Hack 9500 into 9700...

[Black_Paladin]

Hello everyone,

I too got on the bandwagon like you to try the Radeon 9500 hack. I like tinkering with things and therefore couldn't resist ordering a Radeon 9500 Sapphire 128MB OEM card from Newegg last week. The card arrived on Friday.

First thing I did when I got the card was to run a couple games to see if the card was running OK. It seemed to function fine. I then ran 3dmark 2001 SE and got a 3D Mark score of about 11780. This didn't impress me at all honestly because my Radeon 8500 running at 310Mhz core / 300Mhz memory was giving me almost the same exact score. Granted, the 9500 can take over the 8500 when overclocked but believe me, the fps difference in games is not significantly different even with an overclocked 9500 than a 8500.

OK, it was then time to perform the conversion hack. Just like you guys, I also had to spend some hours to get the thing to work but it worked fine in the end. For those of you still having problems. I found out that the guaranteed way to get the hack to work is to follow these steps:

1-Uninstall ATI control panel from Windows Add/Remove programs. Do NOT reboot.

2-Uninstall ATI Display driver from Windows Add/Remove programs. Do NOT reboot.

3-Put the setup files for the driver of your choice to install into a temporary directory on your hard disk. To do this, run the executable file to install the driver, when the installer asks you where you want to put the setup files on your hard disk, point to a temporary folder like I mentioned above and when the ACTUAL installation screen pops up after this, just cancel. DO NOT install the drivers yet. All we did so far is to extract the setup files from the single installation file you download from ATI's website or whereever to a temporary folder on your hard disk.

4-Make a search for the ati2mtag.sys file on your entire hard disk (all partitions) . A copy should be found under Windows\System32\Drivers. Right click on this file from the search window and choose copy. Now make a search for the ati2mtag,sy_ file. This file should be located in a subfolder under the temporary folder where you copied the setup files earlier. Go to this folder. Right click any empty area in this folder and choose paste. We have now copied the ati2mtag.sys file from Windows\System32 folder to the folder where you have the ati2mtag.sy_ file so they are both in the same place. Now make another search for the ati2mtag.sys file on your har disk. DELETE ALL copies of this file except the one you just copied to your temporary folder. So now the ati2mtag.sys file is ONLY located in your temporary folder and nowhere else.

5-Run the RivaTuner script to do the conversion hack. When the script asks you for the ati2mtag.sys file, point to the subfolder under your temporary folder where your setup files are. Patch the file that is in this folder. We have now patched the file we had copied from the Windows\System32 folder. Run the Riva Tuner script again. This time, for the file type, choose the ati2mtag.sy_ file and again point to the same folder that you just did. Now, patch the ati2mtag.sy_ file.

6-OK, now reboot.

7-When you reboot, Windows will ask you for the installation files for your graphics card. DON'T let windows install drivers automatically for you. Choose the "Install from a list of specific location" option and then point to the temporary folder where you put your installation files. Here, you might need to point to a subfolder in your temporary folder for Windows to find the .inf files which identifies your adapter. When this is done, windows will start installing the drivers and tell you that the driver you are installing is not certified. This is GOOD! Choose "continue anyway". When the drivers completes installing, you should be prompted to to do the same thing again, this time for the "secondary display". This is fine too, just do the exact same thing you did a moment ago and point to your temporary folder where the installation setup files are. When the "secondary display" is also installed you should be good to go. If you are prompted to restart, do so but in my case I don't believe I had to.

To find out if this worked, go to your display properties, go to the settings tab and the click the advanced button here. From there, click on the adapter tab and you should see Radeon 9700 for the cchip type and NOT Radeon 9500.

If this didn't work for you, I don't know what to say! I don't think the instructions I wrote could be more detailed. If you follow them to the letter, the conversion hack should work.

