Most likely issues with the card. But you could try out Forceware 186, which was one of the last drivers before the Fermi architecture release.

I moved to the driver you mentioned (on a clean WinXP SP3 install) and I still get crashes in Doom 3 and Painkiller (in-game; benchmarks both work fine). Worse, the benchmark for STALKER Call of Pripyat produced weird black flat polygons all over one of the areas of the benchmark flyby before completely tanking the entire PC, so yeah, I think the issue is with the card. Not sure what to replace it with, though; probably something late-DX9 (Radeon X1000/GF7 series) instead of DX10.

DX9 cards still retain 16-bit dithering for old 16-bit color only games, if that matters. Radeon X1xxx series has arguably better dithering compared to all Nvidia.

I was considering a DX9 card pretty strongly until I found a cheap GT 240. I imagine most games that only support 16-bit color should work fine on my Voodoo3/Pentium III machine. I'll keep those in mind if I end up needing it, though.

Okay, I hate to reorient this thread to be about a new issue I'm having, but replacing the 8600 GT with the GT 240 (and updating to the latest available driver for the card) does not seem to have fixed the crashing issues. Painkiller and Doom 3 still crash in the same way. Call of Duty, which also crashed under the previous card, still does so on the GT 240, but this time I'm given a full error message:

1RB_EndSurface()-
2SHADER_MAX_VERTEXES
3hit

This sounds like a graphics problem, but god I would hate for the issue to be that I got two bad GPUs in a row. What else might be the cause here?

Are you sure that your system is stable enough? Memtest, Prime95, etc?

MemTest came up clean. Despite downloading the 32-bit version of Prime95 it crashes on startup, claiming that it is not a valid Win32 application. It looks like it needs an internet connection anyway, which this PC doesn't have.

Update with further thoughts: I just remembered that this PC did arrive poorly packed and transported. I had to replace the CPU cooler as it not only broke in shipping, but also came unplugged and dislodged from its mounting place. So I'm starting to fear that maybe the damage is to the motherboard and that I should replace it. I can rule out storage devices being a source of instability as I used two different drives (each freshly formatted and with clean installs of WinXP SP3) and experienced identical crashes on both. Considering changing the graphics card also didn't change my luck, the motherboard is starting to seem like the likely culprit. That sucks.

lmttn wrote on 2025-08-01, 22:42:

MemTest came up clean. Despite downloading the 32-bit version of Prime95 it crashes on startup, claiming that it is not a valid Win32 application. It looks like it needs an internet connection anyway, which this PC doesn't have.

Prime95 does not need an internet connection for stress testing.

My mistake, I didn't realize there was a download specifically for XP 32-bit at the bottom of the page. I'm running a test now. Hopefully this gives me an answer that's less work than replacing the entire mobo.

Run memtest. Ensure its not just bad ram.
Then find a version of mats/mods from that era to test the gpus.

I'm betting it's one of those.

Prime95 has been passing tests with no issues for about 18 hours now. Combined with the fact that Call of Duty gave me a verbose error screen directly pertaining to graphics, it's starting to sound like it's time to accept that I got two dying cards in a row. I haven't ordered card number 3 yet but it's gonna be a Radeon of some kind.

Find mats/mods

I have a GT 240 which would crash randomly in games when I first got it. I underclocked the shader freq. from stock (1340?) to 1100MHz. Then it was fine. (Then I used Nibitor 6.06 to edit the card's VGA BIOS and make 1100 the default clock)