I read on a download that a DX8.1 compatible card is needed to display water effects. Okay, well, I was reinstalling my CD drivers for my Radeon 7000 (Catalysts and CFS2 dont react too well with each other) and I looked on the CD, and it has an install file for DX8.1. So, therefore, it should be DX8.1 compatible. So why cannot I see water effects when I follow the suggestions (Effects to Land Only, Water to High)?Any more thoughts?

The driver CD may be generic across several models. The 7xxx series Radeons support DX7. The 8xxx series support DX8. You'd assume that all 9xxx series Radeons support DX9, but the 9000 and 9200 only support DX8.Of course, if you bought a Compaq laptop advertizing "Radeon 9200 Graphics" you'd expect to find a 9200 chip inside. You'd be wrong though:http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/...tid=152&tid=185Moral: never trust people from marketing.

A videocard can either be DX9 (or 8 in this case) -compliant- or just DX9 compatible.You can install (and should) install DirectX 9 even if you don't have a DX9 compliant cared. DirectX 9 drivers from ATI's website, DirectX 9 can be downloaded from Windows Update. This will allow you to run DX9 games, but you will not see the DX9 effects such as pixel/vertex shaders. The Radeon 7000 still only has the hardware capabilities for DirectX 7 effects.The actual graphics chip on the Radeon 7000 card does not support the type of effect FS uses for water reflections. To get those, you'd either have to emulate it in software (and get less than 1 FPS), or get a new videocard that can do it in hardware (on the actual graphics chip).To put it into perspective, the Radeon 7000 chip contains about 30 million transistors, while the Radeon 8500/Geforce3/4 (DirectX8) contain about 60 million. Radeon 9700/9800 (DirectX9) contains almost 110 million and the GeforceFX 59xx almost 130 million. Those extra transistors, among other things, are for the advanced DX8/9 shaders (for reflections and other similar effects) as well as other things like improved FSAA, more pipes (higher performance) etc.

Would this give me what Im looking for?http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_...duct_id=0160043Pretty darn cheap....$72, 128mb DDR SDRAM, ATI 9200SE processor...