Thanks for the input.  I guess with all the various messages here it's easier to assume that it is a driver problem.  If that's the case, it  might be a good thing (if they resolve it in a future driver) because I put on a cooler on my motherboard that is kind of hard to take off once it's in place.  So, replacing the motherboard for me would mean replacing the CPU as well.

As I said before, when installing Unreal Tournament 2004, there are images that changes from one to the next.  With the integrated HD3200 on the Asus M3A78-EM, I can see the images appearing block by block as if the computer is taking lots of time generating the image.  When I tried an X1650XT, the lag was gone.  When I installed an HIS HD 4670, it only lasts for like half a second, but that block by block image appearing is still there is you're staring at the screen and looking for it.

The very same thing applies for 1080p videos.  In other words, X1650XT no lag, HD 4670, tiny bit of lag that you have to look for to see and HD 3200 some lag.

What I find makes the choice difficult is you won't be able to play UT3 or Crysis or anything like that with an X1650XT.  I mean there's just no way.  This leaves you with a choice of modern cards which may have HD improvements but the ones on Nvidia cards are actually off by default.  Not only do you have to enable that but also you may have to adjust the colors to your liking on a Nvidia card.  This means ATI graphics are more user friendly so if you're not used to playing with settings on a graphics card, then you need to learn it when buying a Nvidia card.  Also, the only difference from what I read between the 8800 GT and 9800 GT is the 9800 GT has physics acceleration or whatever they call it again.  That might be a good choice, I'll see later what I want I guess.  Chances are if I get one I would also choose a Thermalright HR-03 with a 92mm Scythe or Nexus fan.

Hi,

Tested just 4 fun 8.10RC2.
Nothing new :-(

ATI answered to my ticket - for them only a problem from Firefox :-(

Well, it seems that ATI doesn't see a problem. I finally make up my mind and decided to buy nvidia card, to exclude this problem in other ATI product. I hope it suits me well. Bye bye ATI...

or ati is trying to fix it..
if you are so great coder and you think its easy, why dont you help them find the problem?

-------------------------
i chuj

I think a bunch of us posted detailed info to help them out.  What can we do?  We're kind of helpless here.

That's ATI's job even if some of us are programmers we won't waste our time releasing something that isn't our job.

These guys should had learned better programming skills if they can't do their jobs that means they need training to find the issue or maybe get better programmers.

I kind of wish that guy who made the Omega drivers could fix the problem.  I thought he wrote somewhere Jesus Christ told him to make drivers.  I wish Jesus Christ would tell him to make a 780G chipset driver. 

Hi,

I have the same problem with Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H motherboard.

Does anybody know if this problem also appears when IGP is in crossfire with, HD 3450, for example.

Hi guys!!

I just bought a Asus M3A78-EM this weekend. I spent the hole week trying to fix this until I found this topic.

I am having the firefox problem too! So I tried to downgrade Catalyst to 8.5 (and it didn't work, the windows freezes after booting up) and yesterday I tried 8.10 (the CCC crashes, so I can't start it)...

I was so worried because I could even not play downloaded 720p mkvs. Lags happens all the time, specially in camera moving scenes. So I overclocked my Athlon X2 3800+ from 2.0GHz to 2.4GHz (4400+ equivalent) and the problem was the same

So I think this is related to AMD drivers too... Hope they fix it soon!

It was supposed to be my first HTPC, but it's more like a nightmare!

 

 

-------------------------
HTPC-> Athlon X2 3800+ / ASUS M3A78-EM / 2x1GB DDR2-800 / 320GB SATAII / Samsung LCD Series 6 - 40" / Still need a nice case...

You know, as I posted before, I did see some visual effects I did not like with the on-board HD3200 and an HD4670 that I installed.  It seems there were no issues with an X1650XT but I can't really used that since it's in another machine and not powerful enough for UT3.  So, I ordered an 8800GS.  It may arrive here this week.  So, I hope I'll be able to post results.

Anyway, about the CCC crashing.  You could try downloading the redistributable package for dotnet 3.0 and installing that.

Hi everybody!

Thanks for the information. Now I could prove the problem is really with the driversp. I tested some of your sugestions, like removing some of the hardware acceleration, it worked for web pages, but not for 720p/1080p videos.

So I put my EVGA 8800GTS 512mb from my personal computer in my HTPC (Asus M3A78-EM). And like a miracle, everything worked fine! There were no more lags in firefox or 2D moving windows and I could play the videos (without hardware acceleration - I used CoreAVC, that uses only the CPU for decoding) without lags... so the problem is indeed with AMD video drivers...

Hope the fix it fast!!

Anyone have another workaround until we have better drivers? RMA it?

-------------------------
HTPC-> Athlon X2 3800+ / ASUS M3A78-EM / 2x1GB DDR2-800 / 320GB SATAII / Samsung LCD Series 6 - 40" / Still need a nice case...

I can't believe that a problem like this hasn't already been discovered and fixed by the ATI Team.  I see that many of you have desktops with this chipset.  I bought a laptop that also has this chipset.  It is an HP 1004 NR laptop that i bought from bestbuy.  It shipped with windows vista home premium originally.  I had no 2d window slowdown problems with vista...just many many many other problems that in the end made me switch back to windows xp. 

They claim it is "Only" firefox...this is definately not the case.  I use this laptop for work.  There is a very small very simple program i use every day.  This program runs amazingly fast on even some of our old toshiba laptops running windows 98 with old 486 processors and less than 32 MB of ram.  It runs so slow in full screen mode on my new "Powerful" dual core 4gb ram HD3200 laptop that it is almost unusable.  I have to keep it out of full screen mode to even be able to use it effectively.

