Whirlpool

I have this old, P4, 512mb ram, X800 pro computer that I hardly ever use except when lending it to someone to play games on when they come over etc... but I'm having some problems with the drivers for the graphics card:

-Some games tell me the graphics drivers are way too outdated to work properly and the games performance is absolutely horrible, I then update the drivers and some games give me the error message:

" A debugger has been detected. Unload the debugger and try again"

(Games in question TF2, and Halo PC)

Now I've been a nVidia customer all my life and only bought the X800 because it was a cheap replacement for a fried FX5700... but the drivers from ATi are absolutely horrible compared to nVidia drivers... so could some ATi person give me some help please?

nIMrOD888 writes...

" A debugger has been detected. Unload the debugger and try again"

You don't have cheat programs or anything loaded do you? =P

Nope, it only happens when I install the drivers from the ATi website... to remedy i have to roll back to my ancient drivers that were on the disc.

u r getting these ones right? game.amd.com/us-en/drive...?p=xp/r­ adeonx-xp

Yes I am, they also make the computers visuals very laggy when I install them (like when you have no driver installed).

Have you tried just using the Windows drivers ? . Thats what worked best on my old 9600 Pro .

No offence but that is dead set the dumbest statement I have read this year.

Bump

This forum moves so fast, anyone else got any ideas?

Is this an AGP card? If so, you might need to update your motherboard's GART drivers (usually rolled into the chipset driver package in your mobo's website, or sometimes seperated or sometimes called AGP drivers. Without this, sometimes the card will run at x4 AGP speed, or sometimes the driver doesn't even detect that it's an AGP card.

Have you tried uninstalling directx (directx eradicator) and installing 9.0c? Sometimes features such as DirectDraw3D or whatever aren't available for some reason, could be the reason for your slow downs.

Lastly, a reformat if worst comes to worst.

Its a completely clean machine (recently formatted) the old drivers work perfectly fine with the graphics card except some games say they're outdated and want new drivers... games that don't need newer drivers run very well.

When I upgrade to the new driver it runs like absolute **** like its running on microsoft drivers, and has all sorts of conflicts with games.

It is in an AGP 4x slot however.

Have you done this?
support.microsoft.com/kb/812759

Yes, none of that is applicable to my system though... I can confirm 100% that its the graphics drivers and not something else.

Stop blaming the X8xx and ATI or the Catalyst drivers. It's churlish.

I can confirm v7.1x including CCC all work/ed fine with the X8xx series cards under legit XP SP2 and directX 9.0c with .NET framework 2.0 or later installed.

Then how come they don't?

I knew there was a good reason I never bought ATi as my gaming card.

nIMrOD888 writes...

Then how come they don't?

do you have .NET framework 2.0? you need that for the contorol center but not sure about display drivers

I knew there was a good reason I never bought ATi as my gaming card.

you seem to be having a very isolated incident, many people such as myself have had no problems with ati cards. i had a x1950gt before and a 380 512mb now-both working well but i got the x1950gt because my 7600gt was plagued with driver issues in 2 computers and eventually died- my 7300le has driver issues to, but my old x300 hasn't- it still works

nIMrOD888 writes...

Yes I am, they also make the computers visuals very laggy when I install them (like when you have no driver installed).

Hey! I'm not offended , i'm too old for that . Its an honour to be insulted by someone who can run a video card with no drivers . Fair dinkum!! : )

Yes I am running .NET framework the control center refused to install without it.

I think I might just stick with the older drivers seeing as they work *shrugs* to hell with the newer games.

If you actually read the thread properly you would discover that I AM IN FACT RUNNING WITH OFFICIAL ATi Drivers. These drivers being the problem, the only thing the windows drivers are for is to get a display screen so that you can install the proper drivers (windows drivers won't do anything but display a desktop).

Try www.omegadrivers.net, his drivers are pretty good. Also, IIRC he replaces some of the newer driver files to with older driver files to fix some errors. When I had my old 9600 PRO its the only drivers I used for it :)

I recently had troubles with my x800xl (Direct3d not working at all, strange things happening when loading games) and a rollback to the 7.7 version of the catalyst drivers fixed the problems... not sure if any more recent versions worked, but that fixed all problems I was having.

nIMrOD888 writes...

(windows drivers won't do anything but display a desktop).

I must have been on drugs then ,and only imagined that i had no problems playing V8 Supercars and IL-2 Sturmovick with Windows drivers .
Must have also imagined that i had problems with the u-beaut Ati drivers that i couldnt be bothered stuffing around with anymore .
Thanks for pointing that out . You are a legend !

fitzwell writes...

I must have been on drugs then ,and only imagined that i had no problems playing V8 Supercars and IL-2 Sturmovick with Windows drivers .
Must have also imagined that i had problems with the u-beaut Ati drivers that i couldnt be bothered stuffing around with anymore .

that sounds very sarcastic so i will assume it is........

the windows drivers wont do much more than display desktop because they dont know what the card is and what it can support

Tom:Bomb writes...

the windows drivers wont do much more than display desktop because they dont know what the card is and what it can support

How do you account for me being able to play those games without any problems ?
Might i have only imagined it . : )

fitzwell writes...

How do you account for me being able to play those games without any problems ?

you only uninstalled ccc or another part of the package like wdm, rather than the full driver package

Might i have only imagined it . : )

must of if it was with windows drivers- i evan tested this just then when i was going to install the omega drivers-i uninstalled the whole ati drivers package and restarted windows- win had no idea what card i was using and when i tried to play cod4, crysis and halo ce and i couldn't. i reinstalled just the drivers so i could install omega then-fine now

Tom:Bomb writes...

you only uninstalled ccc or another part of the package like wdm, rather than the full driver package

I have run the games after a fresh install of Windows without ever installing the
Catalyst drivers . I don't give a stuff if you dont believe me .

