ATI Radeon 8500 Performance Article/Tutorial
I recently got a chance to try and test the popular Radeon 8500 graphics card by ATI and immediately became apart of the big driver situation encountered by many owners of the Radeon 8500 graphics card. I have spent a good twelve hours testing this card and going through various sites on the Internet which provide support and unofficial driver releases. In one forum that I came across I found myself sifting through 1846 threads in the support category and came across some pretty interesting information which told me how to solve most of the problems that I had encountered. To try and make sense of it all for all those newbie's out there I have compiled this article with a list of fixes and easy instructions on how to optimize your Radeon 8500 graphics card so it works how it says on the box!
Grabbing the latest drivers
First of lets take a look at a few general procedures which you can do to kick things off. If you haven't already grabbed the latest ATI and Windows XP verified drivers here is a list of the latest drivers which you can download:
Don't forget to check out
Windows update and the official ATI
support page for the latest drivers. While some people prefer to stick with the official drivers there is a good few who opt for the unofficial drivers which have proven to provide much greater performance. The only problem with these drivers are you will need to make a fresh install of your operating system to make them work properly. The reason for this is the drivers do not remove some settings in the registry which developers are not keen to spend time doing. But they are well worth the effort! Here is a list of the latest unofficial drivers:
As the Radeon 8500 is greatly dependent on DirectX 8.1 it is very important you make sure you have the right version installed. You can download any updates from the
official DirectX site.
Configuring your settings
Once we have all the driver installation out of the way lets look at how you can configure your settings to get the most out of your graphics card. Go into your Radeon 8500 graphics card settings by right clicking the ATI icon on your toolbar and going into Display settings. Let's try the following changes:
- Go into the Direct 3D and Open GL settings and turn of "Wait for vertical sync". This will greatly improve frame rates but in some cases may cause slight distortions to occur in the image.
- Go into OpenGL settings and click on convert 32bit textures to 16bit this basically does what it says and frees up more graphics based RAM.
- In the both the OpenGL and Direct 3D settings make sure you have the texture compression settings ticked.
- Go into your smoothvision properties and make sure all settings are set for performance. Also make sure FSAA is disabled in both OpenGL and Direct3D.
- Go into Direct3D settings and set Z-buffer bit depths to 16
The changes that I have just listed are simple ways of increasing the performance of your game without dramatically reducing image quality.
Tweaking and overclocking
Obviously with a card like this many of you may be wondering why you would need to overclock but there is a safe way that you can overclock a graphics card without causing potential risk to overheating and damage. Simply stay within the boundaries of what the program recommends and you should be fine. One tweak program that I recommend would be the Rage3D Tweak program by Rage 3D and it doesn't only work with the Radeon 8500 it also works with all other Radeon cards including the 7000, 7200 and the 7500. Here is the info:
Version 3.0 Beta 4
What's New:
- Reorganized the categories in the tweaks tab to make a bit more sense.
- Added the ability to Disable the Memory Latency and Memory Timings settings individually.
- Updated the Custom Display Modes tab with some fixes, bringing it to v.007.
- Updated OC tab with some fixes, bringing it to v.007.
- Updated GameUtil, bringing it to v.007. Updated GameUtil, bringing it to v.007.
- Added tweak to change sound hotkey to wave volume instead of master volume.
- Added tweak to allow u to enable memory timings and latency individually on the OC tab.
- Updated the 800x600 tweak to work with more games.
- Added tweaks under Win2k/XP to enable/disable the refresh rate fix checking.
- The refresh rate fix in GameUtil updated for better 2K/XP. functionality. Should work correctly after resume from sleep if it didn't for some of you before.
- Added a last resort to clear out all traces of Rage3D Tweak from a system called TweakKilla. Use this only after you have attempted an uninstall from add/remove programs. You'll find it in the "Last Resort" directory where the install files were unzipped.
Download:
Primary Download Site v3.0 Beta 4
Benchmarking
After you have gone through the process of installing new drivers, configuring them and tweaking it would be a good idea to benchmark your card for 3D performance. One of the mothers of all benchmark programs would have to be 3D Mark 2001 by MadOnion.com and you can download it from here. Be sure to look out for 3D Mark 2002 because its coming out soon!
It would be a good idea to benchmark your system you make any changes so you can compare the results after you install the new drivers. Ideally you should be getting a 3D benchmark score of about 7300 and above.
Game Issues/Fixes
There have been known to of been quite a few problems with certain games and software. I have compiled a set of Questions and Answers to try and solve some of these problems.
Questions and Answers:
Q. Why does my game run jerky?
A. This has been known to happen when running on a system with 512MB of memory. One way to fix this is to go into your BIOS and set your AGP aperture size to 128MB as supposed to the default setting of 64MB. If you find your hard drive is constantly loading information it might just need a good defrag.
Q. Why does Counter-Strike keep exiting in OpenGL mode?
A. This is due to an overflow problem which is common with ATI based graphics cards. Sierra released a fix for this problem and while ago and is available for download here.
Q. Why do my models in Counter-Strike come up all funny?
A. Many people have been complaining of the funny barrel shaped effects commonly associated with custom weapon models which is caused by ATI's Trueform technology. Sierra's default setting is to have Trueform enabled but by simply entering the command "ati_npatch 0" (without quotes) into the console it can be deactivated.
If you do not want to completely deactivate it setting "ati_subdiv cvar" in the console (without quotes) to a higher setting (0-7) will reduce the effect that Trueform has on the models.
Q. Why do textures keep flickering in Counter-Strike?
A. I believe that this is a problem also associated with Trueform, try disabling the setting all together and this should get rid of the problem.
Q. Why do I keep getting horizontal lines in my Games?
A. This could be a symptom of having vsync disabled or if you have overclocked your card you may need to put the settings down a bit.
If all else fails
If you are still experiencing performance problems particularly with Windows XP you might want to consider installing either Windows ME or Windows 98 on another partition and playing your games on that. Many people have commented on how there games seem to run better on Windows 98/ME while some are saying Windows XP is the best for them. It can't hurt to give it a go!
Posted by LNorton at October 20, 2002 05:50 PM
