7earitup

Hey guys,

I am new here, but figured it would be a good place to ask a few questions about the issue I am having. I have a fairly old rig now that still has AGP, so I recently bought a Visiontek x1950 Pro 256MB since it is pretty much the best card out for the AGP interface. It runs most of my games fine, like COD4, Warcraft, Battlefield 2, etc. With those games running decent, World of Warcraft runs terrible. I have tried all types of drivers (7.4, 7.5, 7.10, 7.12), yet they all yield similar results. Does anyone have a similar setup and play WoW also? If so, how does it perform?

My specs:
ASUS A8V Deluxe
AMD 4400+ X2 @ 2.4 GHZ
2GB PC3200 RAM
2x160GB SATA HDDs
Visiontek ATI x1950PRO 256MB

If any other info is needed, please let me know. Thanks!

Tipstaff

First up, welcome to the forums!

Believe it or not this is a long standing issue with WoW and X1950 Pro AGP cards (as well with x2600 Pro AGP cards too btw). A few things to try:

- Try changing the AGP Aperture size to 256MB in the bios.

- The best drivers seem to be the Catalyst 7.7, or the later 7.12. I've seen people report better results with the Omega drivers over the official ones though.

- Be sure that Catalyst A.I in the Catalyst Control Center is set to "Standard", however in some cases people had to disable it to get things working.

- There seems to be a conflict between some video codecs (the problem is very apparent in games like Oblivion). As such the suggestion is that if you have used a codec pack program, like K-Lite, that you remove it, and try playing the game. In fact there is a known problem between the Vodei codec, and some games, so at the very least try reinstalling K-Lite, but remove that codec from the list.

Give those a shot, and let me know how things go.

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7earitup

Hi, and thanks for the reply!

1) I originally had the aperture size set to 256MB, but I changed it to 64MB and set Fastwrites to OFF in the BIOS and I seem to have gained 5-10 FPS.

2) I have tried many drivers, mainly the Tweaksrus, Omega, and DNA versions - I am not a fan of the stock ATI drivers. Omegas are my favorite thus far. I installed the 7.12 OMEGAs yesterday and they seem to be OK as compared to others.

3) I have yet to try that, I will give it a go once I get home. I am not sure what it is set at now to be honest. I am more familiar with NVIDIA settings than anything else.

4) I currently have everything on a fresh format just as of the other day, so codecs should be no problem. I use the VIDEO LAN program to play all my videos, which unlike Windows Media Player does not require codecs to play my movies and whatnot.


I have a question though, just to soothe me in my purchase of this card - I am right to think that spec wise, this x1950Pro should tear apart WoW, correct? I upgraded from a 6800GT, and the 6800 did alot better in WoW, even with my 1920X1200 resolution.

Thanks for all your help and suggestions! I look forward to your reply.

Another question - Is this a software issue with the AGP cards or is it a hardware issue? Do you think it is going to be fixed anytime soon if it is a software issue? I always get disappointed when I switch over to ATI.

Spazite

I'm running my old x-850-xtpe agp card on the old 6.1 catalyst and wow runs great.
It's definitely a software issue.you should be tearing through wow at even the highest resolutions.
Have you tried cat 7.7 as tipstaff suggested?

Tipstaff

From what we've (or at least I have) seen it's a mix of software and hardware. Cards prior to the x1000 series seem to be fine with WoW for the most part, but after that I've seen consistent reports of people have FPS and freezing issues with the X1000 series AGP cards. Just type in "ati x1xxx wow issues" (replace x1xxx with a card number) and you will see a ton of posts come up.

That said, people had reported issues being fixed with later versions of Catalyst drivers (7.7 being the most stable).

7earitup, a few things:

- For reference, what OS and version do you have (I've assumed XP with SP2)?

- One thing of note is that your board uses a VIA chipset. The reason I mention this is that AGP systems using VIA + ATI usually don't do very well together. There's a long long history of issues there that I won't even get into, however there are things to try first (I should point out that with VIA AGP systems my very last suggestion ( #6 ) would be the first thing I'd personally try, however I recommend that in your case you should go through steps in the order I listed instead leaving #6 for last):

1) Be sure that your bios, and all relevant drivers (chipset, sound, agp) are all up to date.

2) With SmartGART (which is in the CCC), try setting the AGP setting to 4x. Preferably, set this in the bios if you can.

3) Also, you can try to uninstall SmartGART altogether. Head over to THIS page, and download the Smartgart Uninstaller. Run it, and reboot your machine. Don't worry about messing things up, cuz if you ever need SmartGART you just have to reinstall your drivers via the installer (manually installing the driver keeps SmarGART from installing BTW).

4) One thing to try is turning off what's called Sideband. Sideband is what allows the card to send and receive data at the same time, thus increasing performance. Normally this is on by default, however it can be a source a problems for some. If that setting is in your bios you might want to try turning it off as a test. Also, you can change it from Sideband to Pipeline Transfer mode, try that as well.

5) You mentioned you turned off fastwrites. Was this in the CCC or the bios? If there is a fastwrites listing in your bios, try turning it off too.

6) In the bios you should see a listing that says AGP Driving Control, and maybe even one called AGP Driving Value. Most likely Driving Control is set to Auto, but the setting you might want to try changing is the Driving Value. If I remember correctly it should be set to (in hex) C5 or DA by default, but you might want to try DA if it's not set to that already by default, however for ATI cards I remember that a setting of 68 is optimal (for Nvidia cards it was EA). 2 notes: 1)you may need to change Driving Control to Manual first in order to change the Driving Value number, and 2) if the computer freezes after changing this value you will need to reset your bios in order to clear this setting (be sure to turn off your machine first, unplug it from the power, remove the battery on the motherboard, and reset the bios via the provided jumper on the board. Then, reverse the order, and try a different setting).

What is it, and why change it? It would take too long to explain, but this is one of those old VIA tricks I remember where we had to change the value for certain ATI or Nvidia cards in order to get the cards to run stable (specifically ATI 9550 and Geforce 2 cards). If you want a more detailed explanation give THIS article a read.

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Thorfkin

My brother has an Athlon XP and a Radeon X1950 Pro AGP and Wow runs well enough Runs at 1680x1050 resolution with all detail settings in game set to max except the AA which we have set to 1x. Gets between 25 and 45 fps which is decent enough to play. Slowest place is Shatrath. Had to leave the adaptive AA turned off in the drivers because that setting absolutely killed performance :P AGP aperture set to 256. Fast Writes and Sideband addressing enabled. Running the 7.11 official driver release. Gonna give the new 8.1 a try tonight.