I'm having a very weird problem here that I've never seen before. Beware for a long post, with a lot of details ;)
It all started two days ago: I needed my second monitor on my laptop so I unplugged it and plugged it back in after I was finished. A few hours later I tried to start a game (World In Conflict) and got the following error:
"No appropriate 3D card found."
What..? I thought I might have screwed up the card by (un)plugging the monitor roughly or something..?
But I didn't want to jump to conclusions quickly so I first tried to reinstall the driver (8.
. Tried it three times without luck. Then finally I uninstalled the driver completely before installing the new (8.9) driver: This fixed the problem, I was able to play all my games again perfectly fine!So I was glad, I knew it couldn't have been my card after all if a simple driver update fixed it...
Well, yesterday when I came back from work, I tried to run the same game and to my horror I saw the very same error message again... The problem was back for some reason... I was pretty sure that another driver uninstall / reinstall would fix the problem again but I didn't want to keep doing that every time I restart my pc... There's got to be some kind of fix for this..?
So I decided to try a System Restore back to before the problems started. After it was done I checked the driver version which was back to the old one. I tried the game and YES, it worked again! And just to make sure, I tried another game, but... It failed... This time it crashed without warning. I tried the first game again and this time it came up with the same error message as the day before... And the problem was back once again without changing anything at all (it worked right after the system restore..?)...
But it gets weirder:
After another few driver updates and reinstalls my problem still persists, nothing fixed it. I decided then to try a different game. I tried all my currently installed games and came to the conclusion that some games DO work, while other do NOT...?!?! Specifically:
- Spore (crashes without warning)
- Call of Duty 4 (gives a cryptic 'invalid call' to some 2d vector graphics thing error before quitting)
- World In Conflict (same error about no appropriate 3d card)
These three games do not work, they don't even start.
However, the other games: FIFA07 and Command & Conquer Generals work perfectly fine without even any loss in performance!
It seems that newer games don't work while older games do..?
Then I tried to run some benchmark and information programs. Including windows (Vista) itself and the Catalyst control center (CCC), all these programs tell me the exactly correct details about my card (brand, model, memory, etc...).
Today however, I tried uninstalling/reinstalling the driver yet again (didn't solve the problem anymore) and then I noticed that the CCC gave me an error about an unsupported driver... When I started the CCC I noticed that most of the options (tabs) had gone and that the information it gave about my card was alot of "Unavailable" entries...
So I uninstalled/reinstalled my driver again and the CCC worked perfectly fine again! All options back and no unavailable info: all correct...
I restarted my PC minutes later for something completely unrelated and when it came back on I got the CCC error again, and the options and information had gone AGAIN...
Now, I hope someone can make something of this, cause I don't have a clue what's going on...
I do suspect that it is a software issue because I don't think a broken video card can be fixed by reinstalling a driver, right? And I also don't think that older games do run without any loss in performance if my video card was busted...
Does anyone know what's going on? I really need help, I've posted similar posts on many forums but nothing so far has solved this problem...
Thanks!
