ATI Radeon 9200 Bandwidth changes

My son has a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9200 card with 256Mb on board. He has been experiencing problems with certain games such as "C&C Generals" and "Beyond good and evil". "Generals" has lowered resolution and BG&E will crash. I read a post somewhere that the installation of WinDVD changed the bandwidth from 128 bits to 64 bits (something he has done). Is this true? If so, how can I fix it so that the problem goes away?

Hi Cleve,

Thanks for the reply. I mentioned the WinDVD issue because I was searching via Google for a solution and one of the hits was a posting (with no reply) on a techie website mentioning a similar problem that is ocurring on our box.

Generals was running perfectly until recently and the resolution issues have been a recent (post-WinDVD) problem. We have since swopped out the motherboard for a GA-7VKMLS mother board from Gigabyte with an 2.4Ghz AMD Athlon with 512Mb of RAM, because I guessed that the RAM on the old mother board might have been suspect (the son also wanted more speed than the 1.3Ghz AMD was delivering at that point!).

To answer the points you have raised in your mail.

We have detuned the graphics in Generals to almost SVGA level (800x600) with most features set to low. We still have parallel texture lines accross the horizon that only resolve to more detail once you get close. This was never a problem in the past and the game worked perfectly even at the highest settings. We have 19" MAG screen that can easily handle 1600x1200 at 100Mhz refresh rate.

For the crashing of BG&E: In the beginning an error message used to flash up that seemed to indicate a DirectX problem. We have upgraded to 9c. We have also downloaded the latest drivers and the error mesaage has now disappeared. It crashes without an error message. The system freezes with the sound stuck and on several occasions the screen totally blacked out. Other graphics intesive games such as Homeworld 2, Project Earth, etc., do not have the same problem. The game BG&E works perfectly on an (oldish) IBM laptop!

On overheating I can say that the box has been equipped with 3 extra fans. Two extracting and one pushing air into the box. If the CPU core temperature is checked (we live in Pretoria with high ambient summer temperature - currently 33 degrees C) the CPU reports 45 to 48 degrees celsius. We have set cut-outs at fairly low temperatures.

The power supply is a 250 Watt power supply and it is possible that this is insufficient. The machine has two drives (20 and 80G), as well as a Live soundcard and a CD-writer.

Bad memory: I cannot check the graphics card RAM, but the system RAm has been replaced with the motherboard.

He now wants to spend a lot of money on a new graphics card, but I do not believe that the current card is at the end of its useful live!

I hope the above helps somewhat. As I said I only read about WinDVD and I wondered if this could be the problem.