Radeon 9800 Pro AIW crashing on games with newest driver.

[Matt Ion]

So after months of surviving on an old (5.8 or something) driver and old
MMC (9.08) on this thing, and having MMC become steadily flakier, I
finally grabbed the latest driver and MMC for this thing.

Seems to work alright, MMC is certainly faster to start up, although it
now has other sorts of flakiness...

The really annoying thing is that I'm now getting bizarre crashes and
reboots running games. I tried the free Half Life demos from Steam; the
Deathmatch one seems okay, but the Lost Coast one causes a reboot a few
minutes in, every time. I tried loading up trusty old Unreal
Tournament, and after finishing one or two levels, the video either goes
blank or gets totally corrupted, and I have to hit the RESET button to
get it back.

So what's the deal? Is ATI/AMD ever gonna get their heads out of their
asses on the software side?

 

[First of One]

The really annoying thing is that I'm now getting bizarre crashes and
reboots running games. I tried the free Half Life demos from Steam; the
Deathmatch one seems okay, but the Lost Coast one causes a reboot a few
minutes in, every time. I tried loading up trusty old Unreal Tournament,
and after finishing one or two levels, the video either goes blank or gets
totally corrupted, and I have to hit the RESET button to get it back.

Reinstall your motherboard AGP GART driver, then set the AGP speed to 4x or
lower in BIOS. I had to do something similar with my 9800 Pro to avoid
lockups in BF2 and HL2.

So what's the deal? Is ATI/AMD ever gonna get their heads out of their
asses on the software side?

ATi/AMD already did... by discontinuing the entire AIW line. MMC 9.16 is the
last you will ever see. Notice there is no AIW variant of the HD2x00 cards.
Notice there is no nVidia equivalent to the AIW cards, either. Next time
just get a separate tuner/capture card (from Hauppauge, Leadtek, etc.). That
way the multimedia software isn't tied to the video card drivers.

 

[Matt Ion]

Reinstall your motherboard AGP GART driver, then set the AGP speed to 4x or
lower in BIOS. I had to do something similar with my 9800 Pro to avoid
lockups in BF2 and HL2.

That's no solution. UT worked great with the older driver at full 8X.

 

[First of One]

Sure it is. Remember that SmartGART redetects system hardware, sets the AGP
speed, and turns various AGP features on or off (like FW or SBA). With a
driver update the AGP settings may have been set differently.

Keep in mind AGP8x brings exactly zero performance benefits over 4x.