I have a ATI Radeon X300 graphics card in my machine. When I try to hardware render something I get an error message saying that my graphics card is insufficient for rendering. Is there any setting I can change to correct this or do I have to actually get a better graphics card?

Prolly the latter Hardware rendering is very picky and maya in general doesn’t like ATI a Nvidia quadro is the Card of Choice for running maya. I have heard some people have goten decent performance with the Geforce line but the OpenGL is hadicapped on the cards and users often fight with trying differt drivers for several weeks before finding something that will perform well if you wan great performance that is consitant and not have to fight with the system then get a quadro

I had an ATIx300 and had the same problem

bottom line is you have to have a supported card if you want hardware rendering to work perfectly

Thanks for the responses.  Sounds like I need to get a new card!

You could at least try this code, by pasting it into the maya environment file located just below your maya folder in the Windows documents folders.

MAYA_FORCE_HWRENDERER_SUPPORTED = 1