So I left the ranks of the nVidia owners, and bought two cards, a 9200
for my workstation and a 9600 Pro for my play machine. Both did the
exact same thing......
*($^%^#%^*( REFRESH RATE PROBLEM!
What moron at ATI keeps whatever idiot in programming, that cant write
a driver to save his life? First of all, I dont want to hear that it's
an "XP Problem" because it is not. I have NEVER had another card do
this - not nVidia, not Savage, not even taiwan onboard junk.
Regarding your issue related to ATI video card and low refresh rate
in games, I can tell you that Nvidia cards also have the same problem
in Windows 2000/XP especially in the early days when the video card
drivers did not have the option to specify refresh rate override. As
the matter of fact, my old Voodoo 3 also has the same problem.
I have used Voodoo 3 and Geforce 3 in Windows 2000 Pro and GeForce 3
and Radeon 9600 XT in Windows XP. All three cards have low refresh
rate problem in full screen games unless you specify refresh rate
override in the driver or using tweak utility such as RivaTuner or
Rage3D.
One solution to get around the issue when there were no tweak
utilities for override refresh rate is to modify the minimum vertical
refresh rate in Windows 2000/XP registry. To do that, just run
"regedit" and use the find function to search for all instances of
"Mode1" key. If any "Mode1" key contains string value such as
"30.0-95.0,60.0-160.0,+,+", I would change it to
"30.0-95.0,85.0-160.0,+,+" where 85.0 HZ would become the *minimum*
vertical refresh rate Windows will use *regardless* of the screen
resolution. This solution does not require refresh rate override
specified in the video card driver or tweak utility.
I guess you did not have the refresh rate problem with Nvidia card
possibly because the driver you installed already have the proper
refresh rate override specified or you have installed a tweak utility
and turned on refresh override. And if I remember correctly once you
have the proper refresh override specified, all subsequent new
installations of video card driver or tweak utility will *inherit* the
refresh rate override you already specified.