Hi,

after an upgrade yesterday my specs look like this;

P4 3.06 533mhz, ATI 1950PRO AGP8 512mb, 2gigs DDR1 running at 333mhz and an old 120gig hd.

So besides from the usual post upgrade stability issues, i'm also experiencing... ugh, ingame video quality drops. To illustrate;

http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/4303/cc3lm9.jpg - as you can see the screen is very blurry and it's hard to watch it for a long time (eyes have to concentrate a lot, get tired quickly - not the purpose of gaming is it?) or even play normally - I don't even think the image illustrates it good enough, but the basics are thee - a very "blurry" "foggy" image. To compare, here's a googled random image of the game; http://wargamescenter.free.fr/comm [...] m-wars.jpg - much clearer, better quality, etc. All my settings were on ultra high and I discovered that this fog came up when i set the vfx quality above "low" - then it disappeared and the quality got better, although still a little bit blurry and not perfect (IMHO). What's funny is that I had no lag/loadtime difficulties at all and the foggyness/lack of brightness was the only issue - note that it couldn't be fixed with the ingame settings.

In PES 08, the images look great - but the cutscenes lag a bit, the game lags too (not real lag though from what i understand but more like the monitor is struggling with the image.. again this makes it hard to play because your eyes hurt)- I also have onboard sound but really don't think it's the problem. My rig matches the recommended specs so I really don't see why it lags like that. I also noted that everything works much better on medium - maybe this is the screen that is having difficulties working with those advanced graphics and slowing me down?

last but not least I'm having trouble in Hitman BM and MOH-airborne, graphics look ok but again the screen is foggy/blurry and the image lags a bit when i move the mouse to look around - Hitman is worse, but MOH has this as well. Here's a hitman screeny to show ya what I mean.

http://img221.imageshack.us/img221/848/hitmanbl8.jpg

Now all that I could make up was that this is a monitor issue. I have a MEDION 19' CRT from 2002 which is running @ 100hz from what I understand and could this be the problem? In that case what should I replace it with - my machine won't be running any of the 2008 games on max (medium at best I guess) and after that it'll stop taking newer games at all.. I would like a 19' LCD of some kind for gaming that isn't too expensive -- what should I look at if the monitor is my problem?

- Regards and thanks for reading/looking, Kirill

I would guess it is a driver or game setting issue.

The graphics in the status screen (upper right corner) seems pretty sharp.

The icons on the lower left of the screen looks pretty sharp as well.

Right you are, I had to install Sapphire drivers (Sapphire made the card) to fix this issue which had nothing to do with my monitor (thank god!)

Thanks for your help anyways