Justincase3

To be honest I don't know if this is a hardware or software problem. I would take it to be software but I'll just start here first.

Look at my specs quickly and note the video card first:

AMD Athlon XP 2400 2.0GHz Processor
2.0 GB of RAM
Visiontek Radeon HD 2600 Pro 512MB AGP Video Card

Now the Visiontek Radeon HD 2600 PROs have been encountering driver problems for a while. These problems were solved in ATI's 8.1 driver release. I now have Visiontek's 8.3 drivers seeing that I should download drivers from the manufacturer site and not just the chipset provider.

When I installed this driver update I noticed that some games would not be allowed to run in Steam: such as Half-Life 2. It would give me a message stating that I need to update DirectX, except DirectX wouldn't update to 9.0c from 9.0b (or to any version from any version to be precise). Some games would run just fine. And some games (all the games I talk about now probably require 9.0c just to note) would play a bit but eventually have a BSOD without any information given that is actually helpful.

After many talks, I was told something must be corrupt with DirectX or Microsoft. A re-format was recommended. I have just spent the past five hours backing up documents for everyone on our PC, formating the hard drive, installing generally needed software, updates, and drivers. I then install Sam and Max demo for Moai Better Blues (one of the BSOD games) and it started to run. There's an opening tutorial in which you put your settings how you want them. The first cluster of choices relate to graphical options. I immediately scrolled down the resolution list and clicked on 1440x900 (max setting for my monitor). The screen flickered and then came back to the 3D tutorial for a second only to be presented by a BSOD.

I just really need help now. I don't know if it is a thing related the drivers I'm using, the video card, or whatever. I'm running on a clean version of Windows XP and yet this thing still persists. I've been playing on limited games for a couple months now and after finally being able to have enough time to go under this re-formatting project I figured this would solve everything, but it hasn't. And it's extremely gut-punching now.

Please help me...it would be very much appreciated.

Edit:

Last night I also tried ATI's 8.1 Hotfix drivers, uninstalling the drivers already on my PC before installing any other ones, and after that didn't work I tried the most recent Omega Drivers.

Something in the Omega Drivers makes the games work, but I get low performance (stuttering mainly) on Half-Life 2 (a game I should be able to play perfectly) at all high and there's a graphical problem in it as well. A number of objects are rendered from a distance with a foggy white color on them. I"ll show you in a minute.

If only I knew what Omegaman is using correctly and only implement that into some ATI drivers, of course I know nothing about how to do that.

Here's the picture:

[IMG][/IMG]

temeteus82

Official ATI drivers won't work with that card since ATI has dropped AGP support for it's new cards.

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