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Jord
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Message 20816 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 15:53:45 UTC - in response to Message 20813.  
Last modified: 29 Apr 2009, 16:34:50 UTC

If I remember it right, the AGP controller driver has to be installed before the graphics driver. Maybe that is the culprit. One looses quite a bit of performance if the AGP port runs in the PCI compatibility mode and the graphics driver may even not work correctly. So could you check that you have the appropriate northbridge driver (containing the AGP controller) installed?

Usually these drivers get installed together with the rest of the chipset drivers.

Also, if an embedded video chip is on the motherboard, but it is disabled (in the BIOS, by a jumper or by plugging in an actual card, depends on motherboard how that's done), then this can throw off readings of the AGP bus. The other weekend I was fighting with a motherboard that has a GF 7900 GS on it, which would show everything enabled, but for the GF.

I solved it there by using DriverCleaner Pro to delete all motherboard and Nvidia (oops, not ATI ;-)) drivers, then reinstalling all motherboard drivers manually, and the earlier 180.06 drivers, before upgrading to the newer drivers.

It is possible that this is a similar case.

Donnie, what's your motherboard model?
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Donnie
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Message 20820 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 16:28:01 UTC - in response to Message 20816.  

If I remember it right, the AGP controller driver has to be installed before the graphics driver. Maybe that is the culprit. One looses quite a bit of performance if the AGP port runs in the PCI compatibility mode and the graphics driver may even not work correctly. So could you check that you have the appropriate northbridge driver (containing the AGP controller) installed?

Usually these drivers get installed together with the rest of the chipset drivers.

Also, if an embedded video chip is on the motherboard, but it is disabled (in the BIOS, by a jumper or by plugging in an actual card, depends on motherboard how that's done), then this can throw off readings of the AGP bus. The other weekend I was fighting with a motherboard that has a GF 7900 GS on it, which would show everything enabled, but for the GF.

I solved it there by using DriverCleaner Pro to delete all motherboard and ATI drivers, then reinstalling all motherboard drivers manually, and the earlier 180.06 drivers, before upgrading to the newer drivers.

It is possible that this is a similar case.

Donnie, what's your motherboard model?


I think CP hit on it. Here's the deal - I purchased the Gigabyte GA-K8U refurbished from Gigabyte; no onboard VGA, no driver CD, nada. Just the mobo.

I installed an eSata PCI card to use with my Seagate external drive for backup. This device hid the ULI (mobo) mass contoller from me and Windows installed (fresh install of doz) the eSata PCI driver. God I hate 2-3 hours of updates from Windows. The CD driver that came with the ATI HD3850 AGP card had Cat 8.1 on it. I knew this wouldn't run the ATI GPU app, so I attempted to install the normal Cat 8.12 driver. Well since this was an AGP card, I got the dreaded "your hardware/system doesn't support the driver". That's when I read about the AGP hotfix and installed it, to no avail.

To make a long story short, I was going to update the Bios last night and somehow chose the reset BIOS and the mobo wouldn't post. I shut the PC down, opened it up, jumped the CMOS, made the time/date BIOS changes, and left everything else the same. While I had the PC apart to jump the CMOS, I removed the eSata card (just a hunch). When Windows booted up, it detected the ULI mass storage controller that had no driver. I downloaded the current driver and installed it and it informed me I should had done this prior to installing the AGP driver. It also informed me I needed to reinstall the AGP driver for everything to work properly.

Needless to say, this is my next step. I'm going to unistall everything ATI, run the registery cleaners, and put the AGP 8.12 hotfix back in. I hope the card moves to the AGP bus where it belongs and leaves the PCI bus alone.

At least this is less time consuming than starting all over again. Thanks for the info guys. Guess I'll be back in a while with the results.

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Profile Martin Chartrand
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Message 20825 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 17:11:15 UTC - in response to Message 20820.  

Well if you would not all live so frigging far, I'd have a party for you Donnie and beers and pizza :)
Hope this works. Good learning curve for all of us!

Cheers!! Gulp!! Gulp!!

Martin
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Message 20831 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 17:37:26 UTC - in response to Message 20825.  

Well if you would not all live so frigging far, I'd have a party for you Donnie and beers and pizza :)
Hope this works. Good learning curve for all of us!

