Video Woes

[CJJohnson]

I am having problems with windows and graphics. I recently upgraded my computer to an Athlon 64 3500+ with an Asus (ATI) X300 PCIe graphics card. Since then I have not been able to play DVDs as PowerDVD locks up straight away and WinDVD 5 comes up with the error “Create overlay failed. Please lower your screen resolution or colour depth & try again”. I often experience the graphics card resetting and sometimes failing when playing modern games (Far Cry etc). I thought that the graphics card was not up to the job so I recently bought a Gigabyte X800XL (GV-RX80L256V), uninstalled the old drivers/card and installed the new one. Still the same problem. I think the problem is DirectX so I ran DXDiag. Everything comes up fine except for the DirectDraw7 test which returns “Direct3D 7 test results: Failure at step 8 (Creating 3D Device): HRESULT = 0x8007000e (Out of memory)”. If I run the DirectX test in Sisoft Sandra The Direct Draw shows red crosses against everything in general capabilities (including “Has 3d Hardware Acceleration”) and Extended Capabilities (apart from “Can render in window”). It also tells me in the tips, Video card does not have 3d accelerated hardware, No stretch support, No hardware overlay support, No Z buffering support, No hardware colour-space conversion and recommends that I upgrade my graphics card. £220 well spent there then.
I am running XP Pro with all updates and latest drivers for video.
Anyone got any ideas, apart from a Windows re-install?

 

[CJJohnson]

No ideas????

Alright then, how could I force my system to reload DirectX as it is integral to the system and would be difficult if not impossible to uninstall. All versions of Directx that I have tried recognise that I have the latest (9.0c) loaded and will not allow me to reinstall them. I still think that this is where my problem lies.
Some of the installed files in DXDiag date back to Jun 2000. Is this right?

 

[SHAWN]

Try updating your drivers for the video card. What video card did you have before the x300? I can bet that a reload would fix it, but leave that as your last resort.

 

[CJJohnson]

I have already loaded the latest drivers from Gigabyte, still have problems. Completely removed drivers from old card before installing new card.
The funny thing is that games run OK (apart from the occasional lockup). You would have thought that with that many X's in sisoft sandra that the games wouldn't even load.
If I do an "Auto detect" in the games the settings come back quite low, yet I can manually set them to "Very High" settings and get excellent frame rates.

 

[desiboi]

Run some "security" scans. Could be spyware.

 

[CJJohnson]

Funnily enough, according to MS AntiSpyware I had a Trojan, part of it embedded in an ATI folder. Anyway, I removed it and no difference. Goodbye trojan though.

 

[CJJohnson]

Took the mem down to 512MB, single channel (thought it might be a mem problem. No change. Had to re-activate windows just because I removed a DIMM?? I really love being a legal owner of windows-not.
Removed ALL video related drivers, reinstalled latest drivers (again), no change. Dohh.

 

[CJJohnson]

Could this be due to Multiple monitors? I did dabble a while ago with 2 monitors from my X300, but now I only have one which is set as my primary monitor. Could something have remained "set" for dual monitor? I only ask this because dual monitor does not support video overlay and that seems to be my main problem.

 

[CJJohnson]

I have sent a report off to Gigabyte. Worth a try.