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ATi HD 3850 AGP Return to Castle Wolfenstein crash

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First post, by Shiftyy

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Hi all,

I'm trying to play RtWC on my ATi HD 3850 AGP and it keeps crashing the driver within a minute of the first cutscene.

I have managed to finish the cutscene if I set all details to their lowest, but it eventually crashes a few mins into the first level.

I have asked @agent_x007 to try on their HD 3850 and they had the same results.

We have tried many driver versions, from oldest to the newest and inbetween.

I have installed the latest game patches, tried r_primitives 2, and anything else I could find.

No luck. Still hard crashes the video driver within a minute in the first cutscene.

Has anyone experienced this problem and could offer some advice?

Windows XP 32bit SP3.

Reply 1 of 9, by dominusprog

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Use Display Driver Uninstaller to completely remove the current driver and try a different version then.

https://www.guru3d.com/download/display-drive … aller-download/

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Reply 2 of 9, by leileilol

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Do you have a glide wrapper like nglide installed that's causing RTCW to freak out and try to use its provided WickedGL ICDs? It's really buggy for the Voodoo card detection and that'll throw a lot of things off. Make sure r_glDriver is set to opengl32 and r_glIgnoreWicked3D set to 1.

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Reply 4 of 9, by Shiftyy

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leileilol wrote on 2026-05-24, 17:23:

Do you have a glide wrapper like nglide installed that's causing RTCW to freak out and try to use its provided WickedGL ICDs? It's really buggy for the Voodoo card detection and that'll throw a lot of things off. Make sure r_glDriver is set to opengl32 and r_glIgnoreWicked3D set to 1.

I don't have a glide wrapper installed.

Reply 5 of 9, by jmarsh

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From memory RTCW is one of those games that blindly reads the opengl extensions string into a fixed size buffer without caring if it fits, that may be causing all sorts of delayed chaos by overwriting other memory.

Reply 6 of 9, by BitWrangler

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Point an IR thermometer at the bridge chip when it crashes, if it's over 70C, that's your answer.

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Reply 7 of 9, by Shiftyy

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BitWrangler wrote on 2026-05-25, 16:33:

Point an IR thermometer at the bridge chip when it crashes, if it's over 70C, that's your answer.

This isn't the issue.

Reply 8 of 9, by Shiftyy

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jmarsh wrote on 2026-05-25, 16:33:

From memory RTCW is one of those games that blindly reads the opengl extensions string into a fixed size buffer without caring if it fits, that may be causing all sorts of delayed chaos by overwriting other memory.

Is there any patch or fix for this?

It seems strange that the problem is only occurring on a HD 3850 and nothing else.

Reply 9 of 9, by jmarsh

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Shiftyy wrote on 2026-05-28, 00:47:

It seems strange that the problem is only occurring on a HD 3850 and nothing else.

It crashed on a lot of cards that came out in the years after the game's release, that's why I know it's a common problem.

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