Ok heres the problem [and yes you can call me a n00b as I cant build computers, so go ahead XD]

okay I was bought Half-life 2 episode 1 for my birthday recently and my PC had all the requierments as far as I checked. so I installed the game and booted it up, I got so far and then well it just stayed on the background animation. a messege opend up an said that I needed to install the latest drivers for my Graphics card.

so I checked this up, it turned out that my graphics card was a ATI Radeon 9500. so I used the good ol' net to find the latest drivers for it by checking the ATI website. they told me to download the 9550 drivers and the catalyst control center so i did.

as the read_me file said I installed the new drivers and everything seemed fine. so I went back on HL2: ep.1, but when I played it this time it was smooth running except for one problem....

vertecies and polygons were stretching in and out all over the screen only for like single frames but it was annoying as hell and it still happens on all 3D stuff now I just wanna know how to fix this as I have some really good PC games that I cant play now cuz this stretching polygon problem is crashing my PC on anything 3D...please help me

Did you uninstall you old driver before installing the new one??

No I didn't as the new driver didn't tell me to, I thought that [like most updates] it would have done that on its own....

As a rule of thumb, with any graphics drivers, always uninstall the current version prior to installing the updated version. It will save a lot of headaches down the road. New drivers aren't like the old ones of 5+ years ago when you could install an update over top of the old ones. The individual files within the drivers are too complex anymore due to the hardware of the card.

So what do you reccommend that I do Im worried that if I uninstall all the drivers my computer wont display anything...

Don't worry about that. What to do is to download the updated driver (if you haven't already done that) and then go into your control panel - add or remove programs - uninstall the driver for the card. You can also do this by right clicking on the desktop - properties - settings - advanced - adapter - properties - driver and then uninstall it. Once you uninstall, you'll be prompted to reboot. Click yes. When Windows starts up again, it will install it's generic VGA graphics driver. At that point, you can install the updated driver and follow the directions/prompts from there. Good Luck!

You probably have multiple device drivers running so it may be best to boot into safe mode and uninstall all graphics drivers, then reboot in normal mode and install the latest one. 9 times out of 10 that works just fine.


I will just add, I have sorted many pc's out using that method.

thanks I'll try that and than I shall get back to you if it worked

Thanks for all the help rik and sghiznaneck everything seems to be fine now ^_^

I'm glad it's sorted. Just wondered if you would mind explaining what you did so that others with the same problem can read this post and learn from it.

well i did what sghiznaneck told me to on comment #6