Major artifacts with my new 9600 in DX8 Programs Help!

[willmg]

Hey all recently replaced a Geforce4 Ti with an ATI 9600 Pro I got for really cheap. I did a driver cleanup to remove all Nvidia leftovers before upgrading. Then put in the ATI card and installed the drivers. Noticed some problems so dled the new drivers ran a cleanup of the old and installed 3.9. I am working fine in all DX9 situation, 3DMark03 and Halo both run great! :) But then I went to run 3DMark01 and there were messed up visual artifacts everywhere with lights giving of thick solid shapes and trails behind objects, needless to say dissapointed, tried some DX8 games and same problems appear solid lights and walls where there shouldnt be!!!! ANy ideas whats going on? The only special setting I have in bios is fast writes enabled. My system is Athlon 2400, MSI KT333 MB, 1GB DDR 2700, 9600 Pro 128MB built by ATI(stock). I had perfectly fine performance with the old card so almost wanna just stick it back in :(

[willmg]

Well I feel retarded, I shut off fast writes and there was no change.........so I figure what the hell I will lower my AGP aperature and low and behold now my games work fine, I had to bring it down to 128MB how much performance will I lose in DX8 games now that I cant use 256MB aperature mode??? anyone have an idea?

[TheTaz]

AGP Aperture Size has very little performance impact above 64MB.

It needing to be set at 1/2 your system memory is a myth.

Regards,

Taz

[-=DVS=-]

AGP aperture standart is 64 and or 128 , more or less you will get trouble with games not performance increase ;)
Ooo and Fast Write is useless to, on some motherboards and cards it couses problems , does not increase speed !!!

[GlowStick]

Yeah, havieng a big apeture size 'can' casue slowdowns in some situations where the game uses alot of ram, and not as much video ram. But your not missing anything by lowering it.

[nIghtorius]

setting aperture size to 128MB will have no impact on your performance. and gains with "fastwrites" are so small that it can be neglected especially when you consider the problems you might have with it.

aperture size is a defined memory area on your systemram that can be used for AGP bus transfer (THIS IS NOT DEDICATED to your graphicscard. but will be used when needed).

by setting your aperture size to 128MB you will not lose performance because when a game needs the AGP aperture the performance will always be very slow. no matter if it is 64/128 or 256Megs. because when a game runs out of onboard videomemory it will use the aperture. and because aperture accessed through the AGP bus (which handles about 1GB/s (4x) or 2GB/s (8x)) compared to your 10+GB/s of your 9600 the speed penalty will always be big no matter what aperture you set.

conclusion)
it is no biggie of a problem to set your AGP aperture size to a smaller size. I actually recommend 64Megs for your aperture.

[rellingsen]

Probably a stupid question but did you re-install your games or benchmarks? If not some of them could be configured for your old nVidia card.
On my rig 64mb AGP aperture size runs perfect. Higher settings didn't run any better.

[The Baron]

the card might also be bad.