You're experiencing one of the weirdest problems I've ever come across, sure it isn't a PEBKAC error?

Seriously, the issue should not be the Catalyst drivers it has to exist somewhere else. I'm running a x800 PRO under WinXP (SP3RC1) and the latest 7.12 drivers without any issues.

What you might want to do is go into Add/Remove Programs, uninstall the old drivers, then go into Device Manager uninstall all the display adapters, don't worry should work, and then run the installer from the latest drivers.

Might need a reboot or two just to be sure ;)

Well I'll try that, then I'll give the omega drivers a go failing all that I guess I'll just have to put up with the drivers from the CD

fitzwell a video card will not run properly on windows/microsoft drivers they are only to get it working so you can install real drivers and they don't know how to utilize the graphics capabilities of the card. You are dreaming.

fitzwell writes...

I have run the games after a fresh install of Windows without ever installing the
Catalyst drivers .

if you used the found new hardware wizard then it may have found the drivers on the web

I don't give a stuff if you dont believe me .

good 4 u

edit +1 nimrod888

Tom:Bomb writes...

if you used the found new hardware wizard then it may have found the drivers on the web

You might be onto something there . <blush> I always leave my modem connected during a reinstall .

Get stuffed nlMrOD LOL

Maybe i'm not as smart as i look : (

I would also suggest to try these omega driver. It delivered much stable gaming experience and chew less system resource compares to catalyst 7.12 with my x1950.

well the omega driver makes it run a lot smoother, but im still getting the debugger error with Halo *shrugs* time to complain to technical support on both sides I guess.

Thanks for the help.

Edit: I just found this

www.rage3d.com/board/sho...php?p=1335291032

Some dude reckons AGP support stopped after 7.10, and another guy said after 7.10 he gets the debugger error as well

Tom:Bomb writes...

the windows drivers wont do much more than display desktop because they dont know what the card is and what it can support

I have had a chance to think about what we discussed yesterday and thought i should reply .
Windows did know what card i had and installed the appropriate drivers for it .
My device manager told me so . My Radeon 9600 Pro was listed .
I check it after every reinstall . I would have noticed if my modem light was flashing away downloading as i am a bit paranoid about that .
The first thing Windows does on an XP install is to search for installed hardware .

XP has support for heaps of devices . Why would it not carry support for ATI cards ?
The drivers were not the latest u beaut ones that i had previously had problems with but were adequate to play the old games that i was into .

I was'nt dreamin' .

fitzwell writes...

Windows

Xp ? or Vista?

My Vista actually have a MS ATI X800 driver and forced me to upate as windows update

It works most game I have installed. but I think it is only in Vista

Edit: notice I use most, as I have issue in HL2

nIMrOD888 writes...

AGP support stopped after 7.10

Don't think so, I am using AGP with 7.12 with X800 and 1950pro on 2 pc and don't have any issues.

g645um writes...

Xp ? or Vista?

XP Pro SP2 .

Fitzwel windows would have installed a driver written by ATi not microsoft.

And As soon as I go past 7.10 halo stops working, so to hell with the other garbage.

I got the same problem after installing Windows XP SP3 Release Cadidate 1 service pack.

I am not sure if it's the new features from Vista they added into the service pack, a driver problem from my audio or video or something to do with Daemon Tools that M$ blocked.

If it is M$, that's bs because I bought two Halo Combat Evolved games and owned both, but over time the CD's got scratched all ta hell and I had to download the game online and just use my original CD keys and use a no-CD crack.

Anyways, I am still looking for a fix for this and I will post the solution if I ever find one for at least my particular situation.

I thought for sure that it was an HD audio problem and that I had fixed it once by doing the HD audio fix HERE, but I tried it this time and it didn't seem to work..I'll try it once more in a few minutes and then try reinstalling my ATI drivers, but I am pretty sure it's either a Daemon Tools thing, or the lack of the HD audio support for SP3.

I can't remember for sure what I did the first time because I run a home web server on my PC and I thought that at the time, that the SP3 screwed it all up like on Vista where I couldn't run my server without...well sorry, this is a whole other story altogether...

...anyways, to shorten the story, I had uninstalled the service pack so everything went back to normal, but I thought I would try SP3 again since it DOES speed up XP quite a bit and got the same problem as before with Halo.....I just forget if I had found a fix or not for Halo debugger thing or not :P

Just hope something I have said here helps someone find a fix, including myself LOL!

Okay, I solved my problem...seems after installing the XP SP3 RC1 pack, some ATI stuff didn't want to uninstall...after trying various older versions of ATI and Omega drivers (none of which worked) I decided to go find a driver cleaner utility that you can find here....I first unintalled my ATI drivers, rebooted, then scanned for ALL ATI files with the Driver Cleaner Pro that I just mentioned above, and also SOUNDMAX drivers (due to putting a new Creative Sound Blaster Live 24-bit card in), and cleaned everything out with Tuneup Utilities 2007s' registry cleaner and disk cleaner.

I then rebooted again and went directly to ATI's driver download site and installed the DRIVER ONLY, then rebooted and BAM, Halo works again!

That was a toughy :P

Hope this helps someone!

P.S. I didn't try CCC, so I don't know if that will work or not..may try it later on but I don't use CCC anyway....slows down my system too much.

nIMrOD888 writes...

Fitzwel windows would have installed a driver written by ATi not microsoft.

You worked that out all by yourself did'nt you . Well done : )
Btw . There are two L's in Fitzwell ,if you don't mind .

Yeah, I always figure my own stuff out if I can't find it out online first.

And since I couldn't this time by Googling, I decided to post it all over in different forums where people still haven't found a fix.

Just hope this helps someone else out as well ;)