Need some help - My son has been whining for a PC to run MC on, rather than his little Kindle and his XBOX 360. So, I resurrected a 3+ year old HP computer that has 5GB RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and installed a fresh copy of Windows 8.1. We plunked down our $27 this morning for the PC version of MC and tried running it. We get a crash and some messages to the effect that the video drivers are out of date:

Pixel Format Not Accelerated

This error message is commonly caused by outdated video card drivers. To fix this, you generally need to update your video card drivers, please follow the directions for your Operating System below

So, I tried that and seem to run into a dead end. The AMD/ATI stuff is, from what I can tell, indicating that we have the current drivers. So, before I drop more dollars on this project and buy a new graphics card, I wanted to see what I might be able to get out of this support forum. I followed the instructions and produced one of those "gist" link files, below.

Can anyone give us some info as how to proceed, or are we simply screwed with this current video card?




anonymous / gist:485bedaa94ef5099061f

OK, so - it appears that I'm not the Lone Ranger with this non-accelerated-pixel problem. Very annoying. I could accept it if this were some freebie program, but it is not. And this is why I run MY stuff on a Mac, and not this windows platform. Be that as it may, I guess to keep the boy happy I have to go out and spend yet more money - this time for a new graphics card.

Can anyone on this forum provide the name and model number of a PC graphics card that WILL work with the current, un-modded version of Minecraft? And preferably not one that costs a ton of money...

Thanks, Juim

cestislife - many thanks for the reply! Sorry if it sounded as I was dissing Minecraft. Just the opposite - my son's Kindle and XBOX 360 versions are rock solid. He's never had an issue, other than his little brother (20 months old) sticking his finger on the XBOX power off button in the middle of one of the older boy's sessions! Rather it is with this driver stuff and the MS operating system. I worked for 20+ years in IT support where we had 2,200 Windows desktops to support and it was ugly. When I retired seven years ago my wife and I sold our Dell PC's and bought iMacs; I was sick of the driver issues every time there was an OS "upgrade" along with the constant stream of patches. But I digress... :-)

I will take a look at that thread you pointed me to in the morning. Time to go attend to that 20 month old!

Jim

Cestislife: Well, tried and failed - twice. I noticed that there was another post at the bottom of that thread you pointed me to. Tried that procedure and was presented with an error message: "The best driver software for your device is already installed". I rebooted anyway and got the same pixel acceleration failure as before. So then I ran the procedure you suggested. After doing that and rebooting, same old failure.

Suggestions?

OK - got it. I was being tripped up by the fact that AMD's web page no longer looks anything like what is in the Utube video. Once I made the correlation between the old and new and what part of the web page I needed to be in, all was fine. Did the update, rebooted, and MineCraft now runs as it should.

Many thanks for your assistance - much appreciated!