Cheers!! Gulp!! Gulp!!

Martin


Right at the moment Martin, that sounds great =8^) All hardware monitoring devices inform me my AGP card is on the AGP bus running @ 8x (but still have DirectX 10.0)!! ATIs SmartGart kicked in and set the optimum performance for me, but the AGP fast write was disabled. According to ATIs help page, this allows the CPU to wtire directly to the GPU. I have no idea what that's for, so I left it off. The AGP read & write are on, so I'm not too concerned with it right now.

Currently I'm waiting for the CPU to finish up its MW WU & I'm going to attempt to switch over to the ATI_SSE2 app.

Thanks CP, Ageless and all the rest for your time and help. I'll soon know if the GPU app will start corectly.
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Message 20832 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 17:41:27 UTC - in response to Message 20831.  

...the AGP fast write was disabled. According to ATIs help page, this allows the CPU to wtire directly to the GPU. I have no idea what that's for, so I left it off..


"This BIOS feature controls the AGP bus' Fast Write capability. Fast Write is a feature which accelerates memory write transactions from the chipset to the AGP device.

Fast Write allows the AGP device act like a PCI device. This allows it to bypass the main memory and directly access the data which improves AGP read performance. However AGP write performance is not affected.

While this feature may appear to greatly improve the performance of AGP graphics cards, its actual performance effect is quite negligible. Also, it reduces the overclockability of the graphics card when enabled.

Therefore, if you do not intend to overclock your graphics card, it is recommended that you enable AGP Fast Write for potentially better AGP read performance. However, you should definitely disable it if you intend to overclock your graphics card, or if any of your PCI cards start acting funny."

(source)
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Message 20834 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 17:50:42 UTC - in response to Message 20832.  

...the AGP fast write was disabled. According to ATIs help page, this allows the CPU to wtire directly to the GPU. I have no idea what that's for, so I left it off..


"This BIOS feature controls the AGP bus' Fast Write capability. Fast Write is a feature which accelerates memory write transactions from the chipset to the AGP device.

Fast Write allows the AGP device act like a PCI device. This allows it to bypass the main memory and directly access the data which improves AGP read performance. However AGP write performance is not affected.

While this feature may appear to greatly improve the performance of AGP graphics cards, its actual performance effect is quite negligible. Also, it reduces the overclockability of the graphics card when enabled.

Therefore, if you do not intend to overclock your graphics card, it is recommended that you enable AGP Fast Write for potentially better AGP read performance. However, you should definitely disable it if you intend to overclock your graphics card, or if any of your PCI cards start acting funny."

(source)


Thanks for the info Ageless, I'll keep it in mind since I haven't OCd any of my GPUs. I believe they'll fry soon enough.

And the good news is...... the ATI_SSE2 opti app is working & producing results!!! What an adventure!! I don't know what the lessons learned here are, but I suppose that if you start with a mobo with no drivers, don't add any "fluff" (eSata PCI card) and video drivers until the mobo chipset drivers are current!!

Thanks again to all for your time & help!! I wish we could have a beer & pizza party!!!
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Message 20839 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 20:43:29 UTC - in response to Message 20834.  

Hi
just my two cents on these HD3850 AGPs, sorry if this is redundant info. I have two of them running now, and had problems in getting either of them working in MW as the drivers that came with the cards were old and the PCs where the cards are are quite old and slow as well.

What seemed to do the trick for me apart from the 8.12 hotfix is .net 3.5 + the latest update for the .net from the Windows update. Before the .net update I kept on getting the "output file absent" but updating it finally helped (the other I just got running 30 minutes ago :-)

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Message 20848 - Posted: 29 Apr 2009, 22:10:48 UTC - in response to Message 20839.  

Hi Haksu

I had .NET 3.5 installed on my machine, but it was suspected by CP that it didn't install correctly. So I uninstalled it and reinstalled it successfully and still had the file absent message. My error, or lack of undersanding, was my chipset driver wasn't updated before I insalled the video driver (the 8.12 AGP hotfix). Only when I updated the chipset driver it informed me I had to reinstall the video driver. Everything is running fine now, thanks to a lot of help and time from the people in this forum.

Happy crunching =;^)
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