Radeon 7000?
By
Golden_Avariel,
Posted on: 2009-11-10 24:19 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
They are telling him he needs to upgrade his video card because it is below the Minimum Requirements for the game.
Minimum supported ATI card is a Radeon 8500.
If the game spit out 20 dollar bills people would complain that they weren't sequentially numbered. If they were sequentially numbered people would complain that they weren't random enough.
Black Pebble is my new hero.
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*does a double spit-take*|
Originally Posted by Golden_Avariel
My friend is getting an Assertion date error when he tries to login to the game. He's running a Radeon 7000 and support is telling him he has to upgrade his card to fix the problem. He is understandably doubtful that would actually fix his problem since the error message doesn't mention the graphics card at all.
Is anyone running or ever run that card with COH? I notice when I try to find drivers for it they go WAY back to like Catalyst 6.6 so I'm thinking NCSoft support might know what they are talking about, however money is an issue so I want to make sure he must buy a new video card to play. |
Um. The Radeon 7000 was simply a clock speed bump of the original Radeon graphics card from 2000 : http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=1
It only manages DirectX 7 adherence, and if I'm right in saying, didn't even properly support OpenGL 1.1. When AMD began it's OpenGL rewrite in 2006, the original Radeon's and the 7000 / 7500 followups had long been out of production. So they'll still only use the really bad OpenGL driver.
Because it's so old and doesn't even support the version of OpenGL the game was originally built against (Open 1.4), it was never supported and was outside minimum requirements.
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The very big problem here is that the Radeon 7000 was only a PCI or AGP release, which indicates your friend is going to have to upgrade more than just his graphics card. There's a recent thread... um, here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=198343
The poster in that thread has a Geforce 6800 GT card and was looking for AGP upgrades. Well, for starters, the first thing you might notice is that AGP varients of today's low-end graphics card, like the RadeonHD 4670 mentioned in that thread, carry a heavy price penalty. The original price of the AGP 4670 is $125. The PCIe version is $65. A little more than half the cost.
That's also presuming that your friend has an AGP slot that can handle a modern card. If he's running an AGP Radeon 7000 on a system that he got back when the 7000 was new, chances are his AGP slot is only going to be a 1x or 2x slot, and thus physically incompatible with the cards available now.
If your friend is using the PCI version, he's going to be in an even worse situation.
The best PCI card on the market is the 9500 GT 1gb which will set him back $85: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814187084
But you'll still pay a premium over the PCIe version, which costs just $55 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814187034
And it will actually be really, really, really, slow, because the PCI bus is really slow.
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Based on the information given in the original post it's a fair shot your friend isn't just looking at a new graphics card. He's looking at buying a complete new computer.
Thanks. I had already told him that I thought the 7000 was too old but would ask. It isn't like I keep up with graphics cards so I have no idea how the ATI numbering works, when anything was released which ones are before or after or the same as the stated minimum or what they supported (aside from ATI literature which says the 7000 supports DirectX 8 and OpenGL).
Most of his doubts arise out of the fact that she can run Guild Wars with no problems at all. I told him different games, different requirements.
I have no idea what sort of computer she has but I know it is the same age as his computer which runs the game fine with an X-something... 600 I think. Hopefully they can find a card that will fit and it does fix her issues. I'm mostly concerned that they'll spend the money to do that and it won't fix the original problem... as in the video would have been a problem if they could have gotten that far but there is actually something else wrong.
[Edit: Just spoke with him and he has a 4x AGP. He decided that even if it doesn't fix COH it'll probably make GW run faster so he's good to take the risk. He's looking around for a new card but they are pretty rare. I'm not sure what to tell him is compatible at this point much less the most value for the dollar. Anyone ever heard of HIS cards?]
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Um. No.| (aside from ATI literature which says the 7000 supports DirectX 8 and OpenGL). |
ATi literature says the Radeon 7000 supports DirectX 7.
That was the reason behind the naming scheme (back then). The Radeon 7x00 series supported DirectX 7, the Radeon 8x00 Series supported DirectX 8, and the Radeon 9x00 series supported DirectX 9.
