Radeon Driver Troubles

About a week ago, I was playing Unreal Tournament on my 64 meg Radeon DDR. The game kept minimizing about every minute, but it ran fine every time I maximized it for about another minute. The next time I booted my computer, it said that a file that my video driver needed to function properly was not there or malfunctioning. Now my computer will only run at 640x480 resolution with 256 colors. I've tried updating the driver, reinstalling it, reinstalling DirectX 8.0a, and reinstalling the GART drivers, but nothing seemed to work.

Which Motherboard chipset????

and which driver version are you using?

I'm using a Soyo K7VIA mobo (VIA chipset, obviously) with the ATI driver 4.13.7075.

The latest 4.13.7075 driver set are known to be stable with this board. I have also been informed that the recent 7078 beta drivers work well.

It has been reported that there is a sequence you need to follow in loading the board drivers and VIA's AGP driver. It is recommended the following steps are taken:

Fully remove the previous ATI driver set using uninstall.
Choose PCI Adapter and reboot.
Load DirectX 7.0a or 8 - reboot
Load latest VIA AGP driver - reboot
Load ATI driver set - reboot
Reload latest VIA AGP driver - reboot
Reload DirectX - reboot
You may need to set the AGP driving strength to 68.

If you have difficulty running at AGPx4 it is recommended you download the latest drivers from radeon_win98_drivers.html at ATI.

Disabling P2C/C2P Concurrency in the Advanced Chipset Features menu of the BIOS instabilities can solve it.

The Radeon 64Meg DDR VIVO has frame drops during video capture and corrupted Direct3D games performance on the VIA chipset. Most users find that this problem happens when updating from version 7 to 7.1. To fix this install the updated version of DVD to update the DVD software version from 4.0 to 4.1.

There is also a conflict between the "Gart" file for the VIA chipset and the Gart file for the ATI 64 DDR video card. ATI technical support advise users to change the "atigart.exe" filename (in the ATI directory) after installation to "atigart.ati" and then load the VIA AGP driver. This prevents a conflict between the two GART drivers.

Sounds goofy, but it's true, that series of reinstalls and reboots -- or a hit-and-miss variation thereof, really does seem to work eventually. As a final trick if that doesn't work, go into your BIOS setup and change your AGP aperture to 128, especially if you have more than 256MB or RAM. That was the final piece of the puzzle after weeks of troubleshooting my RADEON 64DDR.

It is a very finicky card, and I see now why gaming mags never pick it over the GeForce for their featured rigs. <IMG SRC="smilies/frown.gif" border="0">

I tried everything that the two of you said to try, but I still can't do any better than 640x480x256colors. I still get a message saying that a driver file is not functioning properly. I even tried changing the memory aperture to 128 (I have 1152 megs of ram). However, I have no idea what you meant by "choose PCI adapter and reboot." It's looking more and more like it's time to reformat and start over. I'm very hesitant because I have hours upon hours of downloaded files and no CD burner.

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It's looking more and more like it's time to reformat and start over. I'm very hesitant because I have hours upon hours of downloaded files and no CD burner.

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Get partition magic, create a new partition on your hard drive and then move all your hours of data to the new partition. When you slick your C: and reinstall your OS, your data will remain intact in the new partition.

But reformating and a clean reinstall rarely corrects these types of issues. I would say you have a driver, IRQ or CMOS conflict. You may have to try different combinations of DirectX versions and RADEON drivers. And make sure you play the game with the VIAGART drivers each time as detailed above.

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I have no idea what you meant by "choose PCI adapter and reboot."

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In order to uninstall your RADEON driver, you need to select a different display adapter, like PCI or you can choose "STANDARD VGA." This will let you delete all files related to the RADEON because none of them will be in use by the system.

I had a similar problem and my o/s refused to accept that the display device was set to pci. When I tried to run the ATI auto-install I got the same message you referred to.
To get around it I took a note of where the auto install had unzipped the drivers to, then in device manager I used the update driver facility and pointed it to this file. It worked for me.