Lost Pixel Shader 2.0 and other 3d features.

I've lost all recognition on my card fro Pixel shader 2.0 and other features revolving around 3d. I can no longer run certain games I once could. I don't know what the problem is. I've tried to reinstall drivers over and over. I've tried to reinstall directx9 which is leaving me wiht problems. (I'm still trying to get it to uninstall so I can reinstall it. I'm about to download an unistaller.)

Does anyone know what can take that away. I ran an online thing a forum search result mentioned about testing your system to play star wars legos.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/lego-star-wars/

I ran it and it said I was fine for everything but my video card. It says this:

Video RAM: Required - 32 MB , You have - 256.0 MB
Video Card 3D Acceleration: Required - Yes , You have - No
Video HW Transform & Lighting: Required - Yes , You have - No
Pixel Shader Ver.: Required - 1.1 , You have - 0.0

I have a 9800xt and I have all of those and above. This fits the rest of my problems but I can't get it to recognize any of the things on my card anymore. I have 3 exposed ram chips on my video card. Could them overheating or something from that cause it to not recognize this? Or would it be some software problem?

Have you reinstalled windows?

I will not reinstall windows to fix that kind of a problem. Certainly not as a first solution. What would cause that to happen? Or what could?

I've tried reinstalling the drivers. I still have to try to remove and reinstall directx.

Did you try driver cleaner?

That haven't tried yet. But do you know, or does anyone, what would or could actually cause it to do this? Or what has to be there to make it recognize those are their from windows or the cards perspective. What is involved in that from the systems perspective or the hardware itself?

What would be involved in this sort of problem? What could be involved in this problem? Is this more of a windows XP related problem or is it more related to the card and drivers? Do I need to post this in the microsoft forum?

Bad drivers, windows being a pain, the vide card breaking... a few things could be involved.

You really need to give a lot more info. Sorry. Reinstalling might be your best bet t figure the problem out. But a few things that might have caused it could be windows wear-down from extended use, the drivers might have become corrupted, the video card simply overheated and fried, or some other fluke such as a power surge that zapped your hardware, or something as simple as an AGP gart driver gone bad. Like I said reinstalling from scratch might be the best bet.

If your completly unwilling to reinstall try using driver cleaner on both your graphics card and motherboard drivers. Follow the directions exactly. Then reinstall all the drivers. If that doesnt work you need to get a thermal probe and open your case and give us some tempatures for your grpahics card, cpu, NB, hardrive, how long your system stays on, and how long you have had that install of windows on there as well as how you go about keeping up on your system.

Anyway your question is a little to broad and Im sorry we cant help you more but you simply did not give enough info. Its like saying there is a noise coming from my car, how do I get it to go away?

Also you mentioned that you had a radeon 9800xt. What company made it and what kind of cooler is on it. I have seen a few later model 9800xt with a very tiny low profile cooler on it that overheated quickly. If this is the same as yours your core could have started dieing. Usually this starts showing checkere board marks or lines in the screen first but I have seen weirder things happen out of the norm when PC parts start dieing too.

I had the default froma 4 year old ATI 9800 xt. yea I'm getting almost checkorboard marks on the windows logon screens and stuff. I just bought and installed a Thermalright V1a or something but I have 3 mem things with no protection.

The old heatsink broke a screw like rod that was holding it down a few months ago. I don't remember when the checkerboard stuff started thought. But the problem with the game not recognizing stuff happened a week ago or so. It just happened at one point after an error or a regular boot up.

when I asked what could be involved. I meant what does the computer hardware or software use to check it. What from a hardware perspective could cause it not to be able to recognize it if it were from overheating? Or What besides teh drivers would be used to detect if the hardware had these features? what is involved on that lv. I would think their are only so many files it actually uses to check that. Or does each peice of software use some logic to check it? And if so what does it check? I'm asking more for what I can look at to troubleshoot not for you to give me a complete answer too the whole situation. I'm looking for stuff so I can do it myself and not need the help. Windows infastructure isn't that complicated. They woulduse some general logic in how they deal with this. So there would be some logic in where or how to look at it wouldn't there be? ON top of that the card architecture or whatever is relivant. I'm looking for deeper system stuff.