So, this was the good news. The hack by all means works. NOW THE BAD NEWS:

After I converted my Radeon 9500 non pro to Radeon 9700, first thing I did was to run 3dmark 2001 SE. I watched all screens carefully looking for artifacts and saw none. No checkerboards, no white dots, everything looked great. My 3D mark score went up al the way close to 14xxx from the 11780 I was getting earlier. This with the default core clock speed of 277Mhz and memory speed of 270Mhz. I decided to overclock the card some and was able to take the core up to 380Mhz and memory up to 300Mhz. Pretty sweet eh? Funny thing is Powerstip wouldn't let me go above 380Mhz for the core so this card might reach a higher core speed. (This is after I edited the pstrip.ini to alter the defaults so that I can move the slider bar higher). I ran 3DMark 2001 SE again. This time almost 16000 3Dmarks and still no artifacts whatsoever.

So if you read this far, you must now be wondering what the bad news is. After all everyhing sounds great so far right?

That's what I thought but it turned out that not everything is great. I fired up Soldier of furtune 2 and guess what? I started seeing a whole lot of shiny strange lines on some parts of the map. I then ran Urban terror which is a Quake 3 mod and guess what? I saw some flashing lines on some trees this time. I then ran some other games, this time directx ones. All in all. here is a list of the things I ran and my results:

1- ALL ATI DEMOS (Radeon 9700 and Radeon 8500 demos) NO artifacts whatsoever anywhere.
2-Unreal Tournament 2003 (DirectX) No artifacts anywhere.
3-Warcraft III (DirectX) No artifacts anywhere.
4-Medal of Honor (OpenGL) Didn't see any artifacts but didn't play too much.
5-Soldier of furtune 2 (OpenGL). Lots of artifacts.
4-Urban terror (OpenGL) Lots of artifacts.

SO THE SUMMARY OF THIS LONG POST IS THIS: IF YOU DID THE HACK AND DIDN'T GET ANY CHECKERBOARD ARTIFACTS LIKE OTHER PEOPLE AND EVEN IF ALL YOUR DIRECTX STUFF LOOKED GREAT, YOUR CARD MIGHT STILL BE DEFECTIVE IN ANOTHER WAY. In my case the defects ONLY showed up in OpenGL games but not even all OpenGL games (Medal of Honor didn't show any artifacts).

The moral of the story here is don't get too excited if your mod works and you don't see any artifacts in 3DMark 2001. It would seem that pipeline defects can present themselves in different ways. I would really like to hear from the people who say that their mod went totally successful if all of their OpenGL games look OK. Some people who are saying that everything is looking great might end up finding out that there are some artifacts in certain games like I did.

I bought this card from Newegg for $160 and now it is going back. I have to pay the shipping for RMA and a %15 restocking fee. Worth the price of an adventure I guess... Just don't have your hopes up for this mod. It seems that 7 out of every 10 card is defective in some way. This makes sense actually because I had read an article some time ago that the high end video cards had extremely low yields which contributed into their sky-high prices. This was certainly true for the Radeon 9700 Pros when ATI started producing them so there were a whole lot of junk for ATI initially which are now being sold to us as Radeon 9500's unfortunately.

 

[tseongsun]

Of the people doing the hack and getting artifacts, how many are using ramsinks?

I really need a new vidcard (I have a GF2-gts) and this seems like a pretty sweet deal considering the 9700 pro is like $400, but I dont' want it if it has artifacts all over the place

 

[<Grisu4>]

I didn't think that I need a new card, but the mod made me interesting ....

With my old Ti200 I played NFSHP2 in 1024x768 without AA/AF and it looked nice - but now it's looking very smooth with full AA/AF @1280x960 ..... wow.

 

[UnLoadeD]

Black_Paladin---did you try lowering your overclock (I had to drop my mem to 297)? It is possible that is whats causing the artifacts in some of your games. Also what is gonna be your stated reason for RMA-ing the card? If they test it out when they get it back (with unhacked drivers) they won't find anything wrong with it. And lastly I think you have it backwards saying 7 out of 10 are defective, I've read where 30% seem to be defective, making 7 out of 10 successful mods.

Nice step by step guide on doing the script. Also if you lower your overclock a bit and find that it solves your problems, somebody might be interested in buying it from you, rather than rolling the dice.

peace.
unloaded

 

[AlexG]

BP, you didn't mention if the card was still OC when you saw the artifacts? You probably checked for this but I had to ask since OC causes artifacts for sure and they don't always show up until the card heats up.

