Graphics Help

I have a problem with every game I try to play. The main menu and opening credits are always fine. When I enter into game play it looks like im playing the Atari or something. Everything is pixelated and blocky, some shapes wont render and game play is very skippy. I dont have the BEST graphics card but it still shouldn't look the way it is. I have an ATI Radeon x1200. My computer is the Toshiba Satellite A215. Any help would be much appreciated.

What are the minimum requirements for the game? Is this a desktop or laptop? If you fill in your system specs we here on this forum can better ascertain the problem. With that being said, my first guess would be your card. I had the same problem a year ago with Assassin's Creed and my BFG 8500 GS card. Then when my system mobo/cpu fried I did a rebuild and added a new gpu, Radeon HD 4770, and what a difference it made. Now I'm able to play my game. You could try adusting your settings in the game to the lowest settings possible and see what that does for you.

After doing some googling, I found that it's a laptop and GPU looks to be onboard, meaning it's built into the mobo (mother board). I'm not sure but I don't think you can add a GPU to a laptop. You could add more ram to the laptop to max it out, that should help some on the gaming as to how much, I'm not sure but for over all performance it will greatly improve laptop performance. There some options for and external GPU and on some newer and high end laptops, some have the ability to upgrade GPU. Contact your laptop manufacturer to see if it's possible.

I did some research and the main response I was getting was to update my graphics card. I attempted to do this, this is what I found out :
AMD has moved a number of DX9 ATI Radeon™ graphics accelerators products to a legacy driver support structure. This change impacts Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Linux distributions. AMD has moved to a legacy software support structure for these graphics accelerator products in an effort to better focus development resources on future products.
The following products have been moved to the legacy software support structure (including Mobile and All-in-Wonder Variants):
ATI Radeon 9500 Series
ATI Radeon 9550 Series
ATI Radeon 9600 Series
ATI Radeon 9700 Series
ATI Radeon 9800 Series
ATI Radeon X300 Series
ATI Radeon X550 Series
ATI Radeon X600 Series
ATI Radeon X700 Series
ATI Radeon X800 Series
ATI Radeon X850 Series
ATI Radeon X1050 Series
ATI Radeon X1300 Series
ATI Radeon X1550 Series
ATI Radeon X1600 Series
ATI Radeon X1650 Series
ATI Radeon X1800 Series
ATI Radeon X1900 Series
ATI Radeon Xpress Series
ATI Radeon X1200 Series
ATI Radeon X1250 Series
ATI Radeon X2100 Series


Mine is the X1200 I cant seem to find anywhere to update the driver at.
Some games run just fine tho, like World of Warcraft. I have no problems out of that. But Bioshock wont.

Your main issue is that you have integrated graphics. Usually only 64MB allocated data for games and it uses Hyper-memory to steal memory from your RAM if it needs more. You will not be able to upgrade your graphics card in a laptop unless you are a professional, but even that is tricky.

Older Directx 9 games like WoW will play, but DirectX 10 games like Bioshock are not compatible with that graphics card. If you want to test if your laptop can play these games, google "Can I Run it". The first link will take you to a website where it installed an addon to your browser. It has a huge game library, and it analyzes your pc specs to see if you can play either on the minimal settings for the recommended settings. I am sorry, but that is all I can do to help you with that.

Hope this helps.

Ah, that helped alot actually. At least now I know. haha. Thanks for the help guys. Much appreciated.