At a loss...Radeon HD 3650 AGP

Simpleton

Hello everyone.
Before I'll post my troubles, I must state that I'm not in any way a knowledgable person when it comes to computers(Hence my nick). Most of what I know comes from brief reading in forums such as this one (lovely by the way) whenever i come across errors. This case is pretty much the same, though i can't get around it. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Last week I bought A new graphics card-an ATI Radeon HD 3650 AGP 512MB (though the Sapphire brand was actualy on the box as well...odd)
The following days have been a poor attempt in getting it to work. I installed the original drivers provided with the installation disk, and saw they were outdated.
In any fashion i tried to install the newer drivers (that is Catalyst 8.7) I failed miserably. I always get the same message:"Setup didn't find a driver compatible with your hardware or operating system. Setup will now exit"
Yes, I uninstalled my old drivers and rebooted (even twice), but with no avail. I always have to come crawling back to my installation disk, and so i use the older version of the driver.I spent the last few days searching every forum trying to understand how to get out of this fix. Everything they suggested didn't work. not on my comp.
Meanwhile, I cant get my games to work properly. even the ones which worked with my old ATI Radeon 9250 card. The texts are jumpy and letters are missing, and the entire texture seems out of hand (wierd colors, slow refresh rate etc.). I wish I could explain it with a better level of technical understanding. I think i singled out the problem - D3D. whenever i use openGL, the games work fine. but when i try the newly available D3D spec on my graphic options, those errors occur. This happens to me in most HalfLife 1 and 2 based games.
So I think I need help in several fields:
1.How can i get proper drivers that would make my games work?
2.How can I fix my problems with in-game textures?
Oh. I almost forgot. My system specs:
Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz
1 GB of DDR RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3650 AGP Graphics card
Windows XP Home Edition SP 3
Is that it? tell me i you need to know more.
Once again, I greatly appreciate any help you guys could offer. I'm just upset at how complicated this whole thing got. I'd also appreciate if you could explain the solution(or solutions) to me in plain language, as it will save me from replying stuff like "what?" or "I don't get it".
I'm not stupid, I'm just electronically a simpleton.
Thanks in advance guys

temeteus82

Hi there and welcome to DriverHeaven!

Since that card is AGP card AMD/ATi's current drivers don't have the needed information to make the driver to work with those AGP cards, this is a common issue with the HD series AGP cards. You should look drivers from Sapphire. Get them here : Sapphire Technology - drivers

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Simpleton

Wow.
That worked beautifully.
I actually tried it before, but somehow couldn't manage to install the drivers..
The important thing is that now it works.I tried all my games and (nearly) all of them worked. but thats the stuff for another topic.
In the meanwhile, thanks a lot temeteus82. I would still have been in this mess if it wasnt for you.

Bobic

I have had the exact same problems, to where I thought the card was defective and I sent it back (yeah I know, dumb). I searched for days, installed it on no less than 3 different systems, tried almost all the drivers in the universe, and it still doesn't work. So I searched, and yay! I found this. But SOME ONE APPARENTLY HATES ME because when I clicked on the sapphire link, I got a beautiful error 500! So what I now want to know is, does anyone have a copy of those sapphire files in their hard drive? This has been the most annoying installation I have ever experienced!!

CATALYSTCATCHER

I don't have a link to Sapphire drivers, but........

You could try these......
AMD Customer Care

Althought the AGP hotfix drivers are not certified they should install on your system.

thewayitsmeanttobeplayed

I have spent no less than 12 hours trying different driver combinations on my agp machine with this card. What a horrible implementation, and effort by sapphire to squeeze every last dime out of old technology. if they were not going to write a proper driver for it they should have never released it in agp format. I could play BF2 ok, with the 9.4 hotfix, but as soon as I tried BFHeroes ~ BSOD. There is no fix for this. I ripped it out of my machine asap and reinstalled my old Nvidia GeForce 7600 Gs OC card that runs circles around the 3000 series cards in agp . So if you want the best gaming performance for your agp computer it stops with Nvidia. If you still want to try a 3000 series in your old agp machine i suggest beating your head with a rock until that thought stops.

Judas

that's a fair bit misrepresentitive.. considering your 7000 is still natively agp meaning that the chances of any form of capability issues with the agp to pci-ex bridge chip isn't going to happen like the HD2xxx/3xxx/4xxx and so forth.


Guaranteed though... a x1950pro AGP will run circles in native mode.

However provided with a motherboard that doesn't seem to have problems with these pci-ex bridge chips, The HD3650 and 3850's perform admirably. So much so that there simply isn't anything out there that will touch them.

As i mentioned, if you've got agp, it's generally best to go with a x16xx agp or any x1xxx series agp solution to prevent the possibility of capability issues.

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Mac Daddy

Welcome to DH thewayitsmeanttobeplayed could you please start a fresh thread to discuss your issues ... thanks

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