good old catalyst 6.8 (for older ATI radeon g-cards)

**Nachtmeister** · 03-27-2009, 05:35

Not so much a help request as a general info I thought some of those with not entirely new computers experiencing battle map CTDs and the likes might find very useful (did the trick for me after a LONG TEDIOUS forum search over the whole net), so here goes:

The history of it:
I installed the new catalyst v. 9.3 graph driver, fired up EB - and dismally crashed. re-did direct x, failed, wiped my HDD, re-installed everything, failed, got a GB of RAM (ddr1) to complement the already installed GB, partially failed (the game starts up in less than half the time, same goes for all loading sequences) - AND STILL my game crashed immediately upon entering battle maps.

The root of it:
I read the release notes of catalyst 9.3, and in the effing small print, it bluntly stated:

In this Catalyst 9.3 release, the Compute Abstraction Layer (CAL) driver will not
function properly under Windows XP

which in contemporary english afaik very roughly comes down to "your graphics card cannot properly communicate with the rest of your computer anymore".

The solution to it:
I un-installed that virus of a pseudo-driver, googled "old catalyst", DLed v. "6.8" from a benevolent archive site and installed that one - now I got myself a friendly, nice-purring, fuzzy EB running at record speed with no issues whatsoever.

The wisdom gained from it:
NEVER CHANGE A RUNNING SYSTEM.
Even if it's only about upgrading old drivers - Always read release notes closely and consult tech pros before installing. If the release notes don't obviously point out issues, be very suspicious.

BTW, I am using an ASUS ATI Radeon9800Pro (AGP) with a replaced cooler (the original one got clotted with cigarette smoke).

**Tellos Athenaios** · 03-27-2009, 05:57

which in contemporary english afaik very roughly comes down to "your graphics card cannot properly communicate with the rest of your computer anymore".

Almost: what the CAL (actually Hardware Abstraction Layer) does is provide a 'blanket' for hardware of various types and vendors so that software can give instructions to hardware without having to know about the hardware. In particular it means that the Direct3D software (used by RTW in order to draw 3D things on screen) can now no longer work because the crucial 'translation table' between Direct3D functions and graphics card is missing/broken.

You may still want to spend more time to find the latest working driver available. Because it *is* important to keep drivers up to date, among other things because an improved driver is usually faster, more feature-complete and secure.

**Nachtmeister** · 03-27-2009, 07:14

My sincere thanks for granting a more detailed insight into the workings of the above described graphics trouble,
Tellos Athenaios!
I agree with you about driver upgrades per se being a "sound concept" - in this particular case, maybe 6.8 is not even the most recent "working" driver - however, the seemingly persistent problem with such upgrades is that at some point, hardware support tends to
1) cease to *fully* support older operating systems
2) cease to *fully* support older hardware components.

In both cases, this termination of full support is usually not exactly... *advertized* - for obvious reasons...
In my particular case, the download of the (in my view, plain defunct given it's official purpose) catalyst 9.3 driver was linked under and on the download page explicitly assigned (though not exclusively dedicated) to Windows XP.
Now while the GUI of WinXP may work just fine with this driver, I still think that explicitly assigning such software to (among others) WinXP while being aware of
1) ATI cards being mainly used for gaming, ergo if you need a catalyst driver you will definitely need CAL --- I mean, they designed those things for gaming in the first place ---
2) CAL being unavailable or fatally restricted under WinXP
is something between very hilarious and somewhat impudent on the part of those responsible - even if they list the problem among the "known issues" on page 6 of the release notes.

**Aurgelmir** · 03-27-2009, 18:40

lol i tryed the 9.3,and it works good,but i will try the 6.8.It can always be better hahahaha

With Winxp manager i clean to much of the goodies.So i had more probs,had to reinstall net framework,and i installed 9.3.
EB runs much better now,but reading your post over that cal thing.....i will try the older version

I post the changes...when i see any

**Nachtmeister** · 03-28-2009, 02:00

If it is actually working on your machine then I think there is nothing to be gained by installing an older version...
I apologize in case this thread appears a bit confusing; I did not mean to say that catalyst 6.8 is overall better than the "up-to-date" driver. I wanted to provide information for those experiencing problems with the new drivers so they get a hint at where to start looking for solutions before having to search all the web. (And I wanted to flame at ATI for causing me such a hassle.

) Maybe you just have a newer graph card than I do - anyway, congratulations if it is all working, and enjoy the game!

**Slaists** · 03-28-2009, 21:33

Originally Posted by Nachtmeister

If it is actually working on your machine then I think there is nothing to be gained by installing an older version...
I apologize in case this thread appears a bit confusing; I did not mean to say that catalyst 6.8 is overall better than the "up-to-date" driver. I wanted to provide information for those experiencing problems with the new drivers so they get a hint at where to start looking for solutions before having to search all the web. (And I wanted to flame at ATI for causing me such a hassle.

