Beware! nVidia GeForce4 MX 440

Finally went out and got Portal today (individual, not Orange Box version). Took about half an hour to install Steam and Portal together. And then what happens? It crashes. But it’s not one of those “error: xyz malfunctioned \n traceback: …” errors… it was the one telling me my computer sucks.

I have a DELL Dimension 4800, which we bought in late 2004. It’s stock to this day; nobody’s upgraded it to any degree. And it shipped with the best graphics card I’d ever had (the first belonging to a Win98 machine…): an nVidia GeForce4. It would run anything I threw at it. But today, it finally threw in the towel. It’s not broken or anything… but age has caught up with it.

It was produced in 2002. That makes it 6 years old. I can’t think of anything that is still produced in the computer market that old. So I boot up Portal, and get a Half-Life error message: I need pixel shader 1.1 or better. Oh, wait, didn’t I run into this before? Back then, of course, it was almost unheard of. But the fact remains: my chipset just doesn’t support it at all. It’s described as a “watered-down” card on more than one forum, and I’m starting to agree. Now it’s just the question of upgrading: ATI Radeon 9550 or an nVidia FX 5500?

Until then, there’s always the Flash version