AGP speed on VISTA

B

betty

New member
Hi All,

I have an old radeon 64mb DDR (7200), VIVO, and am planning an upgrade to VISTA. I realize that I won't be able to run AERO or any other fancy eye candy, but I will be able to run the standard 2d desktop.

The problem is that CATALYST drivers from r100 cards do not offer support for VISTA. On a fresh install of xp with my radeon, I have to use smartgart to increase my AGP speed from 1x to 2x. I won't be able to do that with Vista with no catalyst drivers. Does anyone know how I might do this?

Thanks,
betty
 
betty,

First, let's see whether I understand the situation: VISTA has no drivers for your video card. Is this correct?

If that's correct, then how can VISTA run the graphics functions using acceptable resolutions, even in 2d? Anyway, perhaps I don't understand.

To answer your question, the AGP speed can also be set in BIOS, providing the video card is capabile of recognizing that fact. With no driver support, I just don't know what will happen.

Perhaps VISTA will include some sort of generic graphics driver to support your card. If this were up to me, I'd buy a card for which there is VISTA driver support. You can get such a card cheap these days.

Just my take on the problem. Others may have better information.

Cheers,
 
Sorry to be a bummer, betty, but any form of AGP support under Vista will be rudimentary at best. I have to admit confusion as to why you would want to run Vista at all on a machine using a sub-9x00 Radeon tho. Please outline the rest of the specs of your rig so we can get a better idea if this is even a worthwhile consideration. You should understand that attempting to run Vista on a rig based around hardware available at the time of the Radeon 7200 series will be an excersize in pain and futility even in 2D only mode.
 
Hi moshpit,

I have an athlon t-bird @ 1ghz, and 768mb of ram. Vista will run just fine on that system in 2d mode, and I have a free copy of it since I recently purchased a new copy of XP (I've been a linux user, but I've needed windows for a couple of things).

My concern is this: Under XP, I need to run smartgart and manually change the agp setting to 2X from 1x. After doing that, my radeon runs at 2X all the time. This is after installing ati's catalyst package. Normally the xp radeon driver would be installed automatically.

Under Vista, the radeon driver will also be installed automatically, and everything will run fine. However, I"m afraid I"ll be stuck at agp 1x because I don't have the control to change the setting to AGP 2x.

Do you know how I might do that?

Thanks!
betty
 
there shouldn't be that much of a difference between 1x mode and 2x mode for the radeon vivo. There isn't much you can do about it; maybe that tweaking software from entech will let you play around with it, or if rivatuner gets ported to vista.
 
Betty,

Make sure you have set BIOS AGP to 2X mode. When you do that, by default your system will run in AGP 2X if it can. If you don't know how to get into BIOS, post back. Your BIOS likely is already set at 2X AGP, if it's a 2X AGP system, but it's good to confirm this.

You don't need the Control Center to set the AGP running mode. The Control Center is just a handy way to change the AGP running mode when you're having problems. If you're not running games, you don't need to worry about AGP. Are you having problems?

I suppose you're using the Radeon drivers that Microsoft bundled with Vista. That's good to know that Vista includes such drivers. Bully for Microsoft.

Cheers,
 
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