9800pro->XT 2D problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter Knut Nilsen
  • Start date Start date
Well, I did some tests, too. New 4.12 drivers didn't help (not that I
expected them to).
Click to expand...

I did the same. And accomplished nothing.
Actually i developed the definitive cure, according to some posts and
articles i've read around the net.
The only effective solution (made drop to zero the number of vpu recover
crashes) was COMPLETELY DISABLE hardware acceleration on the 3d panel of the
videocard.
Of course a solution this radical is someway impraticable, because will
force the user to continuely toggle from unaccelerated (for 2d purposes) to
accelerate when 3d gaming.

Unfortunately (or not, depends on the point of view), i had a serious
hardware problem with my Asus motherboard, so i had to make it substitute.
I've chosen to change brand, Abit, also to see if this it's somehow related
to our problem (looking around seems that ati+asus+winxp is the lethal
combination; for sure the combo Ati+winxp is involved, with this
modification i'll be able to isolate the involvement of the motherboard).

This Wednesday i'll put my hands on the new mobo; test sessions will be
resumed shortly after.

bye and, if we don't catch sooner, happy Christmas :)

larss
 
larss said:
I did the same. And accomplished nothing.
Actually i developed the definitive cure, according to some posts and
articles i've read around the net.
The only effective solution (made drop to zero the number of vpu recover
crashes) was COMPLETELY DISABLE hardware acceleration on the 3d panel of the
videocard.
Of course a solution this radical is someway impraticable, because will
force the user to continuely toggle from unaccelerated (for 2d purposes) to
accelerate when 3d gaming.
Click to expand...
Absolutely. Haven't tested this, but it doesn't seem unlikely that the
problems go away when you disable accelleration. Funny that the 2D
problem goes away when disabling 3D acceleration...not a viable
workaroung, though.
Unfortunately (or not, depends on the point of view), i had a serious
hardware problem with my Asus motherboard, so i had to make it substitute.
I've chosen to change brand, Abit, also to see if this it's somehow related
to our problem (looking around seems that ati+asus+winxp is the lethal
combination; for sure the combo Ati+winxp is involved, with this
modification i'll be able to isolate the involvement of the motherboard).
Click to expand...
Well, as far as I can see, yours and my motherboard are very different -
mine is an old one, with VIA KT266 chipset, while I believe your
have Nvidia chipset. So there's no reason they should give the same
error. Gregor (further up in this thread), who had a similar problem,
have a very similar motherboard to mine, though. That's why I thought it
was motherboard related at first.
This Wednesday i'll put my hands on the new mobo; test sessions will be
resumed shortly after.
Click to expand...

Well, good luck. I'll be waiting for the report.
bye and, if we don't catch sooner, happy Christmas :)
Click to expand...

Merry Christmas to you, too!

Knut
 
Hello, Knut!
You wrote on Wed, 22 Dec 2004 18:21:17 +0100:

KN> Well, good luck. I'll be waiting for the report.

And here we are.
I have good news and bad news.

Good news are that issues mentioned above have completely disappeared. No
more lockups, no restart, no damn VPU Recovers willing to send reports back
to Ati. This, both with 2d and 3d applications, scrolling windows, using
Outlook (i've even tried your "find and replace dialog" trick, and had no
issues). So far i've tried just one 3d app, Deus Ex (i love this game!) and
it's rock solid, while used to crash often before.

Bad news is that i've changed a lot of hards&softs, so i'm unable to exactly
pinpoint which step had been the key one. Now i have this new mobo, Abit AN7
(http://www.abit.com.tw/page/it/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=AN7&fMTYPE=Socket A
that seems to share a lot of components with the Asus i've previously owned,
mainly the nVIDIA2 chipset), with two new PC400 DDR ram sticks; i've
formatted and reinstalled windows XP along with the service pack 2 (that i
didn't before).

Any of these steps could have been the main one, but any of them has pros
and cons: ram could have been faulty, but it's strange that has also appened
to you; mobo has the same chipset of the old one, so buying it intentionally
could have no effects (other than spending money for nothing). On the
software side, you could try a fresh format with immediate installation of
the sp2.

If you could try your card on another mobo (can't you borrow it from
somebody?) we could narrow the range of causes.

larss
 
larss said:
Bad news is that i've changed a lot of hards&softs, so i'm unable to exactly
pinpoint which step had been the key one. Now i have this new mobo, Abit AN7
(http://www.abit.com.tw/page/it/motherboard/motherboard_detail.php?pMODEL_NAME=AN7&fMTYPE=Socket A
that seems to share a lot of components with the Asus i've previously owned,
mainly the nVIDIA2 chipset), with two new PC400 DDR ram sticks; i've
formatted and reinstalled windows XP along with the service pack 2 (that i
didn't before).
Click to expand...

Good to see that it has worked! I did some testing myself, and I am
pretty sure it's a RAM issue. I changed my RAM setting to
'overconservative' (i.e. disabled SPD and set RAM timings a bit
_slower_), and guess what - the problems went away. To be honest, I'm
not sure if SPD works correctly on my motherboard; I can't get SPD
values out of any kind of diagnostics software, only in the BIOS, and
that tends to vary (!). Gonna get some new, better RAM and see if that
improves things. If not, then a new motherboard, like you did.
Any of these steps could have been the main one, but any of them has pros
and cons: ram could have been faulty, but it's strange that has also appened
to you; mobo has the same chipset of the old one, so buying it intentionally
could have no effects (other than spending money for nothing). On the
software side, you could try a fresh format with immediate installation of
the sp2.
Click to expand...

Well, at first I thought it was the VIA chipset, seeing that there was
another guy with the same problem and the same chipset, but then you
came along and destroyed that with your nvidia motherboard :-) I'm
pretty confident it has to do with RAM timings. Funny, though, that my
3D apps, including Half-Life 2 and Doom3, have been rock solid all the
time, the only problem I had was the 2D issue.

Now, I have another problem, which happened at the same time as this was
resolved - after the last Half-Life 2 patch, HL2 crashes on me.... Never
had the famous 'stutter' problem until I got the 'stutter problem
fix'.... :-P But that's another story, I guess.

Knut
 
Hello!

Just revisited this thread after a while... indeed, I can report the
same results, setting RAM to slightly more conservative settings indeed
seemed to stabilize the system, minimizing and maximizing the replace
window in Word now does not bring the driver to a halt. It seems the ATi
drivers must utilize some more powerful functions than nVidia ones as I
had a GF Ti4200 card before and it gave me no such issues on the same
system.

Thank you for your research, it has really been helpful, perhaps
something for ATi to add to their knowledge base :)

-Gregor
 
Hello, Knut!
You wrote on Sun, 02 Jan 2005 22:01:02 +0100:

KN> I can't get SPD values out of any kind of diagnostics software, only in
KN> the BIOS, and that tends to vary (!).

Ta-na-na-na-nanna.....Ghostbusters!

KN> Gonna get some new, better RAM and see if that improves things. If
KN> not, then a new motherboard, like you did.

Actually, i didn't try to bungle with memory settings just because, in the
old Asus bios, i had this global "conservative" feature, and i thought was
pointless to go lower with timings.

KN> Now, I have another problem, which happened at the same time as this
KN> was resolved - after the last Half-Life 2 patch, HL2 crashes on me....
KN> Never had the famous 'stutter' problem until I got the 'stutter problem
KN> fix'.... :-P But that's another story, I guess.

Sorry, i still didn't have the chance to lay my hands on HL2.
As soon as i will, we'll be able to regroup the team to solve this new
issue; until then, bye!

larss
 
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