I had a valuable learning experience upgrading my computer.
I picked up a new Radon 1950XT card, and also slapped in 3GB of RAM into my Windows XP Pro SP2 box. All was going
fine with the new video card, until... I put the /3GB switch into my computer boot.ini as suggested by Microsoft.
According to Microsoft, my computer will ignore anything past the first two gigs of RAM without this switch.
My frame rates in UT99 dropped from 60+ to about 12 frames per second, worse on some maps. I also had terrible
texture tearing, and what looked like random images replacing some textures.
In the World of Warcraft, my terrain and wall textures vanished completely, making it rather hard to move around.
My answer was to roll back to 2 gigs, and remove the /3GB switch from my boot.ini. My texture and performances
issues vanished.