3850 AGP is supported in Vista

THE OTHER DAY we published our review of the PowerColor HD 3850 512MB PCS AGP. A fine and dandy event that many of our readers appreciated. But they were left gagging for more when someone pointed out that “Vista Catalyst 8.2 supports 3850 AGP”. That left us wondering where’d that come from? The 8.2 catalyst notes spoke of no specific new support for this. So does Catalyst 8.2 support Vista?

Yes and no.

Here’s the how and why: If you plug the 8.2 Catalysts in your system you’ll be left out to dry as the drivers themselves refuse to recognise the card. “Standard VGA adapter” all round... So where is the “support”? Well – 8.2 (and earlier even) DO support AGP inside Vista, what it doesn’t do yet is correctly identify the AIB partners’ device IDs.

We contacted their ATI communications staff and they told us that support for AGP is forthcoming, but right now all they can do is sit on their thumbs waiting for their AIB partners to supply the correct IDs for the cards. Once that is done, ATI can include them in the next Catalyst revision – and you’re on.

Just to give it a go, we opened up the *.INF files in the Catalyst driver package and found they had no specific device ID for the 3850 AGP. We looked under the Powercolor, GeCube, Visiontek and Sapphire devices and none of these included an AGP 3850 device. What we did see was support for older AGP cards.

So what can you do right now? Well, if you don’t mind dropping the Catalyst Control Center, you can simply force Windows Vista to use the standard 3850 driver in place of a specific driver for the standard ATI Radeon 3850. It works, no glitches.

On the other hand, if you know what you’re doing, you can write in the necessary device details in the Catalyst drivers and repack them. The 3850 AGP Device ID is 9515, the standard PCIe 3850 is 9505, the remainder you can just run GPU-Z to get your vendor ID (that’s usually 1002 for ATI), subvendor (depends on the brand), and revision. If this works right, you can get AGP + Catalyst Control Center running, so you can overclock the card – although Catalyst still doesn’t let us go over 720/950...

Either way, Catalyst 8.3 should be coming at about the same time the partners ship their cards en masse, it won’t be a headache, and you can rest assured that Catalyst will support AGP 3850s as much as the standard PCIe versions. µ