Wierd, When I see people playing portal on youtube, I see that closed portals have blackish spots on them, and opened portals have a little flame like design on the edges.

As for me, On closed portals there is no black spots, it's just a plain color with some sort of a shading effect. And open portals do not have any special designs on the edges.

I've even set the quality to the maximum.

If you want to know my graphics card, it's Nvidia GeForce something something

Which GeForce is it? There are loads of different types, not just a few, as seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units. I would guess at least half of the cards shown on that page are GeForce.

It could be down to you having an early model, which doesn't support all the special effects.

screenshot?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbo6WwGkgJI

My Portals look like his portals

If you look under Video Adapter in the Device Manager it should tell you which GeForce card you have. To find the Device Manager right click the My Computer icon and click on Properties.

Even when I put all my settings to their lowest, I always had the same affects around my portals (the fancy effects).

You must have one seriously out-of-date graphics card. Time to upgrade.

Probably, but their are really expensive... the new ones.

Anyone know of a good graphics card that is... cheap?

Atlantisrobo wrote:
Probably, but their are really expensive... the new ones.

Anyone know of a good graphics card that is... cheap?

NVidea 8400 GS is kickass.

Problem with recommending a video card is we need to know what type of graphics card slot you have and what your price range is. Is the slot a AGP or PCI-E? If you bought your computer from DELL or something, it would help if you said what model your computer is.

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200

I just found out my Nvidia driver xP

Atlantisrobo wrote:
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200

I just found out my Nvidia driver xP

That is a pretty old card. I have no idea if it would support whatever type of effect is used on the portal edges.
Also, have you updated your driver recently?

Yea, I did.

And when I did, I can't play HL2 anymore. (I still can play Deathmatch though.) (HL2 just crashes during loading screens)

Well, my way of figuring out the best buy is not to go for the cheapest, but to find the recommended requirements of the latest greatest graphic-intensive game, and buy based on that. (for me, usually 1 step above recommended, since I have the money).

The reasoning being. . .that the gaming market tends to build games based on "graphics engines", and if you can find out their sweet spot, you have a great likelyhood of lasting for quite a few years with the same card. If you go for less, you will find more and more games you will not be able to play as time goes on.. .

I believe we have met that requirement for the next couple of years with Crysis, whose specs are as follows:

Quote:
minimum required
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or better
VRAM: 256MB of Graphics Memory

Recommended Requirements
Video Card: NVIDIA 7800 Series, ATI Radeon 1800 Series or better
VRAM: 512MB of Graphics Memory

(For the record, I have a GeoForce 8600 GTS, which does quite nicely)