I have been so so dissappointed with this chipset.  My old laptop, which had less than half of the specs of this new one, could run circles around this one.  It was only a single core amd processor with 1gb ram!!

I am at a loss as to what i should do.  I can't use vista because i had way too many problems with it and it ran too slow on many things that run fast in xp.  I want to use windows xp, but if they don't fix this problem soon i'm going to lose my mind.

I just don't understand how a computer with this type of "good" hardware under the hood can run slower in some scenarios than and old piece of crap laptop from the late 90's.

AMD/ATI DRIVER TEAM...PLEASE FOR MY SANITY AND FOR THE REST OF US HAVING PROBLEMS, TRY TO ACTUALLY FIX THIS PROBLEM INSTEAD OF BLAMING IT ON FIREFOX OR SOME OTHER PROGRAM.  THE PROBLEMS EXTEND FAR FURTHER THAN JUST A PROGRAM.  MY ENTIRE WINDOWS SYSTEM IS SLUGGISH.  NOT EVEN CLOSE TO WHAT THE PERFORMANCE SHOULD BE FOR THE HARDWARE I HAVE.  TRUST ME I KNOW, I BUILD COMPUTERS ALL THE TIME.  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE!!!

If anyone knows a better way to get their attention please let us all know.

Edited: 10/17/2008 at 10:25 AM by joshunger

The race for the first directx 10 compatible IGP was fierce.
AMD came first releasing the HD3200 at least 2 months ahead of Nvidia's Geforce8200.

This market rush is the reason why the chipset has hardware bugs and why driver support is so poor. But it is also the reason why AMD attracted so much more customers for their IGP.

AMD released the RS780 to China first in an attempt to sort out much of the driver problems "on the fly". (poor chinese!)

http://xtreview.com/addcomment-id-4077-view-AMD-RS780-will-start-in-China.html

Now AMD is happy, pockets full, and we are screwed.

I too was a happy nforce user that jumped on the RS780 midnight train. Come on guys, we have to at least give them some credit as their strategy really worked.

I would very much want to say that installing an external graphics card would solve the problems but I can't. AMD's chipsets suffer from poor AHCI support (detection delays / long boot times) and poor USB 2.0 berformance.

Thats it for me.

Edited: 10/17/2008 at 07:50 PM by deej

Which Nvidia chipsets are good then?  I'm kind of confused in that department. lol

EDIT:  I'm not going to Intel for several reasons.  First, the Intel mounting mechanism I've read is a major pain in the rear.  Second, by the time AMD comes out with their 3.0 GHz Phenom in December '08 or January '09, it will likely be pretty close to the E8500 in Unreal Tournament 3 performance.  And the fact that the new Intel core still reveals in some more benchmarks that it can't surpass the Core2 (unless this is really a driver issue they can correct in the future). Also, the new Shanghai and Deneb processors will get them even closer to Intel Core2 performance.

Well for business use, we were quite happy with Geforce 6150.

But for a gaming pc I wouldn't even think AMD - even on nvidia chipset.

Hi!

I've got the same problem on my GigaByte MA78G-DS3H with an Athlon X2 4850e and 2 GBytes of RAM (Kingston). 3D performance is awesome, but 2D... well, could be better, especially when using Firefox 3.0.3 (XP Pro SP3) where I get the same problems with scrolling as already mentioned here.

Could the problem being fixed if I install an additional graphics-card? If ATI can't/won't fix this problem in the near future, I would do that instead. Too bad, that I couldn't use my old ATI card (Radeon X850 Pro), because the mainboard doesn't have AGP anymore.

-------------------------

Mainboard: GigaByte MA78G-DS3H
CPU: AMD Athlon X2 4850e
RAM: Kingston ValueRAM DIMM 4 GB DDR2-800
OS: Windows XP Professional SP3
PCIe: GeCube Radeon HD3450

Hi guys... Well, I found the solution for my problem: it was not the driver - it turned out to be the Samsung TV (Series 6). It has an option called ("Cinema mode" or movie mode). When it was activated, there were lags on the hdmi image. With it off, I have no more problems watching 720p or 1080p movies. But the low 2D performance still remains...

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HTPC-> Athlon X2 3800+ / ASUS M3A78-EM / 2x1GB DDR2-800 / 320GB SATAII / Samsung LCD Series 6 - 40" / Still need a nice case...

I have been following this thread for a while now. I owe a Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H with HD3300 and got exactly the same problems with 2D performance. I got 2GB of RAM and a 4850e CPU alongside it.

I had a few conversations with Gigabyte and ATI using their tickets systems, but no luck so far. So far to me there seems to be no other cause than the Catalyst drivers. Hopefully we will get working drivers soon.

I did found out that the new Google Chrome browser has barely any scrolling issues like Firefox 3 has. You could consider downloading Iron Portable (a Chrome variant, but more secure in terms of privacy and it won't modify any registry items or create folders on your HDD). http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php . Personally this browser is not sufficient for my needs, but it makes an enormous difference in terms of performance. 2D performance in other applications remain problematic though.

I was wondering whether an additional HD3450 videocard would solve this problem completely? And can I keep using my regular HDMI connection in that case? If this would solve the problem, I don't mind sticking in a HD3450 for a few weeks, they are very cheap. Please let me know.

I just found the latest 8.11 RC1 drivers, still in testing fase, but it has a new OpenGL and new 2D Driver. Perhaps this will solve our issues.

You can find the driver here:
http://www.driverheaven.net/vista-radeon-display-drivers/171282-catalyst-8-11-rc1-8-542-download.html

If anyone has tested it already, let me know what your results are.