (i can get the exact message, it just gave an address that idr). If he tries to open PlayOnline back up the window is a black box. It requires a system restart to get it to load again.

He is using the latest version of ATI's driver offerings... 8.20.somethingsomething... I looked at Omega Drivers but it seems 4850's are not supported yet... (or i'm just blind) Any assistance or ideas on how to resolve this would be appreciated. Its an Athalon 64 processor, 1 GB of RAM... I can furnish more specs if needed.

Thank you for any ideas or help.

<cat> <3

[Sigi]

Did you uninstall the old drivers after installing the new card? MAKE CERTAIN YOU DO SO!

[Luriel]

Yes, before even putting the card in all drivers for the old card were uninstalled.

[mackerel]

I'm getting the same behavior with ATI Radeon 2600XT. After a while characters and monsters disappear, only names show, and a few minutes later I get a crash to desktop. I suspect it's an issue with the new ATI drivers, but it could be a reaction to the September version update.

[Lordwafik]

Are they playing a video while watching FFXI? I know it's happened to me and some friends before, where they'll put something in mediaplayerclassic while FFXI'ing and then everything but you will dissapear.

[Miang]

I have the exact same issue with my 4870, whenever the game gets busy the character models disappear and shortly after that the game just drops out to desktop no error messages. Gonna try other driver versions I guess

[Luriel]

Hmm seems like its not just my friend's computer then.

I'll hope for a driver update to fix it I guess... just sucks, I don't want my WHM in my static randomly crashing lol.

[Fryte]

I have this same problem with ATI Radeon 9600xt. What's the fix?

[netz]

Downgrade drivers.

I installed Catalyst 8.9 on my Radeon X850 Pro and encountered the same issue. Downgrading to the release I was using before, 8.2, resolved the issue. Now I know well enough to heed the warning of the release notes: "Don't upgrade unless you're experiencing an issue."

[mackerel]

I downgraded to 8.7, hasn't crashed in 24 hours on Radeon 2600XT.

[Kurai]

Apologies in advance for wall of text:

I recently built a PC for my girlfriend to play FFXI on and we're using the
SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4850 512MB, an Asus P5Q Motherboard and various other components on Windows XP Pro. We're using the stock power supply out of the case we got, which is at 500W.

I tried downgrading Catalyst to an older version, but it would seem none of the older versions support the 4850 card, I was only able to go back as far as 8.5 which came with the CD, previously the computer would start lagging heavily during dynamis/campaign and either crash to desktop, or character models would partially disappear (ie. missing heads/floating body parts).

I did the 4850 Fan Fix and got the stock fan on the card to run at a higher rating, I also rigged a case fan to help keep everything nice and cool. Apparently the card is running at about 27-28 degrees Celsius while Idle, boosting to about 29-30 running in Dynamis. So far, we're no longer seeing the issue with the character models.

We're seeing a different problem now, the computer would freeze up heavily on occasion, the sound would stutter, and while we can move the cursor around, it can't really do anything with the computer and we'd be forced to reboot the computer. A specific example is zoning from North Sandy to South Sandy and we'd be able to target names/npcs/players, but no characters would load at all, so maybe the issue with the models is still there? I don't know >.<

Just to make sure, we tried Bioshock, no lag, no stuttering, game runs like a gem, but it froze when exiting to windows. I'm sort of at a loss as to what the problem could be, does anyone have any suggestions, or have seen anything like this? Could it be the power supply not providing enough juice?

I can list other specs if needed.

[kisada]

i'm running a 4870 and i had same problems as above, in terms of sound stuttering and eventually freezing (no disappearing models). this only occurred while two boxing though.

also i could run bioshock but i'd randomly crash and get red screens (infinite loops of some sort).

i pumped up my fan speed to about 45% and i'm using 8.5 drivers (i think, roommate did for me) with a hot fix to prevent crashing. so far i havent' crashed in ffxi at all, but i also haven't done any dual-instances. i have, however red screened in bioshock since hot fix but i haven't tried it after pushing the fan speed up.

i'm gonna try different drivers and fan speeds if problems continue. hopefully i can find a solution.

[Kurai]

I found some possible fixes that may be worth trying out in the following thread: Granted this is for the Sapphire brand of the 48xx cards
http://forums.amd.com/game/messagevi...VIEWTMP=Linear
"Ziher's Fix" or whatever it's called seems to work for quite a few people, so it may be worth trying out.
Further along in the thread, assuming you have the correct sku and PN for your card, you may be able to flash it. So far all the users that tried it have reported zero issues.

Unfortunately I won't get the opportunity to try any of them until tomorrow, after which I'll try and post my findings. Here's hoping for the best >.<

[kisada]

trying it, will report my findings.

[kisada]

big thread, sifted through about 15 pages so far.

seems like it's a manufacturer specific problem since people are reporting HIS's have no problem compared to the sapphire.

anyone who has a problem have it with the sapphire?

[Not Kuno]

I have the same problem D: Music turns to shit then models dont load. I get a black pol screen when I try to load it again.

[Robertus]

I had the exact same issues with my ASUS EAH3870 after a reformat, downgraded to catalyst 8.8 and that fixed the problems.

Images illustrating the problems for those wondering-
http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/4...1453os0.th.jpghttp://img101.imageshack.us/img101/7...1822jo2.th.jpg

[Kurai]

This is exactly what we were seeing on the rig i posted. Right now we get random crashes instead.

[Rellikard]

I had that as well, but the disappearing models only happened to me.

[Kurai]

Well, I attempted to try some of the fixes available on that lengthy forum thread on saturday, but only really ended up using Drive Sweeper to clear out any junk drivers left behind from the various driver install/uninstall attempts. I installed the Hotfix drivers from AMD, which is Catalyst 8.6 or something and attempted to try the powerplay fix, but for whatever reason it ends up crashing Catalyst control center. Another thing I did was force the fan to run at 50% rather then 60% from before, the temperature still runs fine on the GPU.

Ran the Vana'diel benchmark on a loop on High for about 8-9 hours straight while I enjoyed Thanksgiving with the girlfriends family and it seemed to hold up just fine. So far we're not seeing any crashes IN-game, and the previous issue where Bioshock would crash the computer upon exit doesn't happen anymore.

The odd thing however is that when the computer is left on and idle for a while it "crashes" to a black screen stating something about reboot device or somesuch. So I'm thinking there's an issue with the video card when it becomes idle, which I think was briefly mentioned in that long thread.