I'm sorry if the title is a bit confusing, but this problem is confusing in itself, so here whats happened:
I have a laptop with a Nvidia Geforce 9500M GS and a couple days ago, after a day with absolutely no problems at all, I launched Flight Simulator to get a weird error completely out of the blue about me not having a compatible graphics card (What? but I had just played the damn game the day before ). After many tries I just resigned and tried to play Wings of Prey (what can I say. I had a flight itch) only to be greeted with a message about a "shader model not being supported". I have more than 20 hours logged on that game, so needles to say that my computer can (could) run it. To make the story short, after that I tried to run every game I had installed on my computer and the only games I could run (which were Gish and SpaceChem) were OpenGL or flash based. Every other game would either tell that I didn't have a supported GPU or that there was a "DX compatible graphic card was required". Before I forget, my GPU was updated with the last drivers like a week ago, and I had been playing since then with no problems. I also didn't install any other drivers for any other hardware.
Outside videogames, it's as if nothing had happened: everything else worked fine; under the device manager there was no error messages and my GPU was displayed correctly. Other GPU intensive software (Solidworks, Photoshop, 3Dmax, etc) work fine...
My only suspicions:
1- The day before my laptop went on a trip, but it goes on the same trip pretty much every weekend and it's always safely accommodated in my car trunk, so I'm only mentioning it to cover all my bases.
2- Just before all this start happening I had installed e very old game (from 1999) that had lots of trouble running on new machines, so I figured trying to install the DX version that came with it would help, but when I tried it just told me I had a more recent version and nothing happened (or so I thought), but seeing as many of the error I get mention DX, I imagine it may have some correlation.
What I tried so far:
1- Reinstalling the drivers, installing older drivers, uninstalled the drivers and tried to see if anything would run with the default Windows drivers, nothing worked.
2- Tried to reinstall DX, but it tells me the version I have is up to date so it won't do anything. Tried to install a DX from the most recent game I had, and it seemed to bee installing something, but nothing worked.
3- Run my antivirus to see if a malware could be causing this issue, but found nothing (not surprisingly, since I'm very careful with that).
4- Tried to slap and beat multiple times my laptop in hopes that it would eventually solve anything.
5- Apologized to my laptop for the treatment mentioned previously
Nothing worked so far, and I'm getting a bit desperate. I really wanted to avoid reinstalling Windows, since it's obliviously a pain in the arse having to reinstall everything back. So, here I am, expecting an epiphany from anyone that might be reading this lengthy wall of text.
I have a laptop with a Nvidia Geforce 9500M GS and a couple days ago, after a day with absolutely no problems at all, I launched Flight Simulator to get a weird error completely out of the blue about me not having a compatible graphics card (What? but I had just played the damn game the day before ). After many tries I just resigned and tried to play Wings of Prey (what can I say. I had a flight itch) only to be greeted with a message about a "shader model not being supported". I have more than 20 hours logged on that game, so needles to say that my computer can (could) run it. To make the story short, after that I tried to run every game I had installed on my computer and the only games I could run (which were Gish and SpaceChem) were OpenGL or flash based. Every other game would either tell that I didn't have a supported GPU or that there was a "DX compatible graphic card was required". Before I forget, my GPU was updated with the last drivers like a week ago, and I had been playing since then with no problems. I also didn't install any other drivers for any other hardware.
Outside videogames, it's as if nothing had happened: everything else worked fine; under the device manager there was no error messages and my GPU was displayed correctly. Other GPU intensive software (Solidworks, Photoshop, 3Dmax, etc) work fine...
My only suspicions:
1- The day before my laptop went on a trip, but it goes on the same trip pretty much every weekend and it's always safely accommodated in my car trunk, so I'm only mentioning it to cover all my bases.
2- Just before all this start happening I had installed e very old game (from 1999) that had lots of trouble running on new machines, so I figured trying to install the DX version that came with it would help, but when I tried it just told me I had a more recent version and nothing happened (or so I thought), but seeing as many of the error I get mention DX, I imagine it may have some correlation.
What I tried so far:
1- Reinstalling the drivers, installing older drivers, uninstalled the drivers and tried to see if anything would run with the default Windows drivers, nothing worked.
2- Tried to reinstall DX, but it tells me the version I have is up to date so it won't do anything. Tried to install a DX from the most recent game I had, and it seemed to bee installing something, but nothing worked.
3- Run my antivirus to see if a malware could be causing this issue, but found nothing (not surprisingly, since I'm very careful with that).
4- Tried to slap and beat multiple times my laptop in hopes that it would eventually solve anything.
5- Apologized to my laptop for the treatment mentioned previously
Nothing worked so far, and I'm getting a bit desperate. I really wanted to avoid reinstalling Windows, since it's obliviously a pain in the arse having to reinstall everything back. So, here I am, expecting an epiphany from anyone that might be reading this lengthy wall of text.