Ugly Water on DirectX 8 card?

[Pippinator]

Hey so i was looking at the news on the front page, and saw the dx comparisons and then suddenly realised - my graphics card is a dx8.0 card - and although whatever setting i put water quality on, all i get is the water looking like this picture:

Not only is it ugly and like hl1's water, but there is NO REFLECTION at all! The images on the dx comparisons had much lovelier water!

My system specs are:

xp 2400
Geforce3 Ti500
768mb of DDR Ram
Windows XP SP2

I was wondering if anyone else could help me out? I'm real confused as to why mine looks so ugly, and NONE of the water options change it at all!

p.s I bought the UK DVD version

 

[Xaxly24]

The ti500 is dx8 compatible. Open console and type mat_dxlevel 81 this will enable dx 8.1 if it can pull it off.If you just type mat_dxlevel it will tell you what level it is currently running at....reply....also driver version?