ATI Users

[DragonSkye]

Ok, I know ppl are having problems, so am I, but there has to be someone with an ATI card whose game IS working.

If you are one of the lucky ones, please sound off with your OS and model of your card as well as driver/catalyst version.

I'm running Win 2000 pro with SP4 and fully updated, ATI Radeon 9600 128 MB, Catalyst 5.13

Even if you are having problems, maybe we can work this out.
My problems have to do with corrupt videos. They don't "stutter". They sometimes work beautifully, but most of the time they look like garbage, just a bunch of screwed up squares with the music in the background. Also I'm having trouble with seeing portraits of the leaders..sometimes the area where they are supposed to be is black. And the menus forchosing a technology to research as well as new units to build are screwed up in that the lettering at the top looks like garbage. And after about a half hour, the whole game takes a dive and VPU recover comes up.

I have tried all the uninstall/reinstall solutions..they don't work. Also the reduction of hardware acceleration. Have seen the turning off AA solution, but never had it on in Civ4 anyway. And the Catayst control center does not have an option for turning it completely off. Its either on all the time or "application preference".

[TheHateMale]

Running XP Pro.

AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1GB DDR 400 RAM
Radeon 9600 pro with 256mb RAM (The box also says Atlantis and the the supplier is Sapphire. Not really sure if this makes a difference though).

It's on 8x AGP with Fast Write enabled.

The driver installed to a folder called "5-10_xp-2k_dd_cp_wdm_27256"

Whenever upgrading the driver I use ATI's driver removal software and reboot first.

[DragonSkye]

Yours is running fine under the 5.1 catalyst then?

[TheHateMale]

I haven't noticed any problems.

I haven't got to the late game since installing the patch though. Marathon game speed and all...

[DragonSkye]

Ok, thanks for the info. I'm downloading all previous versions of the drivers. I might as well try them. Nothin else works for me. It's just that almost everywhere I've gone said to make sure you had the latest drivers for everything, and I already did, but having problems. I'll try to go back to earlier versions and check them out too.

[TheHateMale]

The install file is 5-10_xp-2k_dd_cp_wdm_27256.exe - you should be able to Google it. Failing that I'll e-mail it to you.

Edit: ...or maybe not. It's 25.3MB.

[DragonSkye]

lol...25 meg isn't a problem on cable. I've already downloaded all previous versions 5 - 5.13 and the 3 versions before 5 they were all like 25-35 meg...thanks though. I'm probably going to spend some time testing them out then get back on here. If anyone has any other suggestions feel free to post.

[DragonSkye]

By the way, you can get the previous versions off of ati.com it just takes a bit of hunting for them. When you go to the customer care page then the driver/software in the left pane, you click your operating system, then model, then previous drivers/software, for anyone who wants to know

[Kloreep]

Dell Inspiron 6000 Laptop
Pentium M 1.5 GHz
512 MB RAM
ATI Mobility Radeon x300 w/ 64 MB VRAM
My driver is dated 12/3/2004 with a version number of 6.14.10.6483

Works fine for me.

[DragonSkye]

Ok mine is finally fixed. If you are using the new 5.13 catalyst and still having problems, go to ATI's website www.ati.com and download an earlier version, of catalyst control panel and drivers version 5.10. I posted earlier on how to get there. Hopefully that will help someone else who is having this kind of problem, and couldn't get the other fixes to work.

[DragonSkye]

Ummmm....seems I spoke too soon. It fixed the corrupted videos,but after about an hour and a half of play it gives a variety of crap. I can't zoom out too far from my cities or the corruption comes back. Then it will occasionally crash, and if I get so far in the game (buiilding the space race pieces) the damn thing gives me an out of video memory error. I checked task manager while I was playing the game and it was eating up wayyy too much CPU power. I'm running dual MP 2800+ ( 2.1 Ghz) palominos (Barton series) with a gig of RAM, and it was taxed at 100% on both processors...WTF?????? and it was eating up over 450 MB of RAM on top of the memory my processes were using I don't think ANY amount of tweaking on my video card settings is gonna help that...Anyone heard about another patch coming out for this piece of @$%&!??

[DragonSkye]

Ok, after all the headaches this game has caused me...All the fixes I've tried to apply..and the ignoring of my emails to support. I've decided to start filing complaints with the Better Business Bureau at http://www.bbb.org/

They will handle these type of complaints about an unfinished product. Also, no business can afford to have a poor rating with the Better Business Bureau so they seem to respond faster. I'm tired of jumping from forum to forum looking for a fix given by one of their customers that might give me a glimmer of hope for playing the game without problems. It's time to actually DO something about it.

Everyone is encouraged to do the same. Please keep in mind, not to use abusive language in the complaints filed or they will not handle the complaint.

[Auldian]

It's working fine on my installation. I've patched to 1.52.

[LongKnife56]

I have 2 ATI systems - one desktop and one laptop. The desktop always worked with all versions and updates trhough 1.52 after I originally updated the video drivers (to whatever was the latest when the game first came out - catalyst 5.12, I think) Desktop has AIW 9600 128MB.

The other is my three year old Dell Inspiron 8200 which has a mobility 9000 with 64 MB. It was working and then it stopped for some unknown reason (system cleaning?) Anyway I would briefly get the start position and then the screen would go blotchy white blank. Dell tries to control what the drivers their customers can use, but I got the latest catalyst 5.13 drivers from ATI and was able to manually update to the radion 9000 ones so now it works at least for the first turn.

[Elftor]

Since the latest patch the game work fine for me if I turn off sound, so I know it's not my my ATi card that is the problem.
I first ran with a 9800pro 128Mb and a week ago a traded it up to a X850XT which runs like a dream. I use the 5.13 Catalyst driver.
Civ IV was not the reason I changed, Civ doesn't need that kind of raw graphics power. I "needed" it for need for speed most wanted!

Why I can't play the game with sound flawlessly is very strange. It CTD's randomly letting me play for hours sometimes.