ATi abandoned this marketing plan though as various Radeon 9x00 cards, the 9000, 9100, 9100 IGP, 9200, and 9250, were actually Radeon 8500 remixes. They did this because the Radeon 8500 series of cards was actually a better match, performance and feature wise, to Nvidia's GeforceFX entries, than the more powerful cards based off the Radeon 9700 architecture.
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Ok, but...|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Um. No.
ATi literature says the Radeon 7000 supports DirectX 7. |
http://ati.amd.com/products/radeon70...000/index.html
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* Incredible 3D graphics performance with ATI Pixel Tapestry 3D rendering engine * Supports DirectX® 7.0, DirectX® 8.0 and OpenGL® * DVD playback with integrated motion compensation and iDCT |
Not that it matters. We all now know the 7000 doesn't support COH and he's comitted to getting another card assuming he can find one.
I just found the list of supported cards on the support site and I've forwarded it to my friend.
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Oig.|
Originally Posted by Golden_Avariel
Ok, but...
http://ati.amd.com/products/radeon70...000/index.html So that's what I was going by. I can't help it if it's wrong. *shrugs* Not that it matters. We all now know the 7000 doesn't support COH and he's committed to getting another card assuming he can find one. I just found the list of supported cards on the support site and I've forwarded it to my friend. |
I forgot how much DirectX made my head hurt. Yes, I know this doesn't matter, and yes I know I'm being a bit of a pedantic idiot harping on this, but I sort of can't let this go as a matter of documentation for anybody searching the forums for Can I Use a Radeon 7000 or 7500 to Play CoH.
The case in point here is exemplified by both the GeforceFX and Intel Integrated Graphis chips.
The GeforceFX was announced and marketed as a DirectX 9 graphics card, much like the Radeon 9700 / 9500 cards from ATi. However, game developers quickly found that if they used the stock rendering path from DirectX (and from OpenGL for that matter, although at a later date because OpenGL 2.0 only arrived in 2004), the GeforceFX cards were horrendously slow unless they used a special mixed path or vendor specific OpenGL instructions from Nvidia.
The fact was, the GeforceFX cards was actually a DirectX 8 hardware card that had been designed to compete with the presumed successor to the Radeon 8500. ATi's completely mind-blowing and unexpected Radeon 9700 took Nvidia by surprise and they had tried to bolt a DirectX 9 accelerator onto a chip that wasn't designed for full Shader precision. The biggest developer to raise a fuss over this was Valve : http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/13/4
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Intel is a different story. They don't typically try to bolt additional hardware or additional logic onto their graphics chips. Rather, if you actually look into the specs behind the Intel Chips, you'll find that while Intel advertises DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support with pixel and vertex shaders, their graphics chips actually don't have shaders like you'd find in an Nvidia or ATi card. Rather, the Intel chips largely rely on the main processor for some features, like transform and lighting.
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The point here is a difference between Hardware and Software support.
Hardware support is when all of the features of an API are accelerated in one chip and does not require the use of a co-processor or additional external programming logic.
Software support is when the features of API can only be partially run on a single chip, and require an external co-processor, or must use the system's main processor in order to complete the functions.
Yes, the original Radeon cards and the clock bumped Radeon 7000 and 7500 series could run a subsection of the graphics API as specified in DirectX 8. However, they could only run a Sub-Section of the API. If you actually made a game that utilized all of the features that could be accelerated in hardware on a DirectX 8 or DirectX 8.1 video card, yes, you could run it on a Radeon 7000... but... many functions would have to be run in software on your central processor.
Which is why ATi can, and did, promote the original Radeon card as supporting DirectX 8. It did. It just didn't support the DirectX 8 Graphics API in it's physical hardware.
My friend is getting an Assertion date error when he tries to login to the game. He's running a Radeon 7000 and support is telling him he has to upgrade his card to fix the problem. He is understandably doubtful that would actually fix his problem since the error message doesn't mention the graphics card at all.
Is anyone running or ever run that card with COH? I notice when I try to find drivers for it they go WAY back to like Catalyst 6.6 so I'm thinking NCSoft support might know what they are talking about, however money is an issue so I want to make sure he must buy a new video card to play.