I recently got a sapphire ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP and it runs many games really well

I can even max out crysis warhead with no lag and hold 20-25FPS at 1440x900

But my problems start with games using opengl, mainly second life

I get 6-15FPS and it is very laggy.
And if I try to turn or move, the game goes down to 1-3 FPS and hangs and stutters as the scene is rendered (probably due to it making almost no use of the video memory (I have noticed this with many opengl apps)

When I checked using rivatner,  the GPU usage of the card was at 30%  and the game was  only using 5.44MB memory


With my old geforce 6800, the game was able to use all of the 256mb memory
And my average framerate with it was 25-30FPS


I dualboot multiple copies of windows xp, and I recently installed another XP to make sure it wasn’t a problem with moving from nvidia to ATI

Still had the same problem

Why does the card refuse to use more than 5.44MB video memory with many open gl apps

My system specs:

Motherboard:
      CPU Type                                          DualCore AMD Opteron 170, 2717 MHz (9.5 x 286)
      Motherboard Name                                  Asus A8V  (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 4 DDR DIMM, Audio, Gigabit LAN)
      Motherboard Chipset                               VIA K8T800Pro, AMD Hammer
      System Memory                                     2048 MB  (PC3200 DDR SDRAM)
      DIMM1: G Skill NS                                 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM  (2.5-3-3-6 @ 200 MHz)
      DIMM2: G Skill NS                                 1 GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM  (2.5-3-3-6 @ 200 MHz)
      BIOS Type                                         AMI (03/15/06)

    Display:
      Video Adapter                                     ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series  (512 MB)


Screenshot of  sl and riva tuner   http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4189/39558766kj8.jpg


d3d games run fine, but opengl has poor performance as it refuses to use the videocards texture memory

especially second life which will lag and even hang for a few seconds when turning  as the screen is redrawed

cinebench opengl test  shows me getting 40-43FPS  but it also refuses to use the texture memory and only uses 20-30% gpu usage and about 30-40% cpu usage

I never had any of these problems with my geforce 6800, second life and other opengl games ran fine, SL held 25-30FPS 100% no lag when turning, it used all available texture memory  (i could even span it across both monitors, effectively doubling the resolution, and second life would still run at 25-30FPS and no lag)



also 1 extra question, on the back of the 3850, theres a chip next to the agp slot that has a thermal pad on it and it gets very hot. would it void my warranty is I was to stick a small heatsink on it?

I was able to find more info to the cause of this by running gpu cap

http://www.ozone3d.net/gpu_caps_viewer/

my card shows this



it shows 0MB opengl texture memory

while for the main card info it shows me having 512MB memory, just 0 for opengl

AMD opteron 170 @ 2.71 GHz

2GB ddr 400 overclocked

ATI radeon HD 3850 AGP 512MB direct3d memory, 0MB OpenGL memory

More info on the 0MB opengl problem here 

http://forums.amd.com/game/messageview.cfm?catid=279&threadid=108194&enterthread=y

Hi.

Same here on an Asus AH3650 Silent. Tested Catalyst 8.12 and 9.1. And got 0 MB of texture size. Despite the card having 512 MB of RAM on it. That must be why Quake 4 lags a lot!

Have you reported this to the Catalyst Crew? Because I have. It would be better if everyone having this issue reported too.

Best regards.

Athlon XP 133*15\1.65V@200*11.5\1.85V

Abit AN7

Asus AH3650 SILENT 512 MB for DirectX / 0 MB for OpenGL

Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO

Windows XP SP3

It does the same thing on Nvidia cards

http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/GPU-Caps-Viewer_5.png

Game.AMD Administrator

I memory serves me well, on my old GeForce 6600GT it doesn't.

Athlon XP 133*15\1.65V@200*11.5\1.85V

Abit AN7

Asus AH3650 SILENT 512 MB for DirectX / 0 MB for OpenGL

Corsair TWINX1024-3200XLPRO

Windows XP SP3

Im having the same problem, but with a different game.

I have the same card too (HD3850 AGP 512MB) and KotOR I & II (Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic) are giving me trouble.

If i use a force speed the screen gets full of lines (green-blue-red-brown).

The thing is i know what the problem is, and i know how to fix it.

I have to use an old opengl version (from catalyst 7.11) and placed on the game folder. This way the game will use that opengl version while using the newest on every other game. The problem is if i do, the game says it doesnt recognize my card and that im using an windows generic version of opengl .

I downloaded catalyst 7.11, and in the inf files the HD38xx series are there and it seems to be supported, so i dont know what the problem may be