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I just got a custom built PC from my father. It has Vista on it, which I don't have a problem with. The day I got it, the welcome center that pops up says I have an ATI Radeon 9800 graphics card, which is what my dad put in it. I installed The Elder Scrolls III:Morrowind and it ran perfectly. I've wanted to play Doom 3 for a long time, so I installed the game, and I noticed later on the welcome center says I now have an ATI Radeon 9250!?

Doom 3 wouldn't run due to OpenGL drivers I don't have. I installed the ATI Radeon 9800 display drivers, and the game still doesn't run. Not sure why, but that isn't the point. Why would it tell me I have a 9250 when the card is a 9800? I am not very tech savvy when it comes to graphics cards, but wouldn't it have warned me if I was trying to install the wrong display drivers? It didn't tell me I have the wrong graphics card, so is this just a bug or something?


EDIT:Also, I just ran Counter-Strike Source. When your GFX drivers are out of date it warns you. It said I was running Windows XP for some reason and that I had a Radeon 9250...


Edit(again) I am going to just reinstall Vista and see what happens.

You must be mistaken about the card you have.

Vista would install the correct drivers for your card. You can also download them and install them. If you're installing xp drivers for your card, then you installed the wrong ones.

You can obtain the correct drivers here:

http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

As for your graphics card, the only surefire way to know is to take it out and read the model number on the card. In some cases you won't be able to tell without taking off the heatsink and looking at the processor. If that's the case, honestly, I would assume you do in fact have a 9250.

My dad said the exact model was a 9800. He built it himself. I installed the 9800 Vista 32-bit drivers, and it worked fine. I guess I'll reinstall Vista.

EDIT: I also fail to understand why it would say I had a 9800 until AFTER I installed Morrowind and Doom3

There's the possibility that windows update installed it's own driver and it was wrong (pretty unlikely, honestly).

Turn off auto updates and let it only notify you when an update is available, and do not install any video driver updates.

Then, uninstall your current video driver. Reboot, once you're running on the generic vga driver, at that point you can reinstall the appropriate driver.

Ok. Thanks. I will give that a try.