3870 X2 + Vista issue

AdmnPower

AdmnPower

VIP Member
I have an ATI Radeon 3870 X2 and I have an odd problem. I run dual monitors and when I exit a 3d game the right (secondary) monitor will flicker and display a blank black screen. It doesn't shut off, the back light is still on, the screen is just blank for some reason. To get it to come back on, all i have to do is enter display properties and shut it off and turn it back on by unchecking extend desktop to this monitor and then rechecking the box. Any ideas what might cause this?
 
Many of the newer games have their own graphics control center in them. Are you running those at the same resolution as the desktop or other?

It sounds like the games themselves are switching display modes. One idea would be exiting the Catalyst when giong to game to see if the display will return to normal once you exit one. That would be when using a 3rd party program like Ultramon for extending the game's display over since they are effecting the CCC.
 
I'm not sure what the deal was but I was doing some experimenting to see how my new pc works with windows xp (not well) and so i ended up just re-installing windows vista. Fixed the issue, what ever it was.
 
Probably a bug with the catalyst drivers or a simple Windows glitch due to some of those games being written for XP while still able to run on the newer version.

Did you see a new catalyst go on when reinstalling? Occasionally the version that runs well on one card will have problems on another. The 7.9 for the 2xxx line of cards saw a patch that went nowhere until the 7.10 came out. The 7.11 or later for the card here.

Even with the older AGP cards you had to find which version worked the best for the model you had. At least you now have that cleaned up. XP even with SP3 is kind of on the passing stage while still on for a few older softwares here as well as beta testing a prebeta tool for Vista. You probably saw one of the minor bugs that come up since Vista generally has been more reliable over XP here.
 
Yeah, i know exactly what you mean. That would be why things like omega drivers exist. I believe they use old stuff to correct issues that certain cards have with the new catalyst drivers.
 
When running Steam games like HL2 when those first came out I found the Cat. 5.11 was the best for the old Radeon 9550 256mb AGP card at the time. The 5.14 and 6.1-6.5 versions were somewhat flaky. That model had the same chip as the 9600s.

The one thing to note about ATI software updates is that for any one model card you have so many you can use especially for XP at this point. I was hoping to see that change somewhat following the AMD buyout. But apparently still waiting.
 
Yeah, I would think it would be much better to release individual drivers for each graphics card rather than doing it in one big pot like they do. I really don't like the fact that i have to download a massive driver file that supports a whole bunch of cards because all of the excess is just wasted space. I'm sure i speak for those poor people who are still on dial up when i say that the file size is too large when everything is all combined into one package and would simply be rather agrivating to download. Especially with the frequency the drivers are updated. Not only that it would only make sense to distribute the drivers individually, would that not make it easier to phase out old cards. Once a card reaches a certain age simply leave the latest stable driver file available for download and be done with it. As it is now their catalyst center is full of drivers for old cards. I don't really own anything made by Nvidia. How do they do their drivers?
 
When I ran the older NVidia GeForce FX series APG models NVidia had a desktop manager rather then the Catalyst Control Center where you saved your profile and could load that like you would a Windows theme easy enough. The first ATI card was simply spotted on a shelf in a Circuit City of all places while simply browsing what they had then and given a try when looking a 256mb card over a pair of 128s. The performance increase was soon noticed then and I stayed with ATI models since.

With ATI cards the common thing seen is taking one chip or series of chips and using them on the next line up. Like I was saying earlier the 9550 also had the 9600 vpu chip using the same versions of the CCC. But you do end up with a good 45mb or larger download when going for that along with the drivers instead of the drivers only updates.

And then the next lineup comes out and no go with the next CCC for the card you are running like the 9xxx were dumped fast just prior to AMD buying out the original ATI and making some improvements since in that area. Now you are finally able to get a newer catalyst for an older card you thought was long toast without support. The former doa 9xxx series is still foobar while the X1xxx cards have seen newer updates for much longer since the buyout.
 
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