Framerate issues....

Alright well, I have a prebuilt Acer PC which I bought last summer. In no way did I expect it to be a "gaming rig" but it's having trouble running games that it should be able it handle. It has a AMD Athlon 4200+ 64 X2 Processor, 2GB of DDR memory, and an ATI Radeon x1300. Now I know that an x1300 isn't a really good card, but I've read around the internet and many people claim that it runs Half Life 2 on high, FEAR on med-high, but I simply cannot get good FPS on these games at those settings, it is very choppy.

I'm not sure what's wrong, because I installed the ATI Catalyst drivers... Maybe it's my monitor? Because it is a very old CRT monitor. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

I run Windows XP. And I'd like to just get it HL2 running on high without any slowdown, but it seems that ever on low-med there's several times where it slows down, same with FEAR Combat, I put on low and it just looks like crap and still theres sometimes when it will slowdown get get choppy. It's really annoying because before I bought this P I had a really horrible Compaq, 64mb RAM, like 30g harddrive, windows ME, and I hated that thing with a passion. So I finally convinced my parents to get just this new tower, and still I can't run the games a decent settings.

I had pretty much the same computer except with a x1600 and i could barely play fear on high with that.

i think its your video card

BTW If you turn off shadows in fear it helps alot.