Radeon 9200 Drivers

I've been playing Civ since it came out, with virtually no problems.
I'd never had a CTD or other failure.

The patches solved most of the performance problems - increasing the RAM from 512Mb to 1Gb allowed me to play huge maps with minimal lag.

My PC is an AMD Athlon 3000+ with a Radeon 9200 graphics card.

Then it all changed - last week I had the brilliant idea (not) of updating the driver for the graphics card.

From then on, the game got slower, and I started getting CTDs, out of video memory errors and straight reboots (no error - PC powered down). I was unable to play for more than an hour without a failure.

I have now (after last crash at 01:00 today) restored from a previous checkpoint, and am now back to the original drivers, so I'm hoping all will be well again.

For anybody that may be interested, the driver that seems to work OK is version 6.14.10.6476 (dated 25/08/2004). You should be able to download it from versiontracker.com.

As an aside, I would say this pretty much proves that this really is a driver issue - not the fault of Firaxis at all.

BTW, I don't work for Firaxis, but have been working in s/w development for nearly 30 years. It's almost impossible for a programmer to diagnose a driver bug as the act of changing the code to get any diagnostics usually stops them from happening, and anyway the bug isn't in your code in the first place.