it’s your graphics card, matey. not only is it 2 generations behind, it is the generation of nvidia cards that was notoriously slow in directx 9 applications… of which prey is very much.
i had even the fast geforce fx , 5800, at one time, and it was still slow as a bitch.
i would recommend to get a faster graphics card, for example geforce 7600gt or 7800… if you’re on a budget, i’d say maybe a 6800 vanilla or GS… it should give you OK performance, but it won’t be very future proof
descent is not even in the same class of games as prey though…
hey mark, have you heard of the new descent clones in development??
first you got core decision, a retail game planned
http://coredecision.highoctane.biz/
also you got “into cerberon”, which is a mod for doom 3 currently in (downloadable) alpha. i’ve played it and it seems like it has potential!
http://www.chmodoplusr.com/IntoCerberon/
Prey (uses modified doom 3 engine) is openGL based game rather than directx, and nvidia cards used to run them better than ati, but yes, that generation of nvidia cards was quite a failure… i would suggetst at least something from 6xxx generation… those were quite succesful cards.
my 5800 ran doom3 acceptably, but it was a total slideshow when i got 3dmark05
I’ll have to look into another video card–once I have the money.
Has the Atari Adventure map been converted yet to something other than Quake 3? 
Crashday is fun but waaaaaay to short. I finished career mode in a day and after that the game does not have much more to offer imo. Looks awesome though and if they had spent a little more time making the stages more varying it would be a pretty nice game.
I tried Trackmania… it reminds me of some kind of PC game that was released in 1993 / 1994, called Mega Race
Yeah, or 4D-Sports driving, called “Stunts” in some parts of the world 
When I tried TrackMania Nations, I found a game that, in single-player mode, you can go 700mph and hit a wall and nothing happens to the car. I haven’t yet tried it in multiplayer mode.
the single-player mode is just for getting how to handle the cars. There is no damage-model or collision-model in this game. But when you play online there are a bunch of really fantasting tracks available
I think my favorite purely racing game was something for the playstation: Cart World series. It controlled well and had a great damage engine–if you timed it right you could get cars to fly 200 feet in the air.
My favorite 2 games that involve cars is GTA3 and GTA San Andreas. I love editing the handling.cfg file and trying to find a way to make cars that stick to the ground, yet have a suspension that lets them ride right over fences, and can travel straight up buildings, in addition to weighing 20,000 pounds (plowing through whatever vehicles get in your way) and going 500 mph. The mod for the map that lets you get to the hidden city (the one that is from the robbery at the intro to the game) is a fun one too. I made a map modification that had a road that went straight up in the air for several miles to where the city can no longer be seen and -almost- managed to go outside the boundaries of the game. Almost. I also love editing the weapons.dat file–making the flamethrower have an affect on anyone within 200 feet, and lasts for 10 minutes–so I just hit the flamethrower for a second and then get into the car and drive and anyone who comes near the car catches on fire–it’s really funny once I have 6 stars… 
“You’re under arres–AARRGH!!” “You’re risking your AAARGH!!!” Screaming and burning everywhere I drove. I love those games!
sagosen, i’m afraid we derailed your thread 
Ahhh STUNTS!!! Now that was a fun game!! I remember me and my brothers used the track editor to make stages where you could get the car up to speeds where the game started to glitch. The replays of these races where hilarious.
And as for the GTA series my favourite is Vice City because of the atmosphere wich I think both GTA3 and San Andreas lacked… but the king of this genre is Mafia wich is definately one of my all time favourite games.
Semi on topic: Does anyone know a game similar to Freelancer? (I asked this question in a game store and the salesman recomended X2: The Threat… never been so dissapointet with a game (exept maybe for Driv3r 
))
…I guess you will always be dissapointed when you are looking for a “similar” game because it will always be different.
i played mafia (and loved it) before i played any gta games… so i was highly disappointed with vice city. liberty city stories on PSP seems like it has some potential (i played it for about an hour), but that was 4 months ago and i haven’t really had much motivation to try it again 
thanks for the tip on TM nations, finally I get something worthwhile to use my $200 steering wheel on, and its FREE@!@#!@!!
w00t4g3
So many Trackmania-Addicts now
So, I think I’ll have to set up a server soon
Np, this is getting to be a quite fun read!
And when we’re talking about “realistic” driving games, I love Rallysport Challenge 2 on XBOX, other driving games I’ve loved to bits:
Never tried the DS-installment.Kizzume:
I was in love with the GTA3-series myself for quite some time, the online mod was also a lot of fun! Laughed quite a bit of your post there, hehe.
Mafia on PC was exellent too btw, good acting, good storyline etc etc. Godfather looks promising!
so, there is a server available, I hope…
The name of the server is “da renoiseserver”
Password is renoise.
I hope that works.
hmm. Maybe I should set it public. This time, I do not know, if this server works properly
bah
I was just starting to enjoy myself and my GFX card decided to shit itself…kept crashing, so I took it out and dusted everything etc. When I put it back in, the crashing ceased but now it is not rendering propperly…almost everything has those little spikes of poor rendering and theres sections that don’t even seem to get loaded in (triangles of textures that are completely transperent where there should be texture…)
I used to rant abuot this sort of stuff on game tournament forums to some avail but stopped posting there…maybe someone here can offer some tips…