Dreaded ATI wavy text bug

[smoothdragon]

I recently RMAed my Radeon 9500np because it failed to display on start-up. That Radeon 9500np was a sweet one, being factory unlocked and softmoddable. This new one I got back from mwave wasn't softmoddable, but no big deal since I just wanted my video card back. Put it in, uninstalled and re-installed the drivers, and loaded up Windows. Within a couple of hours, I noticed the text becoming wavy on my screen and the textures on my Winamp skin rolling vertically. I chalked it up to the refresh rate and kicked it up to 85Hz on 12x10. Still wavy. I thought it was my cell phone so I moved it on the other side of the room and also moved my PDA to that side for good measure. Still wavy. Uninstalled/reinstalled drivers running everything on stock speeds and even knocked it down to 11x8 and the text is still wavy. I ended up having to use the computer at 1024x768 in order to mitigate the waviness of the text/textures.

I've heard about this ATI bug for a long time, and I thought people just wasn't installing their drivers right had electrical interference. Now the bug has fallen on me, and I'm not definitely not a n00b with a pre-built Dell computer. I built this rig and the GF3 that was in there before didn't exhibit waviness of text like this ATI card I got back does. The ATI card before didn't exhibit waviness. Yes, I did uninstall the GF3 drivers and used Det destroyer and tried both Omega and ATI official drivers. Is there any other solution to this other than RMA? I'm going back to college in a few days and I don't have time to RMA it unless I intend on getting another video card in the mean time *sigh*.

 

[Robor]

Do a search over at Rage3D Forum and you'll see you're not alone. I had a Radeon64 a few years ago that had the wavy text bug. The solution was a registry edit but I can't begin to think of what/where.

EDIT: I should mention that at the time the "bug" was found to only involved some (mostly Sony) Trinitron monitor owners.

 

[smoothdragon]

Thanks for the heads-up on the issue. I have a Samsung Syncmaster 955DF, so I probably can't use the same solution for this particular problem. This is my first ATI card since the ATI Rage and it's frustrating to have a general problem that nVidia users don't normally encounter. I may consider just dealing with the problem until Winter break when I can RMA it or buy a cheap video card in the mean time (GF4 MX or something) to hold me over through the RMA process. I'll be searching the Rage3D forums for solutions, but thanks for the help thus far.