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Catalyst Drivers - BF2 - Anyone else getting..?

post #1 of 45
8/11/05 at 1:24am
Thread Starter 
After a heck of a lot of work, I managed to get the Catalyst drivers installed. I tried the newest ones, with the mobility modder. I had also tried the Omega drivers. Both are doing the same thing...

Desktop settings are great. Doom 3 runs fine, Brothers in Arms runs fine, Call of Duty runs fine..... Battlefield 2 runs fine for a few minutes, then shows strange artifacting, flips to a black screen, shows blocks of strange colours, or freezes. I've tried every different set of graphic settings and details, and none of that makes any difference. Frames per second are very high (50-80), so that's not the issue.

I'm wondering if anyone else came across this. I've reinstalled the drivers several times, and reinstalled Battlefield 2 from scratch and patched it with the 1.02 patch. Is it just lousy programming, or am I missing something?

Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated.

--------- On another note.... How do you get that FPS counter off the right hand corner? ---------
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post #2 of 45
8/11/05 at 1:40am
Did you overclocked your card? Try lowering GPU & Mem first and see if the artifacts are still there.
As for getting rid off FPS display, (if you are using ATI Tray) go to Tools& Options ->OSD and uncheck the "Enable OnScreen Display"
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post #3 of 45
8/11/05 at 2:27am
Thread Starter 
I did not overclock the card at all. All standard settings.
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post #4 of 45
8/11/05 at 8:06am
What notebook do you have?
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post #5 of 45
8/11/05 at 8:12am
I am useing Catalyst 5.3 drivers on my 8101. Before installing 5.3 I uninstalled the old drivers.

Some artifacts are visible in "POP2: Warrior within", but so far 5.3 is the only version that solves "white line on the bottom of the screen for non-native resolution" problem, so I won't move to any other version.
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post #6 of 45
8/11/05 at 9:53am
I have the exact same problem with my T43p running this game. It'll show some crazy characters and dump me to a blue screen after a bit. The only drivers that don't do this are the IBM certified ones from February. I've tried the 5.7 omegas and used the patje modding tool with the regular 5.7s.

At first I thought it was just one thing I'd have to suffer for having a Fire GL... maybe not? I've got my fingers crossed the 5.8s might help.
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post #7 of 45
8/11/05 at 6:45pm
Thread Starter 
I have a Ferrari 4005. Catalyst drivers, the new ones. What are the standard settings for clock speed? I want to check that to ensure my settings are standard, though I have done no changes.
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post #8 of 45
8/11/05 at 6:54pm
You said you switched drivers. Did you use the Driver Cleaner?

You can ignore this if its a stupid question.
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post #9 of 45
8/11/05 at 11:33pm
Thread Starter 
Yes, used the driver cleaner, and also used the Catalyst uninstaller off of the ATI site. Used the mobility modder to install them, and other than the expected error (for which the modder is needed), that went off without a hitch.

I'm very curious what others who have the notebook and run BF2 are using in terms of drivers and settings... or if anyone else has an idea what else could be tried. Curious thing is that all other games work fine. Just tried UT2004, and Halo PC, and those run great as well. Just Battlefield.... the one game I want to play on the road... has issues. However, it is the most demanding game in my collection, so I'm wondering if that's the issue, and not just a set of poor drivers or bad code from Dice and EA.

Ideas anyone?
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post #10 of 45
8/12/05 at 12:24am
I suggest you to try NGO optimized driver http://www.ngohq.com/home.php?page=F...t&dwn_cat_id=9
They have mod Catalyst 1.5.7 also mod Catalyst Beta 3.5.6
Maybe you get lucky with either one.
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post #11 of 45
8/12/05 at 12:54am
Thread Starter 
I will certainly try both of those. DO you know what the differences are with those as opposed to the standard catalyst drivers? And... has anyone used them on a X700 and a notebook?
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post #12 of 45
8/12/05 at 1:33am
Omega, NGO, Uni Catalyst etc are tweaked version of the ATI Catalyst driver. Using any of those optimized drivers usually give better performance & image quality when compared to standard Catalyst drivers.
Personally in the past i always prefer Omega but since now im using Win XP x64 and Omega hasnt made driver for x64 i'm forced to use NGO's x64 driver.
So far it works great and i can't complain.
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post #13 of 45
8/12/05 at 1:01pm
Thread Starter 
I'm reading in a few places that BF2 has trouble with the refresh rate fix, and that causes it to crash. The advice is to use the ATI Control panel and turn that off under the monitor settings. Unfortunately, when I try to access those settings, I get a "Your device is not supported" error. I'm assuming that's referring to the monitor... but why? Anyone else using the Tray Tools with the Ferrari and having/had this issue?

