Video card or Direct X?

[pinkelephants]

Ok, here's the scenario.

Our subject:
One year old EMachine.
1.7 ghz AMD processor
512 megs RAM

The problem:
Doing a simple hardware upgrade for somebody. This person
is by no means heavily into games, but, the games he does
play (Links 2003, Deer Hunter types) seem to be bogging
down his onboard Video. Resolutions have to be set very
low to play well.

I dropped an old GeForce FX5200 in the AGP slot of the
PC. It's helping a lot. However....

In Links for example, as you tee off, the golfer
animation just starts disappearing, as in losing pixels.
Most of the other animations are ok though.

This same game worked well in a Dell 1.5 Ghz, 256 MB RAM
of mine with the same video card and DX9.0b.

To let you in on my process, I put the card in, put the
newest drivers on, then reinstalled DirectX 9.0b.

The scenes are rendering fine and look good, there's just
an error in the drawing of the animations. I've tweaked
EVERY setting available trying to find the problem. Doing
a DXDIAG shows all the directdraw tests finished
successfully.

I'm stumped...

Only thing that bothers me is, after the DX9 installation
finished up, I wasn't prompted for a reboot. (I rebooted
anyways.) I don't know if something didnt' install or
what.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

I would also make sure that I am running the latest AGP port/slot drivers.
This is usually part of the chipset drivers.

 

[D.Currie]

Ok, here's the scenario.

Our subject:
One year old EMachine.
1.7 ghz AMD processor
512 megs RAM

The problem:
Doing a simple hardware upgrade for somebody. This person
is by no means heavily into games, but, the games he does
play (Links 2003, Deer Hunter types) seem to be bogging
down his onboard Video. Resolutions have to be set very
low to play well.

I dropped an old GeForce FX5200 in the AGP slot of the
PC. It's helping a lot. However....

In Links for example, as you tee off, the golfer
animation just starts disappearing, as in losing pixels.
Most of the other animations are ok though.

This same game worked well in a Dell 1.5 Ghz, 256 MB RAM
of mine with the same video card and DX9.0b.

To let you in on my process, I put the card in, put the
newest drivers on, then reinstalled DirectX 9.0b.

The scenes are rendering fine and look good, there's just
an error in the drawing of the animations. I've tweaked
EVERY setting available trying to find the problem. Doing
a DXDIAG shows all the directdraw tests finished
successfully.

I'm stumped...

Only thing that bothers me is, after the DX9 installation
finished up, I wasn't prompted for a reboot. (I rebooted
anyways.) I don't know if something didnt' install or
what.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Off-the-wall thought: The onboard video was probably disabled as soon as you
plugged in the new video card...but...it doesn't hurt to look in the bios to
make sure it's turned off so that it's not sucking up resources.

There may not be much you can do, as that e-machine probably has a low-end
mobo with everything built in. Just for snickers, you might want to try
turning off the onboard sound and see what happens. If that helps, you can
surely find a decent pci sound card (if you've got any spare slots) that
will work.