And what are the other signs of a GPU dieing I might see if that is what is happening?

Sorry, I have a hard time with having to reinstall windows becuase I don't have a good way to back up. I'm always hoping I can work within the system to fix things. I think I am hopeing for a purly software solutions. Or to eliminate those first. Then I don't have to buy hardware also. (It doesn't seem like there are alot of people doing stuff on that lv with xp like it seemed people did with previous versions of windows.). I have a feeling the card is more than likely the problem but if i can get rid of the small problems and make the card work better for a while or completely reverse it somehow then that would be a load off for me. That's why I'm trying to get rid of possible driver/software problems. I just don't know what things in the computer would cause it, or help it, not to recognize something like that(Especially since it happend very suddenly and I don't know why). I was hoping I could eliminate as many things as possible, if I could, in the system since I figure it might techinically be simpler.*sorta* I guess I'm flipping out a little. I was just hopeing for soemthing besides the standard checks that are around today for xp. There has to be some way to go about screwing with the individual stuff on the system to check it.

I did driver cleaner and reinstalled but the catalyst center isn't in the menu on hte desktop when i right click so I'm going to reinstall it to see if it comes up. I'm installing 7.8. I can't do it again for another few days though. And what other information do you need. The upkeep thing is basically just installing windows updates or reinstalling drivers and stuff. I turned off restore points though because I didn't want it to automaticaly restore, like it had been at one point, and cause me to loose data. OOH, I get alot of bsod's now. or stoop errors or whatever. I've been meaning to try to go over them but I don't think I know how to that well or not yet. I've been trying to teach myself to do certain stuff, including programming, and debugging. I keep forgetting to look what the stop errors were form. I wonder if it has something to do with it. I have been having a colmination of issues lately I think. I'll post when I get to them.


I have an awful lot of errors this month from Source: ati2mtag; category: crt; Event 45062. do you know what htat is related to. I haven't googled it or anything yet.Edit: around 10 of them are category: CPLIB(out of around 50-100 crt in the since the 14th.) But I don't know if that was when the problem with the Pixel shader stuff popped up. I'm assuming that is when I must have installed the 7.8 driver combo. I have some DHCP Event; 1002's.System Errors category (102) event 1003. Category W32TIME event 29. And a handful of others. I have to look them up still.

Do you know where the stop error logs are kept. I've read it a few times but I can't remember. I think some of my more recent ones were related to ati. (Ihave been getting alot of those in general too.) I wanted to see what files they listed.

And I only have my computer on a few hours a day. When I am home. I turn it on do stuff then turn it off. I used to use power down mode but I have something that I keep forgetting to deal with where it auto restarts windows while in power down mode. I think I delt with this before but i have no idea why. I"m guessing it's related to some power setting in windows or in the bios that I changed some time back. Probly unrelated though.

I'm pretty sure the loss of pixel shader recognition, or whatever is happening, was unrelated to any driver changing. I think it happened seperate fromany install. It may have happend with a BSOD or other type of error though. I can't remember right now though. Not saying it wasn't related to one but it was not very directly linked to when I changed drivers or reinstalled them from what I remember.

Would one of the memory chips be specifically related to how it looks or says it has those features? I have 3 bare now(from the new heatsink not being fully installed. I have to find something to cover them because of how they are layed out.). I know this happened after the card had been sitting for few months with a loose heatsink(the original one). But do you know what part of the card would deal with that if any? I don't know where too look to get info and I haven't been able to find it on the internet anywhere. Or anything like it. There isn't much info on the pixel shader from what I can find. FYI I stayed away from any heavy 3d games since hte heatsink broke because I knew it was overheating on some of the heavier 3d games inthe past If I played too long after some point(this may or may not be related to one game specifically. It is the only one I played for a while with alot of 3d graphics.(Planetside))

User290 said:

I've lost all recognition on my card fro Pixel shader 2.0 and other features revolving around 3d. I can no longer run certain games I once could. I don't know what the problem is. I've tried to reinstall drivers over and over. I've tried to reinstall directx9 which is leaving me wiht problems. (I'm still trying to get it to uninstall so I can reinstall it. I'm about to download an unistaller.)