I have just finished installing the NGO drivers, and will give that a try in BF2 momentarily. I found that I needed the mobility modder to get these installed as well, so hopefully that's ok, and didn't mess up anything.

Good thing I like the game so much, because, quite frankly, no game is really worth all this $#%#@ hassle just to get it to run.
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post #14 of 45
8/12/05 at 8:57pm
Thread Starter 
Here is an example of what my game is doing... just before it crashes and/or freezes:

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/5628/bf18qg.jpg
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post #15 of 45
8/12/05 at 9:58pm
Thread Starter 
Here's another thing. I just tried Halo PC again, and it froze on me after a few short minutes. I'm starting to think it's the card, or the temperature... just maybe.... But then I fire up Doom 3, running at 1024 and high settings, and play for about 20 minutes with no glitches, hangups, or problems. So if it's the card or the temp, I should have problems in Doom 3 as well... correct? It's a very graphically intensive game.

But it doesn't make sense that its the drivers either, because I've used Mobility Modder and the Catalyst ones, the Omega drivers, and both sets here... all to the same effect. So what the 'eck is it?

Any geniuses in the room? I'm utterly stumped... and quite choked. I do know that Doom 3 supposedly doesn't use Open GL or Direct 3D... one of the two I think. Carmack did something else on his own. Could there be a link there perhaps?
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post #16 of 45
8/12/05 at 11:54pm
hello ppl,

i've encountered the same problem with my Acer TravelMate 8003LMi (Radeon Mobility 9700). First i've had problems running 3DMark 2003 in a loop for many times, 4-5 at least.. and when reaching 4-5th loop at the CPU Test 2 (Troll's Lair) when finishing it, my notebook showed a blue screen and then restarted itself. I've tried BF2 and encountered the same problem.. blue screen (1-2 seconds) and then crashed (hang or restart). First i thought it's from the temperature so i've tried my cpu stability with Prime95 Torture test for 10 hours.. there was no problem... also i've runned in parralel 2-3 times the 3Dmark 2003 3D tests and had no problem. I'm running Ati Catalyst 5.7 Drivers.

I've bought my notebook recently and first i thought that it had some hardware problems but now seeing that you guys also have similar problems i'm somehow worry-free .

Does anyone knows what's happening and how can we solve this problems?
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post #17 of 45
8/13/05 at 3:42am
Did you try playing BF2 with the stock video drivers? Were you getting this problem?
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post #18 of 45
8/13/05 at 9:08am
Nope i didn't. But i think that i've tried loop-ing 3Dmark2003 with stock drivers and it crashed after 4-5 loops when finishing CPU Test 2. I've tried last night to play MOTO GP2 and it hasn't crashed or anything else for almost 2hours (more than it should take to crash in BF2 or 3Dmark). Also when playing i've checked cpu temperature and it was between 60-66 celsius degrees. When reaching 65degrees my notebook fan kicked in full-speed for 1-2 minutes at 5-10 minutes intervals. Also i've reinstalled 5.7 Catalyst last night and now 3DMark doesn't crash my OS but instead i get an Fatal Error (Program has performed an illegal operation and it's memory dump) which closes 3Dmark2003.

Any other things to check out?

thanks...
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post #19 of 45
8/13/05 at 7:03pm
Thread Starter 
I did a complete system restore last night, and installed a new set of Omega drivers, but the issue was the same. Then I did another restore and left in the stock drivers. Same thing.

Today I installed Half-Life 2, and while it runs the menu and into clip fine, as soon as the game itself starts, the machine crashes to a black or white screen. Steam support suggested turning off the sound, or running in a window, and both of those failed to solve the issue.

Running 3DMark 03, all the tests go fine until I get to the aircraft CPU test. THen the machine crashes within about 3-5 seconds. I'm wondering if there is a connection there. SiSoft Sandra tests on the CPU failed to show any errors and benchmarking it several times seemed to work fine.

I was able to play Halo PC for about 1/2 hour last night, and in the time I had no errors. Doom 3 continues to run perfectly, with no hicups or problems... which really puzzles me. There's something to that fact, but I'm not sure what it is. I've tried all various driver sets, so I don't think it's a driver issue, at least not for video.

My manual mentions that I should run a hardware diagnostics, but I have no information in my docs about that. Anyone?
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post #20 of 45
8/13/05 at 9:07pm
:Shadow502t

What notebook do u have? Mine's TM 8003LMi. IMHO i'm pretty sure it's related to ATI drivers. I'm not an ATI fan just because they have terrible drivers(read here Windown & Linux).

I've seen many systems (notebooks, desktops and servers) and when they had any hardware issues (excluding video) they should fail either Memtest86+ or Prime95.

Have any of you tried to contact Acer support with a question related to this issues?

I'm going to try the new 3DMark2005 to see if anything happens... Ill keep you updated...
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