VOGONS


First post, by luigi-master

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Greetings. First and foremost I feel like this question might not be entirely relevant to this forum, since the games I'm having issues with aren't quite "very old", and Windows XP is far from a "new system", but I reckon you guys might have an answer. Recently I've acquired a Radeon HD 2400 Pro, Visiontek brand, and had a hassle trying to install its drivers; I finally did it with Omega drivers. When I tried to play certain games, the card seems like it doesn't perform as well as it should; for example Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) suffers from slowdown during any scenes with particle effects, such as explosions, and the entirety of Simpsons Hit and Run runs at a low framerate (~15-20 FPS), even on the lowest resolution setting. It runs worse than if I were to use integrated graphics! I am not sure if the HD 2400 is a weaker card than my prior Radeon 9550 (which I had to retire as it started artifacting), or if there's something wrong with my GPU, considering how I had a hard time trying to install drivers and getting Windows to identify it. Any and all help would be appreciated, thank you!

Reply 2 of 10, by leileilol

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you can try not using omegadrivers. I never trusted those.

Also the initial HD Radeon series is known to be jank (HD3850 was a big redemption). Also is this an AGP model? Bridged PCIe->AGP RadeonHD cards are known to have problems.

apsosig.png
long live PCem

Reply 3 of 10, by luigi-master

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yochenhsieh wrote:

Here is the place for old hardwares:)
General Old Hardware

Oh darn, I'm sorry! Is it possible for a moderator to move this please?

leileilol wrote:

you can try not using omegadrivers. I never trusted those.

Also the initial HD Radeon series is known to be jank (HD3850 was a big redemption). Also is this an AGP model? Bridged PCIe->AGP RadeonHD cards are known to have problems.

Regarding omega drivers, those were the only drivers that my PC would accept for this card, installing the appropriate catalyst drivers from AMD's site would install fine, but Windows would not recognize my GPU, and thus wouldn't let me play games. My card is an AGP card, according to the label 8x AGP, and when searching for drivers, AMD's website didn't clarify between PCI-E or AGP drivers.

EDIT: I uninstalled the omega drivers and downloaded the drivers from visiontek's website, and disabled anti-virus, that seemed to have done the trick. Simpsons runs at an appropriate speed while TMNT still suffers from slowdown, though that game could just be poorly optimized. However, San Andreas refuses to boot, it says that it encountered an error and had to stop. Maybe I can installing the drivers from AMD's site with the A/V off, perhaps that was blocking progress. Wish me luck.

Reply 5 of 10, by frudi

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The HD 2400 is a really weak card, so my guess is the performance you're seeing is not far off from what you can realistically expect from it. Its performance was absolute trash when it launched in 2007, so I can definitely see it being the rough equivalent of a mid-range card from 2003-ish era, such as a Radeon 9600 or 9550.

That said, it should still be able to play 2003-era games in lowest resolutions with low-ish quality settings. So if you can't achieve that, then perhaps there is a driver conflict going on or perhaps there's some hardware issue like the card overheating. Install GPU-Z or some other hardware monitoring tool and have a look at reported frequencies for GPU and memory, if they are what they should be under load (which should be 500+ MHz for GPU and 400-ish MHz for memory). Also keep an eye on temperature to see if it gets too high while stressed. If it starts going into the 80s or 90s (°C) range, it is too high. If there are temperature issues, check that the fan on the card is spinning (if it has one) and that the cooler is making good contact with the GPU die. Might also replace the thermal compound while you're at it, since it's probably still using the original one which has likely become useless by now.

On the software side, you can try first completely uninstalling any ATI related drivers and use a tool like DDU to clean up anything left behind. Then try installing the plain old ATI drivers again. Try some older driver versions if the latest ones don't work, any release you find that goes back to at least 2008 should support the card. Again, with any drivers you try, use GPU-Z or something similar to make sure the GPU and memory frequencies are reaching their specified values in 3D mode. If they're lower, the card might be stuck in some lower power mode.

Reply 6 of 10, by LHN91

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I still have my AGP Radeon HD 2400 Pro. In terms of raw performance in some ways it sits around the same as an Intel GMA950 - albeit with a fuller featureset and hardware TnL. I had a laptop with a GMA 950 at the same time and used to pick what to play games on based on whether it needed the features of the 2400 Pro or not.

Reply 7 of 10, by bakemono

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2400 pro was a low end GPU for sure but it should still easily beat a Radeon 9500 or Intel, unless you got a dodgy card with slow memory. I'll echo the advice about running GPU-Z, and if it were me I would also examine the part number on the actual memory chips and do a search to find out their real spec. I have seen cards that had DDR2-800 but it was underclocked to 667 by the video BIOS and other similar situations.

again another retro game on itch: https://90soft90.itch.io/shmup-salad

Reply 8 of 10, by swaaye

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I've used a few HD 3450 cards and I felt they were similar to a 9600 Pro. Rather pathetic but it was what had to be in order to build a cheap DX10 card at the time.

I remember some other things about those cards. They can accelerate BluRay, but they can overheat doing it because of insufficient cooling. They can also start stuttering if too much video processing is enabled. And they can't do 6X AA because they have only one of the R600-class RBE units IIRC.

It's also the same GPU integrated in the ATI/AMD chipsets for AM2/3. However those have an updated UVD engine (similar to the 4000 series) that can decode video a bit better (and do Flash decoding).

Reply 9 of 10, by SPBHM

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the GPU itself should be a little better even than the 9600XT I would think (500Mhz 4ROPs/TMUs 8 VLIW5 Shader units); , the problem is that the memory bandwidth is pretty low compared to that, 64bits slow DDR2...

Reply 10 of 10, by luigi-master

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eL_PuSHeR wrote:

[Moved.]

Thank you, I appreciate it!

Anyways I solved my issues; apparently I needed to turn off A/V and use Visiontek's versions of the drivers, and Simpsons runs just fine. I also fixed San Andreas by deleting the .set file, which seems to be the cause of a few problems for that game. In any case, I noticed that the fan seems to be spinning at 100% speed, or at least it's very loud, and I've replaced the paste last night. It still has performance issues, but from what I seen, the HD 2400 was basically a glorified video adapter, not really meant for gaming. I feel kinda fleeced for buying it at 19 dollars, considering I could've gotten a GeForce 7600 GS for 15, which seems to have been quite a bit faster than the HD 2400. Looks like I'll hold onto the 2400, unless I can do something to bring back the 9550 back from the dead. I also have an HD 4670, which is apparently the absolute fastest AGP card ever produced, but I think it would be overkill for a Pentium 4 HT, plus I could sell it for some big $$$!