Does anyone know what can take that away. I ran an online thing a forum search result mentioned about testing your system to play star wars legos.

http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/lego-star-wars/

I ran it and it said I was fine for everything but my video card. It says this:

Video RAM: Required - 32 MB , You have - 256.0 MB
Video Card 3D Acceleration: Required - Yes , You have - No
Video HW Transform & Lighting: Required - Yes , You have - No
Pixel Shader Ver.: Required - 1.1 , You have - 0.0

I have a 9800xt and I have all of those and above. This fits the rest of my problems but I can't get it to recognize any of the things on my card anymore. I have 3 exposed ram chips on my video card. Could them overheating or something from that cause it to not recognize this? Or would it be some software problem?

Click to expand...

That was a common failure mode with the 9800 cards along with the card suddenly ID'ing incorrectly and/or
drivers not seeing the card at all (so you were always prompted to install drivers every time Windows starts.

Viper

I didnt read your whole last response to forgive me but Im in a hurry and wanted to give you a response. I do applaud your efforts in trying to understand and learn your way around the infrastructure in the PC. It is nice to know and diagnose problems.

As for the software side most pieces of software will read the ID of the GPu on the card and test for certain instruction sets in the GPU. This is also done through the drivers as well. But becasue you used driver cleaner to erase all forms of the drivers off your computer and installed fresh and known working files on your PC you know the software is not the issue with your card. So it leads to a hardware issue.

This is where a LOT of other background knowledge comes into play. I recommend you look into cooling and effects of cooling heavily. Air cooling can get much more complicated then what meets the eye. Also some background knowledge in the hardware your dealing with in itself is helpful.

I can go on forever about the effects of cooling in your system like I said I suggest you do research in that topic your self. You said a spring retention screw came off your heatsink on the card a month or two ago. This poses a huge issue. That spring retention screw is required to apply even pressure of the heatsink against the GPU. Without even pressure the heatsink is not able to effectivly cool and "suck" the heat out of the GPU quickly enough which causes it to over heat. You can check for heat marks on the GPU die and on the back side of the card itself. All though depending on the manufacturer and how bad it overheated you may not always see them. Look for a round blotch of off colors in these areas. This will show signs of heat stress and overheating. When your card overheats it breaks the electrical contacts within the GPU itself which causes it to fail.

This is also where the back ground knowledge of the card comes in. 9800XT's had an issue with getting very hot. I have seen many of them fail with conventional use with properly working stock heatsinks. Also as stated above this was a common issue with this card. Seeing how you have the stock heatsink on the card and it was not properly seated on the card leads to it being overheated. Unfortunately to check for this problem you have all ready taken the software steps you can take. There is not much more you can do. You've all ready covered a broud spectrum with the process of elimination this way. To be completly sure its not a software issue the next best thing we can tell you to do is to reformat. This ensures a clean system with fresh and unaltered or fragmented files. But again by what you said it sounds like the card simply overheated and died.

Yea, it is alot worse since, I think sometime last night. I took out the card but hadn't read about teh stress marks.

I did notice it happens in the bios and before the windows install. If that makes any difference. But it is now more than just chekermarks. Even the screen to check for my harddrives is like an 4 bit color nightmare in some areas. They are like 3 1-2 to 4 lines worth of spaces in two areas on the bottom and in the middle. The rest is blackish. And I went from even checkermarks to more numerous ones on the windows loading screen. and the screen I"m looking at now has what looks likea very thick, what are they called, those lumberjack shirts but thicker sets of lines. I wasn'tsure if it would be anything besides my card. I'll have to look for the heatmarks. I'm tring to get some hardware to test tomake sure it's not something else.

Thanks for the info. Hopefully soon I won't need it. I'm planning to try to start EE and a Computer science degrees in January if I can. Hopefully some programming and 3d modeling or maybe extra math if I can get it(Or anything else). I'll have to go back over the card after words and play with it.

