Fellow simmers,two days ago I got so annoyed by endless stutters and tweaking, so I swapped the old GeForce TI4200 with a Sapphire Radeon 9800 Pro Atlantis. (The card is a bit old, but the best buy at the moment if you don't wanna spend more than about $200.)Then I spent almost TWO DAYS getting this new card to work. I did everything possible except reinstalling os/sim. I tried drivers downloaded from Sapphire, ATI and DNA, all versions from 5.1 to 5.3, every possible settings with the same result: Fantastic performance ... for about five minutes. After those five minutes things were more different; freeze, ctd, total blank out, with or without strange sound-loops following the disaster.After a while I was temted to give up and ask my son if he wanted to trade his nVidia Something (better than my old one anyway) for my Sapphire. But the performance I saw those moments when it worked made me carry on. And finally I got it working. This is what I ended up with:1. Scraped out every possible traces of drivers and programs. Tools: ordinary uninstall in hardware manager, control panel and ATI's uninstall program (all of them). Then Driver Cleaner Pro (removing everything with the nVidia and ATI name on it), and finally Reg Supreme registry cleanup and disk defrag. (How many restarts I don't remember.)2. Restarted and cancelled all found new hardware wizards. Then Easy Install from the CD that came with the card! I don't even know which version (the Help tab says Catalyst version 0 :-hah ). At work I usually work on Macs where the latest drivers also happends to be the best, so I'm used to dowload the latest without question, and never use the cd. The install included also things that I already have (.NET, DirectX 9c), but I was desperate and went for the lot.3. Disabled AGP read/write from BIOS and Smartguard, but left PCI read/write on in Smartguard.Now I'm really glad I did't give up, this card is amazing considering the price tag! This post became longer than intended, and for what reason? Maybe I just wanna tell you guys not to give up if you find yourself in the same situation. Now is the time to upgrade to this amazing card (forget about 256MB and 9600, look for the 9800 Pro, 128MB is no problem). And if this post can help one single person setting up the card, it's worth the effort :). Here's a screenie from Misty Fjord:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/110378.jpgbrEagle

Beautiful shot. Sometimes writing down (typing down?) all the ups & downs of hardware tweaking can be good therapy. I think my video card just went on the fraps tonight (not my new post). But actually I have another question. How do you post your shot to show in your thread. I can only upload as an attachment that one then needs to click to see? Do I need to check that "embedded" checkbox? thx

Jupp, just check that box, and a small piece of code is pasted automaticly into your message. You can move that code as long as you don