New pc - worse than old one?!!!

MajorR

Is the BIOS of your new systerm set correctlly. If you have on-board graphics it might be set to that and you'll have to disable it and activate the ATI Radeon X1600 Pro otherwise you could have been using the lower performing on-board.
Also you said you have the latest DirectX driver but what about the cards own driver, make sure you get it from the correct supplier ie. if you have a Diamond Viper - ATI Radeon X1600 then you need to go to the Diamond website and get their driver or if you have a Sapphire - Radeon X1600 you would need to go to the sapphire site. Just 2 guesses that have caused me probs in the past

Toxteth_OGrady

@ Stumpy

Have you got fastwrites enabled or disabled?

Another thing you could try is to download and install ATI Tool and run an artifact scan. You can also use ATI Tool to monitor the temp of the radeon gpu to see if it's an overheating problem. If it's running below 70C under load you could try tweaking the PCI-E voltage up by 0.1V in the bios.

What brand is your 550W psu?

:cool:

TOG

Stumpy

OMG this is getting complicated! I thought if I bought a brand new computer, with the supplier building the thing, it would all be set up and ready to go with no problems. What a nightmare.

Anyway, to answer a few questions - no idea of the brand as such of the card - the spec simply says its an ATI Radeon x1600 pro. I tried downloading up to date drivers from the ATI site and installing them (after uninstalling the previous ones) but it made no difference. Also tried the other suggested drivers, again no difference.

I have tried dropping the resolution a bit, and it seemed to make the game run a little bit more smoothly, however, it then started to crash more - a complete "restart the computer" crash. And more and more frequently too. About 5 times in the space of an hour or so - the last time it crashed, before I gave up completely, it had been running for about 2 minutes, with nothing much going on on-screen. And I reduced the level of detail to a fairly basic level - much more basic than I previously had it on my hamster driven computer.

Fastwrites - disabled. No idea what they are, but someone else said to have them off.

PSU brand - no idea - the computer is from Mesh.

BIOS - sorry, another "no idea" - however no other graphics is shown in my hardware settings, other than the x1600 card.

Temperature - can't find any way of monitoring that, unless it's the motherboard temp? Found 3 readings for that showing around the 25 to 35C area. There were boxes where I could enable the GPU temperature, but couldn't actually click in them. Saying that, I'm using the other driver at the moment, So I'll go back to the ATI one - as neither seems to make a difference anyway, I might as well use theirs.

Edit - I've just gone "caveman" and, rather than using software to tell me how hot it is in there, I felt the case. Probably a completely useless way of telling how hot the chips are getting, but the case is cool, and the fan is blowing fairly cool air out of the front of the thing as well - at least I now know why I feel the urge to wear slippers more now!!

Toxteth_OGrady

Did you try downloading ATI Tool (it's nothing to do with the drivers) and running an artifact scan? Also ATI Tool will let you monitor the gpu temp.

:cool:

TOG

wonderfullife_2

Hi
Funnily enough, I got this game last night, went straight on first time, no problems, but I did notice that the game is running at 800x600x32 by default in the game options so check this out.
I have the Radeon ATI X600 256mb Hypermemory graphics card.

But if you would like to compare settings for this game just pm and I'll gladly do it.

Hope this helps

Stumpy

I've just downloaded that ATI Tool thing - ran the artifact scan - don't know how long I was supposed to leave it running, but left it for over a minute and it came up with no errors. Couldn't find the temperature monitor thing though - where do I find that?

Edit - just realised I've just edited the wrong post! Anyway, see above about my "caveman" comments regarding temperature!!

Stumpy

wonderfullife wrote:

Hi
Funnily enough, I got this game last night, went straight on first time, no problems, but I did notice that the game is running at 800x600x32 by default in the game options so check this out.
I have the Radeon ATI X600 256mb Hypermemory graphics card.

But if you would like to compare settings for this game just pm and I'll gladly do it.

Hope this helps

I've just tried changing the settings in the video config to those you suggested, but it still gives me that bloody annoying "bong" then tells me my hardware isn't good enough. I KNOW it must be good enough - it's miles better than the hardware I've had it running on in the past, it's just being flaming stubborn about it all. Normally, at this point, I'd go and let off some steam by killing some bad guys - grrrrr.

Thanks for the offer anyway

wonderfullife_2

Okay,
Have you gone into your ATI Settings, I think the ones to look out for here are, OpenGL, Direct3D and Troubleshoot settings, and VPU Recovery (not sure about that one, I think it resets the graphic card) have you tried to tweak these.

Hope this helps

Toxteth_OGrady

OK - you need to bowl out whether (a) your card is faulty, (b) you have a system wide graphics configuration problem or (c) the problem is specific to DS2.

You probably have what seems like 8 million permutations to try at the moment and I sympathise - it can be incredibly difficult and frustrating.

However it does help the diagnosis if you answer every question that's put, if possible using quote tag.

You say your psu is 550W but you don't know the brand. Unfortunately it wouldn't be the first time a system has been sold with a cheap, inadequate psu. You have a high-end, very power-hungry system. Take the side of the case of and let us know what brand it is. Also post the Amps for the +5V and +12V rails - you'll find these on the label on the side of the psu.

For the ATI Tool artifact test you need to run it for at least an hour. To see gpu temp with ATI Tool, click on the bottom right settings button, then in the drop down list at the top (above "Use Device:") select 'Temperature monitoring' and tick 'Measure Card Temperature' and select 'Tray Icon - gpu temperature.'

To try some general stress tests of your card go to https://www.futuremark.com and download 3DMark05 and 3DMark06. Run the benchmark tests in these. If both tests complete successfully there is nothing wrong with your card or your graphics subsystem.

When you've done that go to Start --> Run and type in dxdiag and OK. Go to the 'Display' tab and run the Direct Draw and Direct 3D tests. Report results.

Then go to the 'More Help' tab, select the 'Override....' button and tick 'Override Value' and enter 60 and OK.

:cool:

TOG



Do you have Vertical synch turned off in the game settings?

Toxteth_OGrady

Another thing to try is to go here and download Driver Cleaner Professional, use it to uninstall and completely clean out the old ATI and Omega drivers and then try a completely fresh driver install.

I would give the Catalyst 5.12s a try as there have been some problems with the Cat 6.1s and 6.2s and ATI drivers can be a bit buggy.

:cool:

TOG

p.s. did you try upping the PCI-E voltage in the bios?