DX7 Effects On DX8 Vid Card?

[Kn1ves]

Heya.

For some reason, the water and forcefield effects in HL2 look like crap on my computer. I've seen the screenshots of differences between DX hardware levels on Gamespot and my water looks nothing like the water in the DX8 screenshot. The video menu insists that I do have a DX8 card (This card being a GF3Ti200). I've seen the game run on my brother's rig, which has a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, which the video menu also calls DX8 hardware, but he has the awesome shader effects for both water and forcefields, and probably some other stuff I'm not noticing. So... what's up with that? I'm guessing that it's either a card specific problem, a model specific problem or an error on Gamespot's behalf.

Thanks in advance for any assistance..

 

[TEDR]

well valve decided that your card has to be played in direct x 7 mode as it produces fast frame rates and the dirext x 8 frame rates would be slow

its the same story with the geforce fx series they default to direct x 8 same reason