Thursday, November 22nd 2007
AMD/ATI turns back on AGP users
For the past few months some of ATI's older AGP cards like the x800 and other second generation series cards, have been unable to run the latest Direct3D games. Users have noted problems in Hellgate London, Call of Duty 4, Gears of War, Need for Speed Pro Street, and Crysis(These problems often consist of not just minor artifacts, but D3D not even working!). These second generation series cards can not even pass Direct x diagnostics with the current drivers. Some say that those users on "old" graphics cards should upgrade and its simply their fault for having outdated technology. This Bias is contrary to what is actually going on, the x800 series cards are perfectly capable of running most of these games at medium to high settings especially Call of Duty 4 and Hellgate London. The Second and Third Generation ATI graphics cards are often referred to as minimum requirements for these new games, and yet they are incredibly unstable right now. And as being listed under AMD/ATI's supported products list, these cards should work with the latest drivers, but they don't. These problems started roughly with the 7.9 Catalyst release (Back on November 10th). Today ATI released its 7.11 Catalyst set of drivers and still has not provided a solution for these second generation AGP cards.
See Read More for solutions:
Their are two methods to get around this problem.
The first and in my opinion best solution is Omega Drivers 7.10 Release. The omega drivers release is fully compatible with AGP.
According to Deluxe TNT over at Guru3d forums this method yields the following results:
Hellgate London: 100%
Call of duty 4: 100%
Gears of War: 100%
NFS pro street: High frame Stutter even with Frame Rates Above 50+ FPS
Crysis: Untested
The Second method is to install 7.7 Catalyst Drivers then copy the ati3duag.dll and ati3d1ag.dll(if u have this) from last working driver (7.8;7.x) in system32 to a temporary location. Next uninstall the 7.7 drivers and do a driver clean with driver cleaner pro. Then install 7.10 Catalyst drivers.Finally replace the 7.10 ati3duag.dll in safemode! with the one you copied to a temporary directory from 7.7 release.
See This solution here
According to Deluxe TNT over at Guru3d forums this method yields the following results:
Hellgate: Working but some low FPS
Call of duty 4: 100% ok
Gears of War: 100% ok
NFS Pro Street: untested.
Crysis: working but with bugs and terrible graphics
The best of luck to you who are toughing it out with x800 cards, hopefully AMD/ATI will help out the old AGP users soon. I hope this helps some of those select users with this major problem. Might I add a Personal Happy Turkey Day to those of you who live in the United States!
Source:
Guru 3d Forums
See Read More for solutions:
Their are two methods to get around this problem.
The first and in my opinion best solution is Omega Drivers 7.10 Release. The omega drivers release is fully compatible with AGP.
According to Deluxe TNT over at Guru3d forums this method yields the following results:
Hellgate London: 100%
Call of duty 4: 100%
Gears of War: 100%
NFS pro street: High frame Stutter even with Frame Rates Above 50+ FPS
Crysis: Untested
The Second method is to install 7.7 Catalyst Drivers then copy the ati3duag.dll and ati3d1ag.dll(if u have this) from last working driver (7.8;7.x) in system32 to a temporary location. Next uninstall the 7.7 drivers and do a driver clean with driver cleaner pro. Then install 7.10 Catalyst drivers.Finally replace the 7.10 ati3duag.dll in safemode! with the one you copied to a temporary directory from 7.7 release.
See This solution here
According to Deluxe TNT over at Guru3d forums this method yields the following results:
Hellgate: Working but some low FPS
Call of duty 4: 100% ok
Gears of War: 100% ok
NFS Pro Street: untested.
Crysis: working but with bugs and terrible graphics
The best of luck to you who are toughing it out with x800 cards, hopefully AMD/ATI will help out the old AGP users soon. I hope this helps some of those select users with this major problem. Might I add a Personal Happy Turkey Day to those of you who live in the United States!
63 Comments on AMD/ATI turns back on AGP users
So its not AGP that is the issue here.
It's the X800 and lower because they are only SM2.0. (bar 2600XT don't know what going on there. . . .)
As Ket said SM3.0 is the norm now.
X800 series had thier hey day and they were kickass.
It's not just the drivers that are the issue for these cards, it's the game devs.
If they created thier games to be playable across the spectrum of GPUs, the game will not look anywhere near as good as they do now.
Cards like mine which have cores identical to there pci-e brethren hence why my core says pci-express on it but its an agp card.
The newer cards have what ati calls there rialto chip that does the conversion from pci-e to agp these cards seem to work fine as i have had 0 problems with mine.
Cards without these chip seem to be the ones affected because of some sort of change in card architecture.
Quoted from INQ: "Rialto is already in production and ATI will use it to bridge R430 and later on RV410 based cards. R430 based Radeon X800 cards are expected very soon, in March, while bridged X700 cards are coming approximately one month later."
