Wirehead Studios

My Catalyst 4.7 drivers for my ATi Radeon 9200 SE are having a hard time with Far Cry. A REALLY hard time. It's choppy even on Low detail. Far Cry's hardware detector says that Medium detail is optimal (it's unbelievably slow), and I've heard of people with system specs similar to mine getting good performance even on High detail (good performance in my mind is a steady 35+ FPS, with 25 FPS being acceptable). I've heard of some drivers by this guy called Omega, but the Windows 98 version is no longer developed, so I have no way of knowing how old they are until I install them. Plus, the installer was broken. I know a friend who gets decent framerates in Doom 3 on high detail with a system very similar to mine (he has Windows XP instead of 98 and an Athlon XP 3000+ insteado f a 2700+)

Here are my system specs:
AMD Athlon XP 2700+ monitor
ATi Radeon 9200 SE video card
Sound Blaster Audigy Gamer sound card
512 MB RAM
60 GB master hard drive (installed in spring 2003, last reformat 12/27/03)
20 GB slave hard drive (installed in late 2000 or early 2001, God only knows when it was last reformatted; both HDs were defragmented a couple of months ago)
Windows 98 SE (I simply cannot part with my old DOS games)

Sounds like you need dual boot mate.

Dead easy to set up .....XP and 98. :thumb:

My slave HD is totally full, and there are things there that I don't want lost in some kind of OS spork-up. I think my motherboard supports dual masters, though.

Does XP offer any real advantages over 2000? The pastel-pastiche UI would immediately be disabled if XP was installed (I hate it), so I see no reason to fork over $50+ more for XP and suffer through that damned activation process.

If you have 2000, I'd keep 2000. Windows XP has some serious issues, especially when referencing Service Pack 2. I've had it deactivate hardware just because the drivers are more than two years old (and said drivers have no updates available).

I think it's not the drivers, but your 9200 SE... I'm using a 9800 Pro and have not experienced any serious hang-ups in one game yet.

My friend has a 9200 and he can run Doom 3 on high detail.

your problem is in the SE .
look at some rviews of a 9200 and 9200 SE .

Uh, my computer can run UT2004 at maximum detail without a hiccup, so there's more to this than the card. Far Cry at low-medium detail is nowhere near as beautiful as UT2004 cranked up to the max. Is there any difference between the normal and SE versions?

Of course.  It might also be a hardware compatibility fluke between Far Cry and your specific card.  If you want custom drivers, try here:

http://www.guru3d.com (http://www.guru3d.com)

As for card spec differences, here you go:
http://mirror.ati.com/products/radeon9200/...9200/specs.html (http://mirror.ati.com/products/radeon9200/radeon9200/specs.html)

That video memory will make a huge difference.  If you're using the 64MB card I'd wager that's your problem right there.[/color]

Try the Omega drivers. They're supposed to be good.

No amount of new drivers are going to help you.NEVER EVER buy SE radeon cards. Even if it hadnt been an SE the 9200 is based on the old radeon 8500 core so your proublem isnt the drivers . I have a radeon 9700 pro and it runs farcry fine.

and your friend is either running doom 3 at high detail with shitty framerates or hes feeding you a load.

I can't even run Doom 3 on my 9600 Pro at high. your friend is either stoned or is playing at 4 fps.

I guess I learned something new here... ATi's version of "MX" is "SE"  :)~

I have a 9800 pro, 2700+  and can't run Doom3 on high as I only have 512 mg ram. it says that you need 512 mg just for the textures on high setting.

Odd... I've run the Doom 3 demo on "Ultra" with my GF4 TI4600, it has 128 megs RAM, and my system only has 512.  It ran at, oh, 2 FPS, but it did run.

The installer for the Windows 98 version is broken. It's a conspiracy, i tell you! They're trying to make me change operating systems! They'll  never part me from my DOS games! NEVER!:p

Then I got the crappy version of the 9200 then. Just my luck.

Why not name cards like most other products are named and put the two-letter suffixes on the TOP model?

Well, at least it's better than my old GeForce 2.

By the way, what resolution do you run Doom 3 in? My friend uses 640x480. The res makes a TON of difference. I remember how the P166 I had in 1998 would run Quake II perfectly in 320x240 and slow waaaay down when the res got turned up (at the time, I had an OpenGL-compatible 3D accelerator, but not really knowing quite was OpenGL was at the time, I used tbe slowpoke software mode.)

Can anybody tell me of a good driver for a voodoo 5 with XP? I've got the amiga driver, and it works, but sombody must know something better.

Uh, why don't you just upgrade your card. My old GeForce 2 could probably blow away any 3Dfx card. At least you're not as behind the times as some poor souls I've seen who use NVidia TNT2 cards...

Well, I have a main comp with a 2700+ and ATI 9800 pro etc. thats my games machine.

Then I have 2 other comps (800 mgz and 850 mgz)  both with voodoo 5's in them. I use these for dvd making and watching, and work, and longer tasks and downloads so I don't tie up my main comp. Oh, one of them belongs to my girlfriend, who does her work on it.

When my sons come around, BAT and Luke-nucum, we use all 3 comps to play Gen or UT or Q1 co-op, with telejano.

So I could upgrade the cards, but unless we all played Doom 3 or UT2004 or similar it would be a waste of time. BAT is buying a 9800 pro next week for his comp, he says, so his old mx440 will be spare, but nucum will probubly put that in his comp.

so not much point at the moment. I would just like a good driver.

Hmm, Guru 3D has some Voodoo 5 drivers, at least I know they do for Win2K, should work for XP as well.  it's about the only place I know of anymore that handles 3dfx drivers that I can think of.  I think there's some site devoted to 3dfx stuff, but I don't know the site name.  Ask Google?

Thanks. I'll give it a look into. :thumb:

actually i think a voodoo 5 would proubly do better than a geforce 2mx from what ive heard.

Dual boot or run DOSbox.

Windows 2000 is superior to 98 in every way. XP is good if you can tweak the hell out of it, and server 2003 is like XP, without all the bullshit.

Never mind then. But my old GeForce 2 MX probably supported more games since no one gives a damn about 3Dfx cards anymore.

Con: DOSBox is slower than Windows 98's DOS mode by orders of magnitude. Tyrian, which requires a Pentium Pro to run at the "Wild" detail setting without any slowdown in normal DOS, might slow down even high-ejnd machines with DOSBox. Also, I'm not sure all my old games will run on DOSBox. Emulators are almost never 100% compatible.

I downloaded a new set of drivers from ATi, and they're a miracle. I'm getting adequate framerates even in High detail. This is the best-looking game I've ever played (ATi Radeon 9200 cards have some bugs with Doom 3's lighting that hurt the visual quality).

Now if only there weren't those damn helicopters shooting at me with ludicrously accurate gatling guns CONSTANTLY...

Doom under DOSBox is extremely slow.  I could run Wing Commander and Wolf3D without trouble, though Wing Commander would occasionally crash DOSBox to Windows for no apparent reason.  Until that's stabilized, I doubt I'll get around to playing Secret Missions again.  :surprise:

Why are you still using Doom2.exe? You're much better off with either of these Win32 source ports, which offer high resoultions, transparrency, scripting, and a host of other features:

http://www.doomworld.com/eternity (http://www.doomworld.com/eternity)

http://zdoom.org (http://zdoom.org)