) Maybe you just have a newer graph card than I do - anyway, congratulations if it is all working, and enjoy the game!

In my case, 9.3 catalyst installation (btw, 9.3 catalyst is NOT the driver; it's the gui interface. the driver itself can be installed separately) messed up my .net framework (in Windows Vista); took me a while to understand what was going on. I was getting a large number of error messages on the screen stating that 'this' and 'that' script could not be found, etc. My graphics card was not working and neither was my sound. I attempted to restore my system to the state prior to installing 9.3 catalyst: in vain too... 5 restore attempts failed... Finally, on some obscure forum I found a suggestion to reinstall/fix .NET framework (mine was a brand new install, 3 days fresh). After the .NET repair, 9.3 catalyst installed and ran fine.

**Nachtmeister** · 03-29-2009, 02:01

Erm, just to be nitpicky - "catalyst" is also the name of the entire "software suite" which includes the driver. I am aware that the display driver can be DLed and installed separately (which is what I did in the first place) but I believe it even says "catalyst" in the filename...

We do seem to at least agree that version 9.3 of whatever it should be called appears to be quite bugged. ^^
Actually your .NET framework problems caused by it somehow remind me of the notorious DirectX runtime.

**Slaists** · 03-29-2009, 04:40

Originally Posted by Nachtmeister

Erm, just to be nitpicky - "catalyst" is also the name of the entire "software suite" which includes the driver. I am aware that the display driver can be DLed and installed separately (which is what I did in the first place) but I believe it even says "catalyst" in the filename...

We do seem to at least agree that version 9.3 of whatever it should be called appears to be quite bugged. ^^
Actually your .NET framework problems caused by it somehow remind me of the notorious DirectX runtime.

Well, the reason why I was making the distinction was because the driver itself is not identified as 9.3. Check the display driver description in your system hardware properties. At least in my case, the driver the system identified after I installed the 9.3 catalyst was very different from "9.3" (it was 8-something, date stamped in February of 2009).

Catalyst 9.3 identified it as the 'correct' driver so, I do not think that (the number) was an error.

**Tellos Athenaios** · 03-29-2009, 11:02

Well... perhaps the following has something to do with it? If you, like me, also run Ubuntu or any of the gazillion other Linux distributions out there; you will find that ATI ships a propietary binary-only (in contrast with the binary/source choice you usually get in Free Open Source Software - land) driver. This driver is the (in)famous fglrx driver (means FireGL/Radeon-X IIRC). However, packaged together with that driver is the Catalyst Control Center (ccc) (currently at 9.4beta in Ubuntu "Jaunty Jackalope" 9.04 beta; can you tell that is my distribution of choice?).

**Ravenfeeder** · 03-29-2009, 12:54

Im using 9.3 and haven't had any problems so far. Vista x64, Radeon 3850.
However the newer drivers are optimised for the 48xx series, so I can see why older drivers would work better with older cards.

**Nachtmeister** · 03-29-2009, 17:19

Originally Posted by Tellos Athenaios

Well... perhaps the following has something to do with it? If you, like me, also run Ubuntu or any of the gazillion other Linux distributions out there; you will find that ATI ships a propietary binary-only (in contrast with the binary/source choice you usually get in Free Open Source Software - land) driver. This driver is the (in)famous fglrx driver (means FireGL/Radeon-X IIRC). However, packaged together with that driver is the Catalyst Control Center (ccc) (currently at 9.4beta in Ubuntu "Jaunty Jackalope" 9.04 beta; can you tell that is my distribution of choice?).

I did not yet get around to re-installing Linux since my Windows XP pro SP2 busted it's self to hell (over another ATI driver issue). Decided to give my HDDs a low-level formatting while I was re-setting the system anyway. But as soon as I DO re-install, I will likely use my Slackware-distro for the two RFS partitions I made with one of those nifty Knoppix Live-CDs. However, running EB from Linux is out of the question for me - using an AMD cpu of the Athlon XP 2500 generation ("Barton") and 2G DDR1-RAM... So unless you have a magic trick how to emulate a RTW-compatible environment without busting performance down to near-zero on such a system that you would be willing to share, I'm stuck with Windows for gaming purposes for now.
BTW, I had a Kubuntu release from ~2007 before the re-set; never had driver issues there 'xcept when my graphcard-cooler got clotted with cigarette smoke and caused overheating just from running Q3 Arena for 10min - try getting mainstream Linux to run with something as ancient as your homie's dusty Voodoo3 until you manage to get a custom cooler kit to replace the clogged one when not knowing what you're doing because it's your first Linux "experience"...

@Ravenfeeder: I think it's also likely that the new drivers just are -not designed / sloppy work- for the "older" DirectX versions that still run with Windows XP. Remember, XP doesn't get DX10...