Hi,

This is just for information for anyone using a Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card as I've recently found a fix elsewhere online that made a good improvement to the performance in LFS. There've been other threads about recommending an AGP card, and I had previously given up on this card and assumed it was simply worse than my old Geforce 6800 that it replaced, but now it runs quite well after having finally found a fix.

The problem was lower than expected FPS in-game & when I tested it using the Unofficial LFS Benchmark with Fraps it would only average 0.1 FPS on the low detail config, whereas an older Geforce 6800 would manage 95 FPS. Something was evidently wrong.

Actual in-game performance wasn't as bad as the 0.1 FPS benchmark result suggested, but the card's performance was still below what I expected. I thought this was fundamentally due to the Radeon having less memory bandwidth than the Geforce, but I was wrong. Now the Radeon gets 111 FPS on the same test.

The solution was to disable the 'Microsoft UAA High Definition Audio Bus' driver (under 'System Devices' in Device Manager, Windows XP). Previously my CPU usage had hovered around 20% in task manager on one core when idling, but by disabling the above driver this stopped entirely. This was a problem I previously looked into but hadn't got anywhere with. It's to do with the HDMI audio on the Redeon card, possibly looking for something to do or conflicting with the SoundBlaster Live! card I use instead.

Anyway, maybe someone will benefit from the above. I had virtually given up on the card as being underpowered & was considering getting a whole new system, but now LFS is perfectly playable so I just wanted to let other people know in case anyone was experiencing the same problem.

Hopefully the new LFS update when it arrives won't make my system redundant by it being too slow, but I'll just have to wait & see.

EDIT: Further note that the latest ATi Hotfix drivers [v.10.11] for AGP seem to auto-undo the disabling of the unwanted driver. I've found that I don't have this problem when using the last official Gigabyte Catalyst drivers so I use them, v.8.66 [vga_driver_ati_xp_8.66].

My main system specs for reference:
CPU: AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ @ 2.42GHz o/c.
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, socket 939.
Gigabyte Radeon HD 4650 AGP 1GB (model: GV-R465D2-1GI).
4GB system RAM.
SB Live! sound card.

a good fix is unplug it and bin it xD

That's an interesting fix indeed. But have you actually tried installing AMD's HDMI driver and see what happens?

I used the latest Catalyst drivers from Gigabyte's website. I've just found some AMD HDMI drivers as you've suggested but their release notes direct you to the Catalyst driver notes, they are a 'unified' set of drivers so I think it is simply included within Catalyst, therefore I've already got them installed. I don't really want to mess further with it now as it is working well & I have no need for HDMI audio anyway.

Here's the forum where someone found this fix (see end of 1st page):
http://forums.amd.com/game/mes ... 0Definition%20Audio%20Bus

This also appear to be relevant:
http://forums.amd.com/game/mes ... 0Definition%20Audio%20Bus

You don't have them installed, if you did it would say "ATI High Definition Audio Device", not "Microsoft blah blah blah Device". But yea, if you don't need HDMI then there's no point in installing anything else.

Yep, you're seem to be right, they're not in the Catalyst drivers; I've just installed the latest AGP hotfix version of Catalyst & gone through the custom method rather than the express one, it doesn't mention any HD Audio.

The 'Microsoft UAA..' thing seems odd but it fixes the problem nonetheless. I don't want to add more drivers for something I won't be using.

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

That's an interesting fix indeed. But have you actually tried installing AMD's HDMI driver and see what happens?

When I was looking for an AGP card, I found the same thing reported on the AMD forum. It seems that the on board audio over HDMI for the Readon cards don't play nice with other sound card drivers.

Maybe it's an AGP problem. My Radeon 4870 has HDMI audio onboard, and the correct driver for it is installed, and everything works fine.

Yes, the forum page I linked to suggested that AGP does not like/is incapable of having two devices on it, i.e. graphics + HDMI audio, whereas PCI-e doesn't have this issue.

Quote from mr_spoon :

Yes, the forum page I linked to suggested that AGP does not like/is incapable of having two devices on it, i.e. graphics + HDMI audio, whereas PCI-e doesn't have this issue.

Funny how it should have this issue. I bet it's just that they did not care as AGP is pretty much dead. Although if your going to sell it, you should support it.