Just a few days ago, I downloaded Steam and choked up the money for the Team Fortress/Gmod Package. I found that Gmod ran badly; if I spawned more than 10 or 15 items at a time half the screen flashed purple. I was disappointed, and when I went to try to play some TF2 that didn't run at all. I got an error message saying my graphics card needs to support Pixel Shader 1.1 or higher in order to run TF2. All the other system minimums are met (RAM, processor, etc.), and many of the recommended ones are exceeded or neared.

I'm thinking that the problem with Gmod is probably with the graphics card too, but I'm not sure how I can confirm that. I've always known that at some point this century my machine would no longer be able to take games, what with it being so old, but I'm fairly certain that since it's just the graphics card I'm having problems with, it's probably fixable. Anyone know how to find out what graphics card I have? And how much would it cost to fix it?


TL;DR: TF2 and Gmod run like shit on my PC and TF2 says I need a graphics card that supports Pixel Shader 1.1 or higher. How do I found out what graphics card I have, how do I fix it, and how much money is it?