Hey dudes,

I searched around the forums the Googleosphere for a bit but couldn't find anyone with the same issue as I, so here goes:

After starting a new game the 2 intro videos with the text play just fine, but the actual cinematic that follows just gives me a black screen. I hear the audio that goes along with it just fine, but I never get visuals no matter how long I wait; after a while the game crashes too.

I'm running patch 1.1 (not that that would make any difference since the patch doesn't address this kind of problems), but most importantly, a graphics card that doesn't match the minimum specs. (rest is just fine, I have a Phenom II quad core, showing up in dxdiag as roundabout 3.2 GHz)

Now I hear you all coming "lawlz upgraed pc l0lz", but you should know that I run any other newly released games fine, or at worst with certain artifacts, mostly due to my ATI X1950pro not supporting Shader Model 3.0 (SM3).

At first I thought this lay at the base of the problem, but then I figured that a graphics card with SM2 would only give me graphical glitches, like it does in AC: Brotherhood, for instance. So before I run off to spend a good €250 on a more modern graphics card, I'd like to be sure that this is indeed the problem, and not something else. Help would be very much appreciated.

Complete system spec list:

Windows XP SP3
AMD Phenom II X4 955, 3,2 GHz
ATI X1950 pro 512 MB, with latest driver
2048MB RAM
3 gigs of free space on the partition TW2 is installed on
90 megs of free space on the windows partition (yeah, I'm shorta strapped for space there)

Thanks again guys.

The game will not run with SM 2.0 you need 3.0 to run it properly -_-

Properly yes, but not at all is what I'm talking about.

emmm.. If Shock2k11 is right and your card doesnt run on SM 3.0 you cant play the game. sorry.
Edit:
You cant find another game that relies on dx9 (sm3) etc that look more beautiful. they use everything they can, so a SM2.0 card wont cut it