Zephyr

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has gone through the crisis of realizing ye olde graphics card is on its way out and is sending red lines or other graphical oddities across one's gaming experience/desktop. However, in my rage, I discovered one way to extend the life of a dying card without having any seriously noticeable effect on gameplay.

First: Use the default graphics control programs available to download from your graphics card's drivers website or the highly custom drivers such as OmegaDrivers. Once you have these installed, it is very easy to just tweak all your settings to "high performance" and turn off many of the fancy effects that those of us with low-end graphics card (...state of the art in 2003) never really noticed in the first place.

Secondly: Underclocking. While the first step is helpful, this is without a doubt the best way to ensure that your card doesn't overheat during gameplay. Getting a simple overclocking tool (such as ATItool for ATI cards) also gives you the option to turn down the clock rate to something much easier for the card to handle. Yes you may lose some FPS, but your card will work and I think we all know what is preferable there.

I hope this helps those of you who are still holding out for the price drops of DX10 cards/the next MacBook iteration.

-Zephyr

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