 

[BigJk-47]

LOL that wont stop me.Im gonna do it too.

 

[Shaotai]

I think I'm clocked around 320/305 or something similar to that and I'm getting artifacts in CS now.. (in dark tunnels, a purple, checkered dot or square will show up)...

Also, when I try the 9700 demo of the painting, all I get is a black screen, but in the corner, I can clearly seel the radeon 9700 logo on the bottom right. I can also hit esc and get the menu to pop up, but I don't see the demo at all! I worked before too! This was after "burning" in the system running 3dmark in a loop or running the HOCP UT2k3 bench marks in a loop and then running the demo...
Definetly some weird stuff is happening now to my system. I'll have to try clocking it down a bit and also experiment with some other settings. (I recently turned on AA/AF so that may have something to do with it, and also had setup my h20 system and was experimenting with better Overclocking speeds....)

 

[ManOfKnight]

shaotai did that fix your problem...clocking it down?

 

[Black_Paladin]

This is a post that I posted on AMDForums.com yesterday night, let me post it here too and then I'll post an update, there is some progress on the problems:

For the problem with artifacts, I unfortunately found out that it is not related to overclocking. I tried resetting my clocks to their defaults and I even tried underclocking the memory and the core clocks to see if anything would improve but no change.

I did however, discover something. As I had typed in my previous post, the artifacts I am getting are only in some OpenGL games and they were not in the form of checkerboards. Not ready to give up on this card yet, I started making some research on this. I couldn't really find any explanation to my defects but I did read 2 articles on some forums where some people said they managed to get rid of their minor artifacts by disabling either HyperZ or hierarchical Z ( I can't remember which). Well, since I had no ideas myself on how to try troubleshooting this, I took these 2 people's advice and started trying to modify any setting I could find about Z buffers and Z bit depth settings. I first tried using the Rage 3DTweak program which has a whole bunch of settings and looks really nice. Unfortunately, I discovered that the settings you change in Rage 3D Tweak do not actually change anything in any program. This might be because the program is designed for Win 9x and therefore the registry entries the program is chaging are probably wrong ones for Windows XP.

I then tried changing the force Z-buffer depth option under the ATI control panel\OpenGL tab\Compatibility settings to "Force 16-bit Z buffer" and then guess what happened? MY ARTIFACTS TURNED INTO CHECKERBOARDS!!!!

What does this mean then? I am not sure really but it does seem like this problem might not be the fault of the pipelines after all. Since there are a lot of people with the checkerboard problem, this might be a driver issue or even if the problem is with the pipelines then a fix could potentially be implemented with a modified driver. I wish we could tell this to the Unwinder guy who wrote the script for this mod. I haven't lost my failth in this mod yet.

One interesting thing to note here is this. Before I changed my Z-buffer bit depth to 16-bit, It was running at 24 bit and I was seeing some lines on some areas. These lines kinda looked like zig-zigs and they changed angles as I changed my position. On 16 bit Z buffer depth, I saw the checkerboards on ENTIRE AREAS. For example with 24 bit z buffer I would see some lines going through a wall but with 16 bit Z buffer I see the WHOLE WALL covered with checkerboards, not just parts of it. The significance of this is that the artifacts look better and much less on 24 bit z buffer. Now WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO DO IS TO TRY 32 BIT Z BUFFER DEPTH. If I could enable 32 bit Z buffer, this MIGHT get rid of the artifacts completely. All I need now is a registry setting to change or a program to enable 32 bit buffer. Rage 3D Tweak has a setting for this but none of Rage 3D Tweak's settings work so that's out the window. I need another program that works under Windows XP that can change the Z buffer depth. This artifacting problem definately has something to di with it. I know that it is possible to enable 32 bit z buffer depth on a Radeon 9700 card as even my Radeon 8500 runs with 32 bit Z buffer. As a matter of fact I wonder why the drivers don't default to 32bit Z buffer??

