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Updating ATI driver nightmare

S

Stuh505

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2004
Messages
488
I recently bought a laptop with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 card. It has a 3.06 GHz processor and 512 MB ram so I assumed it would be able to support some decent graphics capabilities. As a test, I tried running Doom 3. The game would not allow me to run it in anything above 640x480 with the lowest quality settings. When I tried to run higher settings, it just automatically changed them back down. The graphics quality at 640x480 was so bad that it looked like a different game. My PC is only 2.4 GHz with 512 MB ram, running a 64MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 which is several years old...and I am able to play Doom3 at the highest settings on the highest resolution. On the same resolution as my laptop, with all the same settings, it also looks superbly better. So somethign is definitely not right.

It was suggested to me that I install the latest Catalyst drivers with this tool:

http://www.driverheaven.net/patje/

However, running the tool requires pointing it to some ATI folder...which did not exist on my machine. There was an "ATI Technologies" folder which contained many files, some of them having ATI icons, but none of them executable...and pointing to this folder didn't satisfy the Catalyst program.

I don't know what that program was but it didn't seem to be official ATI stuff, so I decided to go to ATI's website and try to update my driver software from there. When I ran the ATI driver update program, it said "appropriate hardware or software not found." Interesting....after reading through the help file, it said that all previous versions must be uninstalled in order to update (sounds kind of ridiculous). So I assumed that I had a previous version installed that I neeed to uninstall first.

So I went to add/remove programs and got rid of the 2 things that had ATI in the name...I think they were ATI Display Driver and ATI Console. Of course after uninstalling these the hardware was not being detected at all. I restarded my machine, and tried to run the ATI driver update software again...once again it says "unable to locate required hardware or software." !

So then I used Window's automatic hardware detection thing....and it was able to load something that detected the driver, although I doubt it is up to date or optimized.

In dxdiag, it says the main driver currently is:

ati2dvag.dll
version: 6.14.0010.6396

Now, I would really appreciate some help figuring out how I am supposed to install the ATI driver and then optimizing it with these silly Catalyst things. Thanks (NVIDIA never gave me any trouble :/)
 
First off, the 9200 is a rehash of the 8500 series, which would explain its less-than-stellar performance in Doom 3 (it lacks all the nifty hardware features of the 9500 and up).

As for the driver mess, ATi doesn't actually make drivers for notebook chipsets. They give the driver code to the notebook makers, and those companies customize the driver for the features they have enabled on their particular hardware (why ATi can't just detect the enabled features is beyond me). The reason you can't install the official Catalysts is because they would probably disable some features enabled in the notebook vendors' drivers, which would piss people off and increase ATi's support costs. To get your notebook back as it was, download the drivers from the vendor's website. Their drivers are likely to be a few versions behind ATi's, though.
 
My PC is only 2.4 GHz with 512 MB ram, running a 64MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 which is several years old...and I am able to play Doom3 at the highest settings on the highest resolution.
Click to expand...

Yeah... at like 1 fps. My desktop machine's a 2.53 with 512 pc1066 rdram and a 128mb Gefork 4 Ti4600. It does not like Doom3, so I play on my laptop with a radeon 9600 mobility pro. The 9200 is a terrible card, it won't really play doom.
 
I loaded up doom3 on a friends comp that has an 8500le in it and it played ok ..some slight texture flashing here and there tho.

..as far as laptop ati vid drivers ..the older the lappy the goofier it gets I think. I setup an older (500mhz celery) lappy for our church in wich its primary function is to display stuff on a couple huge monitors for congregation to see .. trying to find the correct drivers that properly supported tv-out so you could seperate the tv-out from the primary desktop was a chore and a half ... found one and now I keep that driver on a gold plated cd in a 5 inch think steel walled vault buried under my house ...

..the driver wasnt put out by the vendor of the lappy tho ..the vendor distro of the driver sucked and didnt really support any features of the vidchip ..so it seems odd that trying to load up a standard ATi driver doesnt pick up your 9200 chip in your lappy ..

I have had instances where I had to just unpack the drivers and then force feed them to windows tho...
 
I had the same problem with my onboard GeForce2 on my TabletPC. :( Luckily some guy regularly modified the latest Nvidia drivers to install perfectly as they were released. The HP ones were months and months behind. I know how frustrating it can be so I'll poke around.

Edit: http://www.omegadrivers.net/. I hear the Omega drivers are better then the standard catalyst though I haven't tried them yet. He claims they work on mobile.
 
Boot into safemode. Uninstall the drivers (no reboot) then uninstall the control panel (reboot). Boot into safemode again and go to C:\program files\ati technologies You will see a folder called UninstallAll click on the executable (AtiCmUn.exe) and reboot windows normally. Go to ATI website and download the latest CAT drivers and let the program run. You should have no problem installing the drivers again. If this problem persists contact ATI about it.
 
The 9200 (RV280, 4 texture pipelines) is 1/2 of a 8500 (R200, 8 texture pipelines) and is a "rehash" of the 9000 (RV250, also 4 texture pipelines). It's not going to run Doom3 well.

The patje program requires that you download the drivers from ATI and extract them. Installation will fail because the inf file will not contain a matching chip. That's normal. The patje program has a problem with the latest drivers. One of the files has to be modified before patching if you're using the 8.07 beta or Cat 4.10. You'll need to modify one line in CX_18115.inf. Change:
[Manufacturer]
%ATI% = ATI.Mfg, NTx86

to
[Manufacturer]
%ATI% = ATI.Mfg

then patch the drivers using patje's program. I don't like the tweaked, outdated omegas so I use the real Cat 4.10 on my laptop.
 
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