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Radeon 9600 Graphic Slowdown (was forum=10)Follow

#1 Jan 01 2007 at 10:29 AM Rating: Decent
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My Radeon 9800 crapped out in honor of the new year, so I've backed into my Radeon 9600 until I can get a new card. I have the latest drivers and everything seemed to function fine at first, but as soon as I stepped out into the Aht Urhgan wilderness, everything slowed to a crawl.

Turning my camera to any dense foliage, far distances, or even the sky causes severe graphical slowdown. It's playable, but pretty inconveniencing to force my camera to look straight down every time I'm in a battle or moving through any outdoor TAU areas (though even in Mamook, I can't allow the camera to tip towards wide open spaces).

All pre-TAU outdoor zones display perfectly.

Has anyone dealt with this issue before?
#2 Jan 01 2007 at 1:20 PM Rating: Decent
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ToAU areas use graphics of a much higher quality than regular areas, especially in the texture area. Have you enabled the MIP mapping option in your config? By enabling this your computer will scale down textures to a more basic and less detailed texture based on its distance from yourself, making distant less visible objects wrap a more basic texture and raise your FPS while leaving a small loss in graphic detail on fully visible objects.

If you have, consider testing the unofficial Omega drivers for the Radeon GPU series. I personally use Omega drivers over official as I find them generally better. You can find these at http://www.omegadrivers.net/

Hope this helps :)
#3 Jan 01 2007 at 1:40 PM Rating: Excellent
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the 9600 is bairly adequate to run the game anymore, let alone get good performance out of it.
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#4 Jan 01 2007 at 1:56 PM Rating: Decent
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Yo. Was havin the same problem, same card cept I was gettin this in the pre-ToAU zones. What I did was DL the latest Omega drivers and that @#%^ed up POL. Rolled them back and it's workin fine now. I don't know what it did exactly but it's working... XD

Edited, Jan 1st 2007 4:53pm by valid
#5 Jan 01 2007 at 1:59 PM Rating: Decent
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One thing always bugs me about video cards. Game to game, they seem to preform extremely on different relative to each other (Crappy ones preform better on some games than ones that are supposed to be really great).

I'm sitting here with my 5 year old Geforce 4 TI-4200 (It's even been butchered by Gateway), and I have no issues with playing FFXI, graphic slowdowns are minimal if at all, and besieged is really not that bad. Now isn't the Radeon 9600 a better graphics card? Everything I've seen lists the GF 4 4200 at the bottom and the Radeon 9600 a few steps higher.

I'd like to upgrade this old computer. I got it 5 years ago before going to college and since, have only upgraded 2 parts (added a 200 gig HDD and put 1GB of ram into it). But I'm afraid that if I do, I will no longer be able to play FFXI.

If I ever do upgrade, I'm just going to get a whole new system, that way if the new system doesn't play FFXI right, I can just use my old. Video cards just vary too much for me to feel safe about upgrading mine.


Edit: Btw, I've ran the FFXI Benchmark from playonline.com, and my computer fails horribly, I get maybe 2-3 fps during it... it's crazy. Yet when I play FFXI, it's perfect. WTH is up with that?

Another Edit: When I say butchered by Gateway, I mean gateway did something to my Video card. I've seen GeForce4 TI4200's in their box, and am pretty sure there is a fan mounted on the card to help cool it. Seems gateway removed the fan on this card to make room and save space. Everyone I've talked to is amazed my computer is still running (It's got a total of 1 fan operational right now, and that's on the Processor (Power supply fan died about... half a year ago). Personally I wouldn't have bought a pre-built like this, but it was a highschool graduation gift, so I couldn't say no.

Edited, Jan 1st 2007 5:08pm by TirithRR
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#6 Jan 01 2007 at 2:46 PM Rating: Good
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I'm also using a Radeon 9600 on my system and although it's honestly what's bottlenecking my rig's performance it can still anything other than dynamis and besieged at LEAST 20+ FPS with full settings. Try the following:

- double check you have latest chipset for your motherboard
- double check you've turned off the motherboard graphics chip in your BIOS and have your AGP aperture size set correctly (see next)
- like someone above suggested, grab the latest Omega Radeon drivers (omegadrivers.net)
- tweak your BIOS settings to make sure they're optimized for the drivers (http://www.omegadrivers.net/mb_bios.php)
- windows will probably seem to be running like molasses (at least it was for me after driver install) To fix this (and hopefully get FFXI running better) go to your "Advanced SmartGart Options" under your omega drivers settings and set "AGP Write" and "AGP Read" to Off and restart.
- If you've done any registry edits that mess with your mip-mapping or anti-aliasing ingame that could be bogging you down. Try resetting those to the default values.
-

Hope that helps
- Kaworu

Edited, Jan 1st 2007 4:46pm by KaworuSylph
#7 Jan 01 2007 at 3:07 PM Rating: Decent
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
the 9600 is bairly adequate to run the game anymore, let alone get good performance out of it.


I disagree, I've never had a problem with the game using 9600. (Cept for that one time my computer went matrix(1)(2), but that was due to multiple windowers.)
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#8 Jan 01 2007 at 6:07 PM Rating: Decent
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Okay, I downloaded the Omega drivers and restarted my computer. I followed the BIOS tweaks carefully, making no assumptions or guesses, adjusting only the bare minimum recommended. Save & exit.

Windows "could not read from the selected boot disk."

Outstanding. I go back into BIOS and set everything to default. Save & exit. Could not boot. I reset the CMOS, enter BIOS, set defaults, save & exit. Could not boot.

So here I am posting from a trash computer with 24 hours to figure this **** out before I miss my own Salvage static tomorrow. THANKS GUYS LOL!
#9 Jan 01 2007 at 6:55 PM Rating: Good
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If you have two hard drives in your system look in the BIOS setup program to make sure it is trying to boot up the correct drive first. If FFXI is installed on your boot drive you could try unplugging the power on your second drive so the BIOS has only one choice of hard drives to choose from. This may be why you can't boot.
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