First of all, I want to thank everyone that helped me in this thread build my "Barebones" system. Of course, I ended up building it up a little more that I intended, but it was fun. Here is what I ended up with:

• Motherboard: Asus K8N-E Deluxe Serial ATA, etc.
• Chip: AMD 64 2800+ I went with the cheapest 64bit processor I could, so that my motherboard won't be the first thing to get outdated.
• Video Card: Asus V9400-X 128MB, NVidia MX4000 Here is where I went cheap and I think I'm really beginning to regret it.

I've been using my Sony VIAO notebook for the last several years, and it has an ATi Mobility Radeon 7500 w. 32MB of RAM. It runs Battlefield 1942 at upto 99fps (the game's limit) or 50-60fps when the battle gets going. The only thing I never liked about it was that it had only 32MB of RAM. I'm not a crazy gamer, I usually play games that are several years old, and this thing was fine except sometimes I could tell it was updaiting whatever was stored in memory and caused a pause. So, if I could get something as good as my two year old notebook, but with more memory, I thought I was fine. Especially for only 45 bucks.

Well, this card is really giving me a hard time. I updated the drivers to a version that is a month old (which would be about a year newer than the drivers on my notebook) with no help. In games, the smoke and water is GREEN and the transparency of water comes off as slivers of solid or blank space. And my frame rate is in the 30's, peaking in the 50's or so (rare). I've made sure that each and every setting "in game" for the video and sound is the same between both machines, but no luck.

I guess the reason for my post is to ask for some advice. Is it the card? The drivers? Maybe the PC (DirectX)? Am I wasting my time trying to get things to look right?

Here are some screen shots:

• Water Color Normal blue water on the old notebook. and Green "Detroit" water on the fancy new PC.
• Glare: Normal Humvee windshield with no glare. and Windsheild wth image of mountains "ghosting" into my view.
• Water's Edge: Nice water with transparency and smooth edges and from the new PC I get A pile of sharp edged vomit.

Is this thing fixable? (I'm not a hardware guy.) Or should I save for a new card that'll let me play Battlefield 2 this Spring?

Have you looked at:

- the refresh on your monitor for the driver it is installed to use
- wether you have you got the correct monitor driver
- wether you have the correct colour management settings for the monitor?

It looks as if the colour range/palette depth is wrong. The ghosting might be refresh rate and monitor settings.

I agree though, it looks like a pile of poo. Which drivers have you got installed for the card? Maybe the settings are way off - can you reset to standard/run an optimiser?

Get hold of the GL XS demo/graphics test benchmark and try that out.

This is, I believe, a known driver issue with some nvidia cards and certain driver versions. Here is one reference to it. I have had some very strange results with older nvidia cards, new drivers, and BF1942 or BF Vietnam. For instance, in several machines that I regularly use, which all have FX5200 cards in, any driver later than the microsoft validated one from october last year cause a hard lock when the game is run. Older drivers don't crash, but give texture errors.

Have you tried using microsoft update and installing the reference driver, if it suggests one?

Failing that, I would strongly suggest either getting a graphics card from a reputable manufacturer such as ATI or a later nvidia card, IE FX5700 or later. They seem to work fairly well.

My shuttle has a 128MB radeon 9700 in it still, and it works fine with anything I've tried, including Doom3 at reasonable resolutions. For BF vietnam in particular, the most important performance option is gobs of ram, at least 1GB. BF1942 isn't as critical, but still benefits noticeably.

pca

Wait a minute. If I am to believe the popular fanboy opinion on the internet, NVidia products and drivers are perfect, but ATI is the company with major driver problems. It is so bad that any NVidia user has to loudly talk about the problems, even when they have no first hand experience. How can some well educated person from the UK make these radical claims that NVidia products might have flaws too?

It must be a fluke that my notebook, that runs this game perfectly, is using an ATi.