Obscure Integrated "Cards"

That's exactly what my dad has, and he wants to play Guild Wars. The rest of his specs are fine. The card may be an issue, but he's willing to try the game and find out. Unfortunately, I can't even get GW to start on his machine. I get this error:



He has the correct versionof DirectX, so it must be the card, and all I know is that it's one of those no-name integrated ones. The manual has been misplaced, and I doubt there's much of a chance that it'll ever be found again. Does anyone know how I can check to see what sort of card his system uses, and where I might be able to find drivers for old, obscure, integrated cards?

My computer, properties, hardware.


Should work. Then check for drivers in there.

I haven't done that in ages tho, so can't remember for sure.

Right click on desktop

Properties
Settings
Advanced

and if that doesnt work

go to

RUN
type in

dxdiag

hit enter

display tab for details

if that fails download SANDRA which will find out anything

http://www.sisoftware.co.uk/index.ht...uy&langx=en&a=

also that integrated video card is simply a basic graphics chip onboard not a full fledged video card

possibly even only a 2d chip if not able to initialize 3d

If it is an onboard solution, it wont have seperate documentation - it will be with the motherboard. Basic rule of thumb is that Onboard video chips wont work well, if they work at all - they arent nearly powerful enouth. You'll prolly need at least a $100 card to play (ATI 9200). Sorry.

There are a few exceptions to the rule, my onboard video card(s3 unichrome) plays guild wars just fine(15-20 fps) on medium settings.

I actually got that error the other night when I was at my friends house installing her new vid card so she could play guild wars too. We'd turned the D3D slider all the way to the left to give her the best performance instead of quality and when we tried to boot the game it said that.

My guess is insufficent 3D memory on the onboard card?

Use the procedure above that Drizzt suggested and give us the name of your video card, make of computer. It could be you simply need a driver update. It could be you need a new video card. Lets try and figure it out.

Do what Drizzt suggested above, and, if it were me, I'd go to the website of the computer manufacturer (If' it's some big name machine.) or motherboard manufacturer once you have the motherboard & video identified as it sound like Dad's comp isn't exactly up to date. For my limited experience with these thing I found usually the bios update took care of the video as an update, or there was a separate video update I could get from either of these sources. At least then you can rule out the bios & video bios being out-of-date as a contributing factor.

Cheers

Ouch. Integrated. The best solution though is to buy a spanking new graphics card. The ATI Radeon 9600 Pro/XT should be an affordable solution.