How do I find out what graphics card I have?

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?

does windows still have a device manager in the control panel?
should tell you in there

May not be the card itself, maybe old drivers
find out what card it is, then go hunting for the latest drivers

Right click on the desktop, click properties, click on the advanced tab, it'll tell you there in Windows.

Or you can run dxdiag. Just go to your start menu, click on "Run" if it's there. If it isn't, then right click on the menu. It should only have one option: Properties. Under which, you click customize, find the "Run Command" checkbox and check it. In the run window, just type: dxdiag

In the Dxdiag window, there's a "Display" tab at the top, click that. It should then list all you need to know about your graphics card.