If only teh P4C800e board from asus had some minor onboard video. Or can you use s video for monitor displays? I'll have tohook up my old tv to it and see. I'm not sure if it was outgoing or incoming.(and look it up in the manual.)

Atleast the lines go in and out on occasion. Sound like anything familiar?(I think it is actually individual pixels. they keep changing but I think they are all actual pixel size. There are, at times, five columns to ten going across the screen of the same repeating pattern. 1280x1024 at 60hz refresh rate.)

User290 said:

Yea, it is alot worse since, I think sometime last night. I took out the card but hadn't read about teh stress marks.

I did notice it happens in the bios and before the windows install. If that makes any difference. But it is now more than just chekermarks. Even the screen to check for my harddrives is like an 4 bit color nightmare in some areas. They are like 3 1-2 to 4 lines worth of spaces in two areas on the bottom and in the middle. The rest is blackish. And I went from even checkermarks to more numerous ones on the windows loading screen. and the screen I"m looking at now has what looks likea very thick, what are they called, those lumberjack shirts but thicker sets of lines. I wasn'tsure if it would be anything besides my card. I'll have to look for the heatmarks. I'm tring to get some hardware to test tomake sure it's not something else.

Thanks for the info. Hopefully soon I won't need it. I'm planning to try to start EE and a Computer science degrees in January if I can. Hopefully some programming and 3d modeling or maybe extra math if I can get it(Or anything else). I'll have to go back over the card after words and play with it.

If only teh P4C800e board from asus had some minor onboard video. Or can you use s video for monitor displays? I'll have tohook up my old tv to it and see. I'm not sure if it was outgoing or incoming.(and look it up in the manual.)

Atleast the lines go in and out on occasion. Sound like anything familiar?(I think it is actually consistant of individual pixels. they keep changing but I think they are all actual pixel size. There are, at times, five columns to ten going across the screen of the same repeating pattern. 1280x1024 at 60hz refresh rate.)

Click to expand...

Refer to my post above. The card has died and the way it did was an extremely common End of Life failure mode for 9800 cards.

Viper

What is the best nvidia card to buy as a replacement? someone said the 6800gt or xt. Do you guys have any opinions on what the best replacement would be. I haven't looked at what is on the cards yet. And i have looked in about 4 years. I don't even remember which ones came out together. Are there any other good cards?

What is your budget?

As little as possible and I wish I could get a new system instead. Unless I can get a better PC for less than the card replacement, though, I"m not getting one.

I have a P4C800-Edeluxe(Asus):
2.4 Celron
1 gig ram
250 gig mirror raid(SATA Caviar 8mb, I forget the bandwith type)
9800xt
Plextor DVD/CD burners.
Audigy2Platinumpro
500watt ATX PS (I beleive)

Basically. I forget some of the specs.

Do they have any none DDR (ddr2 or up) that cost less but are atleast the specs? I didn't want to lose much but I don't want to spend much either. 150 is alot for a 4 year old card. I'd also like to possibly get one that I compatible with the Thermalright V1 ultra cooler that I just bought. Unless other cooling is not a problem for the card. I'm looking on newegg atm comparing ati and nvidia cards and seeing what else is out there. I saw PCI physics card from Asus. How do those hold up to other video cards?(Other odd cards in general not just it.)

Compatibility
ATI: Radeon 9800, X700*, X800*, X850 (*: Check for details)
NVIDIA: GeForce 6600*, 6600 GT*, 6800, 6800GT, 6800 Ultra, 7800GT, 7800 GTX (*: Check for details)

I was looking at amd stuff since I've never bought one of their systems. But I don't know what outperforms the intel ones. I could probably bring over my harddrives if it's cheap enough. But I'd problably be better off waiting when I have more money. I don't think I can do a 75 dollar new AMD system that is worth the upgrade even though I have a 2.4 celron(the original one for the 478 that overclocked well.).

Cheapest thing on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814136007

Sadly I couldn't find any AGP dx 10 cards.

How good is sapphire. They ahve some nice higher card versions for under $100. their higher end radeon:SAPPHIRE 100198L Radeon X1650 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Retail
is cheaper than the smaller ram version right now. The new egg listing seems to get more expensive the more ram you take off. 8)