I'm new at this, please help

[Piccolo00]

I just recently purchased an ATI Radeon 128MB 9500 Pro.
Many strategy games I play will slow down near the middle of the game and start to lag especially when i scroll through the map. I've been searching the forums and I've heard about using BIOS and things like that. Can someone please tell me how I can fix this??
System:
2.2GHZ Pentium 4
Windows XP Home
512MB RAM
ATI Radeon 128MB 9500 Pro

Hi, Welcome to techIMO!

What vid card did you have before? And what drivers did you install for the Radeon?

If you have an nVidia card, you may need to uninstall the old nVidia drivers to get rid of them altogether. From the control panel add/remove programs thingo.

Hope someone can help.

Cheers
Mick

[muno]

Do you have dx9 and catalyst>3 installed?

Bioses can usually be found from manuf. site (if your card is built by ati, then from ati perhaps), if not, then you'd have to find a site that provides custom built bioses (those will void warranty).
-M

[Piccolo00]

i've installed catalyst 3.1 for the ATI and I've removed all of my old Nvidia card

[Telexen]

You may need to format the system and reinstall Windows for your card to work correctly.

[Piccolo00]

I've found this one site where I can get Bioses but I have a few questions

1) What does a BIOS do?
2) Will it help my problem?

[muno]

Sometimes yes, but a bios update isn't something that should be taken lightly, it can do a major ????up on your system.

Try other solutions first, unless you know for certain it's because of bad bios.
-M

[Piccolo00]

well I've got a few days to return it if I need to.
should I return it and possibly get a 9700 pro or maybe an GeForce? or is the problem somewhere in my computer, not the card?

Most likely a software issue, rather than hardware. As suggested, sometimes you need a fresh install of the OS to make these cards run right, as some driver leftovers are very hard to get rid of.

If you are willing to try a fresh install of the OS, that's what I'd suggest. Just make sure you back everything up you want to keep.

Cheers
Mick

[Piccolo00]

Ok I guess I'll have to give that a try.
Man... that's quite an annoyance.... but I guess I'll do it if it will fix it.
I did have a 32MB integrated graphics to start out with. I think that might be still lingering somewhere, I've heard integrated graphics are hard to completely get rid of