Dear Future Gamer,

I have only just recently connected to the Internet and saw an advert in PC Gamer for a free email magazine. I sent in my details and it arrived on the date it instructed in the email, welcoming me. I think this is the best idea anyone has had. Thank you for a brilliant idea.

Could you answer some questions for me please? I have a PII Intel Celeron 333MHz and I think I should buy a 3D-card at some point because the PC I bought about two weeks ago has a Trident 3Dimage 9750 card in it already.

I know it accelerates games as I have used it to play Thief and NFS 3 and everything goes smooth and nice, but, in Thief the graphics go weird when you switch the Z-Buffer on. It doesn’t crash it just goes sort of triangular with funny colours all around but you can still play the game.

The readme said my graphics card is known to have drivers that are incompatible with DirectX6. I downloaded and installed the new ones from their site and it still does the same thing. I wouldn’t mind but I can’t really afford a new 3D card yet. What should I do?

Can you recommend a graphics card that is both fast and cheap or could you tell me what the problem might be? I thought the card might not quite be up to running games, as it only has 4Mb of RAM.

Thank you for making my Thursdays better days,

Robert Hague

FG: Glad you liked the magazine. Your graphics card should be able to handle most games at the moment, but yes, you need some kind of 3Dfx card – Voodoo 3s will be out soon so you should be able to pick up a reasonably cheap Voodoo 2 card soon. Wait for one of those and try to avoid games that have been specifically developed for 3D acceleration. Quite what the problem was you were experiencing is beyond me, try getting some technical support from the game’s developers or publishers.