I converted my system over to Win7 64 about 5 months ago, but hadn’t really had much time to do any gaming.

Eventually, my daughter asked about playing a Disney Princess CD that she’d played for months under Vista 32.

So I pulled out the CD, ran through the install and started it up. Chug… Chug… Chug… Crash!

Ugh. This isn’t good. After some digging around, turns out that Disney Princesses is an OpenGL game that requires 1.1+. Ok fair enough. This is Win7 after all.

I found an app called OpenGL Extensions which shows detailed info about the OpenGL stack loaded and turns out, I was using the generic MS video driver and OpenGL 1.0. Yikes!.

So I tried installing the latest ATI drivers, which, as of April 2010, is 10.3. No dice. The x1900XT is no longer supported.

Double Yikes!

And this card is not  that old.

Long story short. I grabbed the 9.11 version of the Catalyst drivers off the ATI website here. They appear to be the last version (for Vista 64) that did support the x1900XT, and they DO install under Win7 64 (albeit the manager pops an error about some MOM file being missing, but that doesn’t seem to affect the drivers).

Now, OpenGL extensions reports OpenGL 2.1 and that game works flawlessly.

And, I suppose, I’ll be in the market for a newer video card at some point in the nearish future.