First post, by retro games 100
- Rank
- l33t
Introduction
I am testing an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP video card. Its part number is PN 109-A07500-00. It seems to have heatsinks on nearly every chip! I'm testing it on a KT133A based mobo with 256MB of RAM, and a mobile barton 2000+ rated CPU.
1) Link to this card's BIOS.
2) Link to the ATI video card flash utility, FlashRom version 2.4.
3) Links to the ATI Catalyst driver version 3.7. See note 3 below.
4) Link to the ATI Catalyst driver version 6.2.
Notes
1) The webpage for the BIOS says that the same BIOS can be found in the Crucial 9800 Pro, GeCube 9800 Pro, and Powercolor 9800 Pro cards. I assume this is the latest BIOS.
2) This utility works in DOS. BTW, I found out all of the card's relevant BIOS info by running Everest Ultimate.
3) Please google for this file. It's called wme-catalyst-7-93-030812a1-010735c-efg.exe. I tested some of these old ATI drivers, and information about these tests can be found below. I found that version 3.7 was the fastest.
4) This is the latest and final driver which works on W98. It was written with ME in mind, and is based on the WDM (windows driver model). It seems to be the slowest driver to use, when I tested it with Windows 98.
Benchmark info
I decided to test some of the old ATI Catalyst drivers. I wanted to see if they made the card run any faster or slower. I began with version 3.1, and ended with version 6.2. Uninstalling one version then installing another version was problematic. In the end, I got this technique working OK. What you need to do is this:
1) Uninstall the ATI Catalyst software found inside the Windows 98 Control Panel "add/remove" software area. If it's listed as one item such as "ATI Driver", then you just need to uninstall that, but if it's listed as a "cluster" of 3 apps, with one of them being called "uninstaller", then double-click on that one in order to uninstall all 3 of these apps. Then reboot.
2) Delete the "error / yellow exclamation mark!" VGA driver found inside the W98 control panel System / Display area. Then reboot.
3) When the desktop reappears, W98 will reinstall the VGA driver. Rebooting is not necessary at this point.
4) Run Driver Cleaner version 2.7. Select to clean out the "ATI" driver. Then reboot, although this may not be necessary.
5) Install the next ATI Catalyst driver for testing...
Benchmark data
The format below is x=y where x is the ATI Catalyst version and y is the score from 3DMark 2001 s.e.
3.1 = I could not get this to install. I don't think this version covers the Radeon 9800 Pro card. I think the Pro card was released after version 3.1 was released.
3.2 = I could not get this to install. The installation routine reported "infsetup errors". I expect this version does not cover the Pro card.
3.3 = I decided not to look for this version on the net.
3.4 = 11502
3.5 = 11506
3.6 = 11534
3.7 = 11663 (Fastest)
3.8 = 11554
3.9 = 11454
3.10 = 11528
3.? = I'm not sure if there are any more 3.x drivers, after version 3.10. I've seen 3.11 mentioned, but when I downloaded it, it was version 4.1
4.1 = 11489
4.2 = 11451
4.3 = 11297
4.4 = I don't think there's a driver for W98 from this version onwards. Apart from one more they did, which is version 6.2
6.2 = 10187 (Slowest)
It was a lot of "fun" trying to track down all of these old ATI w98 driver versions. If you want to do the same, here is a good tip. You'll find the Windows 2000/XP versions much easier to find. For example, just take a look on the oldapps.com website. Once you find them, notice that each download package has a text file in them with the large driver name. Copy this in to your clipboard, and paste it in to google, and then rename it to wme-xxxx, where xxxx is the large driver version number. (You want to remove the wxp-w2k letters.)
Then google for this search string. You'll then find the wme (windows me) driver versions fairly easily. Another tip is - change the first group of letters from wme-xxxx to control-panel-xxxx, if you find that the downloaded wme driver package has been "cut down" to just include the driver itself, and it does not contain the ATI control panel app. You can then track down the correct version number for the ATI control panel.
The card