Advice on Radeon 7500 settings.

[LawyerRon]

OK, my son just installed his Radeon 7500 64mbDDR card. Could someone please advise as to what settings we should look for to set the system up initially?

His system is a Cely 850 with 128mb of ram.

[DrZaius]

Hi Ron,

In BIOS, make sure the AGP Mode is set to 4X, and the AGP Aperture Size is 64MB or 128MB. Other than that, just install the latest Catalyst drivers and everything should work fine.

[LawyerRon]

OK, thanks DrZ.

Do we get the latest drivers from the ATI site?

[DrZaius]

Yep.

http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html

[LawyerRon]

Dr.Z, one more thing,
What's the recommended procedure for updating this driver? Do you just execute the file and it's automatic or what?

[DrZaius]

Hi Ron,

First, you'll want to uninstall any previous drivers that were installed (throuh Add/Remove Programs), then remove the old video card from Device Manager, and make sure the video driver is set to Standard VGA. Then, just run the EXE file and it will copy the needed files and prompt you to restart the system, and you're done (just reset it back to the desired desktop resolution).

[LawyerRon]

OK,
In the BIOS, we did not see a setting to set the AGP Mode to 4X so we switched it to 4X in the ATI control panel, is this OK?. The board is a Soyo 7ISA+ (815E chipset) and the manual says it supports 2X and 4X AGP.

We set the AGP Aperture Size to 64mb in the BIOS though.

[DrZaius]

In the BIOS, we did not see a setting to set the AGP Mode to 4X so we switched it to 4X in the ATI control panel, is this OK?
That's fine, though I didn't know you could adjust the AGP mode in the control panel, are you sure you didn't change the anti-aliasing feature (which also has 2X/4X option)?

[LawyerRon]

"...are you sure you didn't change the anti-aliasing feature (which also has 2X/4X option)?"

No, I'm not sure, my son did it so I'll go back and check. Thanks DrZ.

[LawyerRon]

OK, yeah, you're right, the Anit-aliasing is set to 4X in Direct 3D.

Also, in OpenGL, Full Screen Anit-aliasing is "disabled". Choices are 2 samples and 4 samples.

Ansiotropic Texture Filter is "disabled" too, with choices being "high quality" and "highest quality".

In Direct 3D, Z Buffer depth is set to 16,24,32.

These are all just defualt settings so if something should be changed, feel free to suggest.

[LawyerRon]

"Also, in OpenGL, Full Screen Anit-aliasing is "disabled". Choices are 2 samples and 4 samples.

Ansiotropic Texture Filter is "disabled" too, with choices being "high quality" and "highest quality".

In Direct 3D, Z Buffer depth is set to 16,24,32."


Does anyone have any advice or suggestions on these settings?

[DrZaius]

Hi Ron,

To be honest, I've always just left the settings to default (even used the "Default settings" button) with all my ATI cards and it's worked fine. Most of those are set for optimal performance and visual quality (not best, but good), so any adjustments would tweak it one way or the other. One thing I do know is that enabling AA (anti-aliasing) will make the games look nicer but you'll see a drastic hit in performance.

[morriswindgate]

Be carfule on the driver and software updates, some of the driver/software updates require that the version on the disk that came with the card be installed. Also the latest drivers require that directx 8.1 be installed prior to loading the drivers updates. Also if, when installing from the disk, you get the box telling you that the file being copies is newer, overwrite it and use the file that came with the card and not the windows one.

[LawyerRon]

OK, thanks DrZ.