My theory on this problem is now this: I think that depending on the pipeline, there is a marking somewhere that creates these artifacts. For example, let's say that ATI at the factory (or the drivers) somehow mark a particular pipeline and this pipeline, when in use, can create artifacts in certain situations. In all situations though, one way or the other, these artifacts turn out to be checkerboards. Some people see the checkboards in 3DMarks demos though while others see them in different demos\applications\games. This might be becase people have different pipelines marked. This is most definately a complicated problem and most probably what I'm saying is wrong but I do believe the checkboard problem has something to do with Hyper Z or z buffer depth.

 

[Black_Paladin]

OK, and this is today:

OK, update on the glitches. I have been playin with the Radeonater program that I downloaded from Rage3D.com. It is a nice program. The important thing is that the changes you make to the settings do actually take effect in Windows XP unlike other programs. With the Radeonator, I made the artifacts go away albeit in a very strange way... To make them go away, I have to turn on anti-aliasing to 4x. This is strange as I had set anti-aliasing all the way to 6X from ATI control panel before and it had made no difference. This must mean that anti aliasing only in conjunction with some other setting that I changed in Radeonator did this. Now I am trying to isolate this setting. There is definately progress here. Maybe I'll keep this card.
In urban terror, I found out that the only way to get rid of the artifacts is to change lightmap to vertex. This is rather strange as when I tried Quake 3 original with lightmap turned on, no artifacts anywhere. It's just Urban Terror that doesn't like the lightmap.
All in all settings CAN make the artifacts go away at least. The question is how flexible the settings can be. I would rather not be forced to play some games at 4x anti-aliasing. I would like to have the option to turn that down. If I can find another setting that doesn't effect performance as much as anti-aliasing to turn off or turn on, that will be nice.

Still haven't found an option to FORCE 32 bit z bufer depth. That's what I need. It might take care of all this!

Note: I do have a reason to RMA this card if I choose to do so. In 9500 mod without the hack, I see some strange things in some games still. They are minor things but I can make people fire up soldier of fortune and as soon the scren comes up before saying loading, I think it should say something like "initializing" at the bottom but all I see is some garbage. So take note, I might actually have a defective Radeon 9500 as a Radeon 9500!! There are those too, you know.

 

[NO LIFE]

O jesus....

I am mad confused now.

BP....have you considered RMA'ing the 9500 you have now and trying the hack on another 9500? Maybe the card you have now is just crap.

-JP

 

[Black_Paladin]

BP....have you considered RMA'ing the 9500 you have now and trying the hack on another 9500? Maybe the card you have now is just crap.

Could very well be. You know this modding thing has actually made a lot of people aware of some issues with their cards. You know what I'm thinking? I'm thinking that a small percentage of some Radeon 9700 or 9500 cards that are sold as 9700 or 9500 (without the mod) might be defective as well.

You know how so many people complain about texture corruption with some games. Then ATI releases a "patch" or a new driver set and the problems go away. KEEP IN MIND though that the strange thing is NOT EVERYBODY has the problems with these games. I have a Radeon 8500 and I have been to ATI's website a lot of times and on there are a lot of patches for games. I personally never had to apply a patch for a game from there because games ran fine on my card. But there must be SOME people with the problems reported on the website, otherwise ATI wouldn't publish a patch for it on their website.

The point? I think all the "patches" ATI is releasing is only enabling/disabling featues on defective cards with problems. This would make sense wouldn't it?

I mean think about it: You might spend the money and buy a Radeon 9700 and find out that you still have some corruption with the textures. Then you go to ATI's website and apply a patch and the problem is gone! On the other hand, a friend of yours has the same card on a very similar system and he doesn't need the patch. Then MAYBE you ended up getting a SLIGHTLY defective Radeon 9700 and your problems can be "cured" by driver tweaks. It's a known fact that people don't always have the same problems on their cards, sometimes even on identical systems. In this case, you can't blame the drivers so there must be some cards out there (maybe a lot) with slight defects that are not noticable in 90% of the situations. But when you really start looking for faults, then you might end up finding them.

Look at me for example, I got my artifacts to go away with driver tweaks! In a way, what I was doing was not all that different than applying a patch.

