Is my video card messed up?

hi everybody,

(FYI, im not completly sure its the video card, just my own semi-educated guess)

i have had an ATI radeon 9200 for about 6 months (maybe?) and has worked fine till recently, now mostly when i play games it messes up:



call of duty - lags horribly bad and i get the blue screen

star wars galaxies patcher - when it starts analyzing the files it takes forever and usually get some error message and the patcher closes (no blue screen? w00t!)

star wars galaxies - if i get past the patcher i lag horribly, blue screen

unreal tournament 2004 - the objects on the maps disappear and reappear, when they dissappear i can only see the bare bones of the map (like the walls and holes in the walls) ( pic at http://tinypic.com/bc0f9 since i cant explain it that well, the dark spots on the ground are supposed to be pillars)



this started happening a few days ago, i have mcaffe, so that pretty much rules out a virus, i think my video card may have gotten too hot or somthing and burned out a circuit? i have a desk that restricts the CPU so it gets kind of hot down there, though i have a fairly good fan, i have a sneaky suspicion (sp?) that its too hot



any suggestions or help would be greatly appriciated

thank you

Most of the problems with gfx cards are its driver. Maybe thats your problem, try rolling back if all fails.

The majority of the problems can be classified into thre groups:

1. You have a non-gaming video card. Actually its more of business card. When you play "heavy" games, you'll notice lag and lower quality etc



2. Bad drivers. nuff said.



3. Other stuff. Sometimes there can be application and/or hardware conflicts etc

i added a picture link to my post since im pretty sure i was doing a crappy job explaining the ut2004 problems...



it started messing up when i reinstalled star wars galaxies, before that it was running fine (i just now uninstalled swg to check if that was the problem but its still not working) the drivers i have had for the video card are the same for about a month and there are no updates for it on windowsupdate.com



Drastik you said i should rollback? what exaclty does that entail/what would it do to my computer? mind you, im no computer genius



Praetor, what video card do you suggest? ( on a budget >100 bucks ) i been looking at

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...164-021&DEPA=1

and its very pretty, would that be a gaming or a bussiness card? i heard ATI is a better gaming card then nVIDIA



thank you

Rollback drivers means excatly what it says, really to put it simply is that u get to reverse your driver to the one you had before your current driver. It pretty simple to do and it solved my problem i had when my computer was freezing....

All u do is, right click desktop>properties>settings>advanced>adapter>prope rties>driver>rollbackdriver.

Forget rollback... its less complicated to uninstall the old and install the new



For a $100 budget that would be the card for you.



LOL i hear it from both sides all the time ... to be honest it doesnt really matter all that much

rollback didnt work installed the newest driver from www.ati.com and its still messed up, is a new video card my last option? can ya'll think of anything else thats wrong? maybe i need to reformat? though i would LOVE to have a new 256mb video card, would rather have the money for more memory if my video card still works

i havent had driver probs with my 9200. it seriously is NOT a gaming card...i doubt its a surprise it wont run COD/SWG/UT2K4...i wouldn't expect it to. the card itself is only DX8.1, and has limited shader support...barelt runs splinter cell without overheating.

wow.... not a gaming card? usually run everything at medium quality no lag... /drool i want that 256mb card... im gonna spaz over the graphics

i meant the 9200 is not a gaming card...i dont think they make a 256mb version. if they did it would be a waste...its too slow for that much memory.