So the only reason these cards do not work right is ati has decided to not bother re coding drivers to support cores before the R430 so this is purely ATi's fault not the the agp port itself
Anyone want to test to see if it is true infact that this issue only effects cards pre R430 with out the Rialto Chip
www.sapphiretech.com/us/products/browseproducts.php?pcat=3
There are other company's that support AGP based on ATi hardware, but SAPPHIRE are the biggest AGP supporters.
I don't know if SAPPHIRE will try and support the NEW HD38xx (SM4.0 / DX10.1), but as they still sell ATI based AGP cards that have SM3.0 technology, I would FULLY expect ATI/AMD to continue to produce up-to-date Drivers for these cards.
Yes AGP is aging, but it's still going fairly strong. I would like to Upgrade to an newer PCI-e card, but it's not as straight forward as just buying a new card. I'd have to buy a NEW Motherboard, Processor, Memory, maybe even a power supply, Hard Drives and DVD Writer (to support SATA to replace another so called OBSOLETE technology EIDE/IDE or ATA/PATA). I still use a CRT monitor. I guess that's another piece of hardware you'd suggest I upgrade as its "OLD HAT".
This would be a MAJOR INVESTMENT, the likes of which, financially, I, and many, many others, cannot currently justify. So, whilst there's still NEWER AGP hardware around then I will continue to use it.
but, what I don't get, though . . . if AGP is so certain to be a dead technology, why still make AGP components? Granted, it's becoming harder to find a good selection of motherboards which support AGP, but . . .
It's like when PCI took over ISA, I guess . . . change is enevitable.
That said, I'm running an AGP X800 GTO (it came with 16 pipelines unlocked so it's essentially an X800 XL) and I have had no problems at all - I'm on the 7.10s at the moment, with no artifacts and DirectX passes with no problems. I even gave Crysis a go to see if there were any issues, and although it doesn't run particularly smoothly at the settings I've chosen, it most certainly works and the graphics look ok... I do have screenshots, but I doubt anyone's interested. ;)
i dont know about you but for a AGP card thats not to damn bad beats out a bunch of PCI-e cards
i would have more SS but i had fraps sending them to my USB drive and it kinda maxed out :ohwell:
Wer'e not coming down to the AGP interface after that.
Wer'e looking at the CPU bottleneck.
The CPU bottle neck on any card released after the X1950pro would be stupid.
I mean the CPU bottle neck on a P4 3.0Ghz HT is enough.
I believe the best option would be to get a motherboard with PCI-E interface and PCI-E card if you have a 939skt.
This way you don't have to get a whole new system until later.
One bonus is not being in the firing line of the people who own PCI-E systems.
If you want to be cool you can tell how the AGP users they are using an obselete interface and should just go buy a new PC even though you know they are only using it because they can't afford to buy a new PC.
j/k:shadedshu
But in return you get the fastest developing games with better gameplay and graphics than any console
It does kinda suck that they have stopped supporting AGP... But you can't really blame them... Pci-E 2.0 is out now even.... Thats getting close to putting AGP back by the standard Pc100-pc133 ram era...
It's technology, it moves forwards, companies can't be bothered to constantly upkeep outdated technology.
Although I do understand peoples pains here greatly myself even, owning a few AGP boards I still run... The time is coming for it to die.
If they buy an AGP based system because they dont want to spend a bit of extra cash, they are costing themselves more in the long run when it comes to upgrade.Not really. They will probably goto the cheapest provider.
But that depends on your definition of support.
Are we talking minimum driver support, or the lot (drivers, help files, software packages etc)
I feel sorry for the people who don't know anything about GPU's in NZ.
Even the retailers like the ones in this link trying to sell X8xxs
For people over in the US our exchange rate is 1 1/2 more than yours.
So these X8xx are selling for near and over $1000 US!
www.pricespy.co.nz/cat_16.html#g234
Are these reatilaer stuck in a time warp?!
Gold is like 800/ounce, was 280 before bush ran us into the ground. Gold hasn't really increased in value. The USD is just that worthless.
He does and says some of the strangest things infront of so many people.
He has to be one of the most entertaning presidents.
Our priminister is a woman who looks like a man.
Even her voice is quite manly.
Wer'e quite a boring nation most of the time.
Our economy went up which made things cheaper but more expensive to export.
Good for me but not for the farmers.
If I have a workstation for video editting/encoding, CAD, and photoshop. The FireGL X3 does 2x dual link for running 2 massive screens, and I want to render, or encode, or multi-task, and I can switch to QUAD CORE 2 using an Asrock board, without the need to replace my memory or GPU.
There is way too much emphasis on the term "GPU bottleneck", when, in every application except gaming, the bottleneck is the CPU.
The thread is about continued support to DEBUG THE DRIVERS of existing AGP cards. No-one is demanding the manufacturers to keep making the latest GPUs available on AGP.