On that note though, I played some more with the settings after I fixed the artifacts and now they are back again!
I am trying to get rid of them once again. What got rid of the artifacts was this was Radeonator program I got from rage3d.com but now the Radeonator program isn't changing any settings. Testing this is easy. Earlier when I went to ATI control panel and set the z buffer depth to 16 bit my artifacts would turn into checkerboards (this still applies) and when I set the Z buffer depth to 16 bit with Radeonator this would also happen meaning that the changes I made with Radeonator were working. Right now when I set the buffer depth to 16bit, artifacts are not turning to checkerboards but with the ATI control panel's settings they still are. So something got broken with Radeonator now. Gotta find out what it is. It could be that Radeonator only works with the original Catalyst drivers. I am now using the Omega drivers so maybe that's the reason.

 

[Black_Paladin]

And where can I get riva guys?

From here:
http://www.guru3d.com/rivatuner/

Also, more on the subject of defects, check this out:

I hadn't noticed these before. With a wallpaper in the background, they are not as appearant. This is just 2D. It looks like my card is going back even if I can fix the texture problems in games. What the hell is this shadowing??? Looks like a bunch of transparent windows stacked on top of each other!

 

[Neo_peter]

Are you using Wizzard's stuff, or rivatuner, if you've just tried one, after you rma, i think you should try both, and wizzard has lots of drivers and different hacks for them, so you should try each individual driver...
Maybe next time you should also do extensive testing before modding the card... Maybe then you can isolated the problem... Hope this helps...

 

[tseongsun]

So for sure, all of these problems are not heat related??

 

[NO LIFE]

WOW BP.......like I said before I have 9500np pure stock. And when I was playing cs the other day I noticed that the letters had shadows like the ones in that pic of your desktop. I thought nothing of it figuring it was just cs being its wacky self. The problem goes away though after I quit cs and go back in. I have noticed this twice now. May not be anything. But I will pay closer attention.

Very odd none the less. Hope my mod goes ok....

 

[Black_Paladin]

I have 9500np pure stock. And when I was playing cs the other day I noticed that the letters had shadows like the ones in that pic of your desktop.

Hmmm, so then our Radeon 9500's could really be fuxxored the way they are and we only see the serious problems with it when we do the mod... Well, I mean most of our Radeon 9500's ARE fuxxored 9700's after all!

So for sure, all of these problems are not heat related??

Yes, I am certain of that much. I am now running my case open, ambient temprature is pretty low and the card has these problems even when highly underclocked.

Are you using Wizzard's stuff, or rivatuner, if you've just tried one, after you rma, i think you should try both, and wizzard has lots of drivers and different hacks for them, so you should try each individual driver...

Hmmm, good point, I am tempted to try this. So far I have only used RivaTuner so that I am not modifying the hardware in any way to not void my warranty.

I am thinking about doing a BIOS flash though. If I save my current BIOS and flash to another BIOS, I can always go to my original BIOS, right? This should also not void my warranty.

The thing is, if all the hacked BIOS is doing is changing the device ID of the card (which many people said is the case) then a BIOS flash should not be any different than using the RivaTuner driver hack. I think a BIOS flash would only help if it was changing another thing. For example, if it changed the memory timing or something like this. I can't get rid of my artifacts by underclocking the memory but maybe if there was a BIOS to tweak the memory timings or such then PERHAPS I would see a difference.

I want to go check Wizzard's stuff. Could you give me the URL to his website? Maybe I can find something useful on his site like you said. Also, do you know of anyone that managed to get rid of artifacts after a BIOS flash (or by using a Wizzard hack) who couldn't get rid of them with the RivaTuner hack. I am just trying to find out if flashing BIOS and using other tools produces any different results at all than the RivaTuner results. If not, then there is no reason to use anything other than the RivaTuner for me (or a BIOS flash, I mean one or the other if it is not going to make a difference).

OK, an update on my problems:

For Soldier of Fortune 2, I finally figured out how to get rid of the artifacts. After playing hours and hours with the Radeonator 2 things in conjunction with each other seem to fix the problem I was having in Soldier of Fortune 2. These things are:

1- Force Z-buffer depth to 16-bit. What this does is turn my line like artifacts (more like moving triangles) into the checkerboard artifacts.

