Hi all,

I recently upgraded to a radeon 9800 pro from a geforce 4 4400 card. I never had problems updating my nvidia drivers, but when I try to update my catalyst drivers, my direct draw, direct3D, and agp acceleration are disabled.

Prior to installing the new drivers, I thoroughly remove the old cat drivers, I use drivecleaner3 in safe mode to do a final clean. I make sure there are no other programs running. When installing the new drivers, I ignore the prompts to install drivers when I boot into windows, and then run the update package. The drivers (which I downloaded from the ati site) seem to install just fine, but then upon reboot when I try to run something 3D, I'm told it's not possible. When I check with dxdiag, under the display page, those 3 features listed above are disabled.

Obviously, I'm doing something wrong, possibly a service I turned off in windows. I have been able to get the card running in 3D by loading the cd that came with the card when prompted by windows. However, that loads only the drivers, and when I go to advanced display settings, there are only bare bone options, i.e., no ability to, say, control AA or anything like that. Oddly enough, when I set up this system a few months ago, I installed WinXP without any problems, and then used the newest cat drivers available and had no difficulty installing the entire package, i.e., the ati control panel, etc.

As I said, I never had this problem with nvidia drivers, and I have not changed my services.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I sense that I'm missing something very obvious. Thanks.

marty

When installing the new drivers, I ignore the prompts to install drivers when I boot into windows, and then run the update package. Do not ignore those prompts close them as soon as they pop up. If you ignore them Windows will reinstall the drivers that you uninstalled or install the native ATI driver if you have SP2 installed.

Are you downloading the complete Catalyst package or just the video driver?

Poor choice of words. I "cancel" those prompts when they come up. When you say "close them", do you mean cancel as well, or is there a close box I can use? I do think that it is at this point of the installation where the problems are. The instructions from the ati site do not specifiy how to deal with this step (nvidia was very specific about this, but I can't recall what they say). Also, I install the entire package. I tried just the video drivers, but it made no difference.

It could be "smartgart" disabling these upon startup because it deems the system to be unstable if enabled.

Two things I would try.

1. Re-install your AGP chipset drivers.

2. Go to the smartgart properties in Display Properties > Settings > Advanced > Smartgart and move the slider all the way to the left and then back. Then click "retest" and reboot.


You can also find an advanced smartgart control panel by typing smartgart in the run box.

Or you can disable smargart completely through your services.

More info on smartgart in thes two pdf files:

1 (http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/SMARTGART-White-Paper-V2.pdf)

2 (http://www.ati.com/products/catalyst/SMARTGART-FAQ.pdf)


Edit- A few more thoughts.

Installing (or re-installing) the latest version of your chipset drivers prior to installing new vid drivers is always a good idea. What version of DirectX do you have?

You could try downloading the two separate packages for the latest drivers, ie the driver package and the ATI control panel package. Then install just the driver package. Check if D3D and AGP acceleration are on. If so, install the control panel.

Re. chipset drivers: after my initial failed attempts with these drivers, I did install the latest via chipset drivers. I also installed an updated bios for my mobo, (albatron kx600S Pro) that supposedly improves agp 8.0 stability, but neither of those updates had any effect. I should double check and make sure that the agp chipset drivers were indeed loaded when I updated the via hyperion drivers, but I'm pretty sure they were (cannot do that now, as I'm at work).

I will pursue that smartgart suggestion, for when I tried loading the most recent cats, while they did indeed load along with the ati control panel, the smartgart option was missing in the control panel. So that makes me think that something is awry there. I thought that perhaps the newest drivers had done away with that feature for some reason.

I have dx 9b.

I have tried installing the drivers separate from the control panel, but it made no difference.

What I find puzzling is that I was able to install updated drivers when I first built the system, right after installing XP, you know, during that point following XP install when you have to install various drivers like audio, video, and so forth. But now, for some reason, I'm having problems. Plus, I keep my system pretty lean. The only program that loads at start up is my avg AV program, and I turn that off before loading any new program. I suppose I could uncheck that in start up and then try the drivers. Who know, perhaps there's a conflict there.

Thanks for the feedback.

marty

Well, I finally was able to install the control panel using the driver package cd that came with the video card. But I had to do it in a weird sort of way. AFter uninstalling all remnants of any ati drivers, I rebooted, XP detected new hardware and I loaded the drivers when prompted to insert the cd. However, this loads only the drivers, but gives me full 3D function. After getting up and running, I then had to go directly to the driver cd via windows explorer, and then I found the folder than contained the control panel installation program. This allowed me to just install the control panel, and not reinstall the drivers. So I got the control panel installed finally and the 3D options were then avaiable under Display Properties. However, smartgart was missing, and the corresponding AtiSmart service was not present. So there seems to be something going on with the ati smartgart feature that precludes a normal install. This did not occur when I first installed drivers right after I installed XP some months ago; everything loaded normally at that time. So something happened along the way, but I have no idea.

My mobo is an Albatron KX600S Pro,a KT-600 chipset, and I'm running an AMD Mobile 2600 processor (wonderful chip, just wonderful, runs solid through 2.6Ghz though a bit unstable at that speed with older games and newer video drivers, so usually I run it at 2.4Ghz so my young son can play games) with one module of 512 of Corsair XMS 3200 memory.

Regardless, the system seems to be running smoothly and now I can access the AA and AS features to smooth out graphics as needed. So I'm content to leave well enough alone at this point, though it drives me nuts not understanding the problem.

marty