ATI Rage Problems

I have been having problems running "Call of Duty" on my machine due to issues with my graphics card. It is an ATI Rage 128 32M. It keeps telling me it has compatibilty issues, specifically that I need Directx 9.0. I tried to update my drivers using ATI's website.I have tried to uninstall my old drivers and install the most up-to-date ones and, then installing Directx 9 but having no luck. I have found plenty of people who HATE the graphics card though. Any suggestions?

 

Minimum requirements for Call Of Duty starts with the following line: "3D Hardware Accelerator Card required - 100% DirectX® 9.0b compatible 32MB Hardware T&L-capable video card and latest drivers". (See here - Activision support site

Your old rage card does not have hardware transform & lighting built in, and won't be able to play it. It's not a driver/DirectX issue, the hardware physically has to have that built in. You'll need a new video card to play it. This is not just a COD issue; quite a few of the new games coming out require that, and at least one requires the advanced DirectX9 programmable shaders that are, again hardware. As games get tougher to display, the older cards simply aren't capable of playing them.

 

Thanks for the response. I am not real familiar with Video cards so bear with me here. From what I can tell I should have a capable card. It is an ATI Rage 128 32M. Again... not real familiar with them but from what I understand It should be ok. From reading online forums though I have found no positive responses about this card and plenty of angry people about it. Apparently it is nothing but horrible. I was hoping there was some round about way of fixing this, but from those I have talked to it doesnt look like it. With this info is it still a problem with the graphics cards specs? Or is it a problem with the brand/version of card I have. I am wondering for informational purposes only because I replaced the damn thing anyway. Again, I appreciate the help.

 

There's nothing wrong with the ATI Rage series; I used one some years back and was happy with it. "A few years back" is the key though. It's a very old design, and not adequate for today's games.

Until last year, older video cards would run most games, just without the newest details and eye candy, and in some cases, very slowly (low frame rates, which cause visible flickering and slowed down action). In the never-ending quest for better visuals and more realistic details, games have gotten much more demanding on the system, both general CPU processing, and on the graphics card's ability to process and render frames. Every year cards got faster, with more and faster ram, then they went to graphics processors right on the video card to handle the calculations needed for generating the picture frames. More and more of the work was offloaded from the main CPU and handled directly by the video card. Then came Transform and Lighting functions; special sections of the video card processor which speeded things up dramatically and handled much more complex lighting, shadow, and fog effects, then programmable pixel shaders for DirectX9, all of which are hardware. The best current cards have more transistors in the processing unit than your CPU has, and has much faster ram than the main system ram. And the newest games have gotten to the point where these things are mandatory to run the game at all, forget about show and ugly.

Your old Rage card has no onboard processing or any of the newer features, and it's VERY slow by today's standards. It's simply too old a design to run the new stuff. "Hating" it is the wrong outlook. Like a Model T Ford, it was great in it's day, but it's day is over.

 

Thanks, I appreciate the help. I ordered a replacment/newer/faster card and this should fix the problem.

 

I got an offer today from a friend for a $25 used card: XFX GeForce FX 5200 128MB DDR 8X AGP. Will this be sufficient?


(I have 1.8 P4, 640M RAM)

 

The FX-5200 is a true DirectX 9 card, so it WILL play the current games, but it is a bottom end bargain card with poor performance. The new demanding games will play very slowly, with choppy framerates, which is no doubt why it's for sale so cheap. You most likely won't be happy with it's performance. For gaming, I'd recommend at least an ATI 9200 non-SE card. Look around the Hardware forum; there are lots of threads dedicated to video cards and opinions on them. Games are the most demanding things you'll throw at your computer; cheap and older cards don't do it very well.