2- Turn on Anti-aliasing to X4. Performance or Quality mode does not make a difference. 2x mod doesn't cut it. At 4X though, all artifacts are completely gone.

3- Color depth also HAS to be set to 32 bit. In bit color, the checkerboards still show up even with anti-aliasing turned on.

In Urban Terror, the above fix makes the artifacts better but doesn't completely get rid of them!! To fix Urban Terror, I have to change the lighting mode from Lightmap to Vertex. When I do this, other settings don't matter. In other words, changing Lightmap to Vertex is sufficient to fix the glithces in Urban Terror. I don't need to apply anti-aliasing or 16 bit Z buffer depth like I need to with Soldier of Fortune.

So, all in all my card seems to have more than 1 defect. My hyper Z unit seems to be fuxxored in addition to other things. This might actually mean that I have a defective Radeon 9500 as a Radeon 9500!! Maybe not though. I have no proof of this at this time. Geee, now I wish I was an engineer. I am checking the RMA period. Looks like I will end up returning this card. My only hope now is for someone to figure out how to turn on or off individual pipelines so we can test which ones are defective. This should be possible. If we can tell the Radeon to use all 8 pipelines with a device ID, we should be able to tell it to use 7 or 6 pipelines too. The problem here is that there isn't a device ID written for this. If someone could make up such a device ID, then maybe we could have this card identified as a Radeon 9600.

Hey but for the people that are having the checkerboard problem in directX, I would say try setting the z buffer depth to 16 bit and then use anti-aliasing like I did. For this, you don't even need Radeonator. You can adjust these settings from 3dmark 2001. From the 3dmark settings screen, set the z buffer depth and turn on anti-aliasing to 4x and check to see if you are still getting aritfacts.

 

[UnLoadeD]

Hey BP, the bios flash alone won't get you anywhere, you also have to short the two pins on the gpu where the resistor would be moved to. I ran the driver hack on mine to test for artifacts. No artifacts so I was happy, then I went and installed control panel and things got buggy. Thinking control panel didn't like the hacked drivers I removed them and control panel, shorted the pins with defogger repair kit, flashed bios to 9700Herc ones, installed real drivers and then control panel. It's still a little bit buggy but much better. I really don't think it's fair for me to blame the hacked drivers, I think my troubles are from leftover drivers and utilities from my AIW 8500 that I had in before. All I did was uninstall MMC, CP and drivers, didn't reformat or crawl the registry. I'm about 99% sure a fresh install of XP would solve my glitches. Also I was running my FSB at 190mhz and getting a bit of bios tearing, dropping down to 166 gets rid of that.

peace.
unloaded

 

[ManOfKnight]

that was something I was going to ask...BP did you lower your CPU overclock? maybe the card doesn't like your high FSB rates...

 

[Black_Paladin]

that was something I was going to ask...BP did you lower your CPU overclock? maybe the card doesn't like your high FSB rates...

Hmmm, my PCI clock is locked at 33Mhz and my AGP at 66Mhz respectively though. So, my AGP bus is not getting overclocked at all. I don't think this is it.

Hey BP, the bios flash alone won't get you anywhere, you also have to short the two pins on the gpu where the resistor would be moved to.

Oh yeah, I had forgotten that, thanks for reminding me. man. I feel really burned out from testing this card for hours and hours every day. I would have just flashed the BIOS for nothing. I don't want to do the hardware on this card so that I can return it so the BIOS flash wouldn't work for me.

The thing is I am getting a strange artifact when starting up Soldier of Fortune even in the Radeon 9500 mod. I'll post the pic here tonight when I come back from school. I'm still thinking I might have a defective Radeon 9500 as a Radeon 9500. Otherwise, I should have no artifacts at all in the Radeon 9500 mode right ?

I also tried different drivers, Omega, Plutonium, old versions of Catalsyt, etc... No change.

I also get rid of all my graphics card files before I switch to another set of drivers. I make a search for ati*.* and delete everything and start fresh.