by macgyver » Thu Jan 29, 2004 7:56 pm
Finally flying;
I bought a Radeon 9600 pro about a month ago new on Ebay, and have had nothing but probelms since, included all the mentioned FMS compatability everyone else has. Sadly, as everyone knows, FMS is freeware and comes with a disclaimer that absolves them of just about everything, which seems pretty fair to me. ATI on the other hand has their work cut out for them. My main beef with them is regarding the compatability problems with SIS chipsets, SIS also partly to blame. I updated everything as instructed, BIOS, AGP drivers, latest Catalyst, etc... always making sure to uninstall before installing, and my machine became unuseable. Windows would start, but become heavily ghosted after 1 or 2 mouse clicks, and would completely hang requiring restart after 3 or 4. I couldn't even get to the screen to uninstall the driver before the system locked. Anyway, I had to revert the BIOS to an older revision, and things are working again, although I can't go past 2X on the AGP port, even though my board supports 4X.
For FMS, I did the unthinkable. I removed my expensive high-end graphics card, plugged my monitor into the on-board VGA port, and voila, I am flying. Here's my set-up and results.
Athlon 1800+XP
768MB RAM, 64 shared for video
SIS 730s chipset
Hardware acceleration set to full
1024X768 Native resolution
FMS performed superbly
32 bit color
Fog, textures, smoothing enabled
1024X768 Resolution (Higher if desired, but my monitor is crappy)
Flies at 27-31 Frames per second compared to nearly 0 with my smokin' graphics card, go figure.
No glitches whatsoever!
Anyway, I know it may seem like a waste, but if you have the option of using your integrated graphics, give it a try. FMS really kicks butt and is a tremendously valuable tool for beginners like myself. After spending the whole night fighting the ATI issue, nearly convinced that the choppy perfomance was just how FMS was, I read this board and found others with the same issue. So, I yanked that sucker out of my box, and have seen the light. FMS absolutely rocks! I can't wait to see how my practice has paid off this weekend. There is hope, at least untill ATI or FMS gets this worked out, although neither is really responsible to do so.
Thanks for FMS!