Radeon 8500 and CS

[NascarFool]

I installed the CounterStrike that came with the Radeon 8500. I tried both video options. With OpenGL, the video stays on the first screen without moving. I can hear my dude walking but no video movement. If I use the D3D, the game is playable but the graphics are terrible. I tried DX8 and DX8.1 with the latest ATI drivers. Any ideas ? I went to the OpenGL site ( http://www.glsetup.com ) and the update program says that the graphics card doesn't support OpenGL. Hmmmmmm . . . . .

[FlyingPenguin]

DO NOT use D3D. D3D does not work properly in Half-Life (or CS) and is no longer supported.

Only reason it's in there is that when the game was originally released, there were few video cards that supported OpenGL (oh how times have changed!).

Radeon most definately supports OpenGL. Make absolutely certain you have the latest driver installed.

Make sure you uninstalled any drivers or utilities for the old video card (NVidia cards for instance need the driver uninstalled in the Add/Remove Programs wizard). You should ALWAYS uninstall the old driver and change to the default Standard VGA driver before installing a new card.

Plenty of Radeon gurus here that should be able to give you more help.

[NascarFool]

Just for the heck of it, I formatted and reinstalled Win98SE with the original ATI drivers. Same thing, it will only play in D3D. The grapics are bad too.

[FlyingPenguin]

Well I know I'm going to get screamed at, but I've YET to get a single Radeon card to work properly (I've tried 3 of them on various computers).

Apparently sometimes you win and sometimes you don't with Radeon drivers.

Some basic things to check:

- I think there's a specific patch for the Radeon and Athlon systems (not sure - check their site).

- In the motherboard's BIOS menu, make sure that "Assign IRQ to VGA" is enabled and that both "Video BIOS Caching" and "Video Ram Shadow" are disabled. Set "AGP Aperature" to 64.

- You may not have the proper or the latest drivers for you motherboard's APG to PCI Bridge. The Radeon is a true AGP card (unlike 3Dfx cards) and is very fussy about having the AGP bus setup properly. This is a MAJOR gotcha. Windows will install the wrong mobo drivers until you update them. There should be drivers that came with your motherboard on a CD, but you should download the latest version from the motherboard manufacurer's web site.

- It's possible that some other device is causing the problem. Best way to isolate it is to pull ALL your cards except the vid card (IMPORTANT: note what slot each card was installed in). Play the misbehaving game and see if it runs stable (yes, the game should run just fine without a sound card installed). If it behaves, install each card ONE BY ONE starting with the sound card until you isolate the bad boy. It's important to put the cards back in their original slots to avoid PCI IRQ Sharing problems (see next paragraph).

- You may have a card that has a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem (NOT the same as an IRQ conflict). The SBLive, NICs and SCSI controllers are very prone to this. Fix is essentially the same as mentioned in the previous paragraph except when you find the misbehaving card, you need to move it to another slot. More details on this problem here: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/glfaq5.htm#5_9

Here's some good Radeon sites:

http://www.rageunderground.com/

http://rage3d.com/

Hope this helps...

[NascarFool]

I will try those tips. I did install the ASUS mobo drivers from the ASUS CD too. I uninstalled the original Radeon drivers and installed the latest drivers. Still no OpenGL in HalfLife CS.

The slots in my comp are :

AGP = Radeon 8500
PCI1 = nothing
PCI2 = SB Live X-gamers
PCI3= nothing
PCI4 = NetGear FA310TX NIC
PCI5 = nothing

[FlyingPenguin]

You should download the latest mobo drivers fro mthe Asus website.

[NascarFool]

All drivers updated with no change.