I’ve recently had an issue with my new video card that I have also found the fix for, and I thought I would provide the fix for anyone who might be having the same issue.

My new Asus AH3650 Silent (Radeon HD 3650) came with the Catalyst v8.7 drivers, which were installed properly upon Windows XP bootup. The Radeon HD 3650, in AGP, has issues when displaying certain textures in 3D games. All other aspects of the card worked perfectly, but strange banding and discolloration occured when any D3D game was loaded.

As it turns out, the problem is actually two-fold. First, AGP FastWrite must be disabled in BIOS. The AGP FastWrite option does not properly write the texture data to the video card. Next, AMD-ATI has provided a HotFix for Catalyst and the Radeon HD 3000 Series drivers. You can get the HotFix here. This will update Catalyst and your drivers to v8.8. The HotFix also includes SmartGart for CCC, which provides information on the state of the AGP and PCI slots, and allows you to test them to make sure AGP FastWrite is off. Once v8.8 is installed and the PC is restarted, crank up the settings in the 3D menu and load up your game of choice!

This issue is also present in the Radeon HD 2000 Series cards, and the same steps may be taken to solve the problem.

Here’s a full description of the issue, to help diagnose if you are suffering from this problem:

• Broken textures that should be solid (i.e. A box that should be solid, but has transparent stripes.)
• Broken textures that display in color bands – most likely purple or green.
• Transparent or semi-transparent textures that tile as solid, with severe artifacting and discoloration.
• Text that displays garbled or text with textured backgrounds which appear garbled.
• Fullscreen images or framed images that appear “lens-flared.” The best way to describe this is if you imagine you have a picture, and in the top left corner you have a smaller copy of the picture, and another smaller copy of the picture in the top left corner of that picture. Many times, the copies are distorted in some way – whether stretched or discolored – but are clearly the same as the main image you are supposed to see.

I hope this helps at least one person, and it doesn’t take them long to find this post to get help. I worked on this issue for a couple of days before I found out what the problem was, and it was still trial and error before I found the final solution.