I took the precaution of pre-ordering Doom and getting overnight shipping, and on August 3rd it arrived, not a minute too soon. I had been reading many articles on recommended Doom specs, so when I loaded it up I expected to play at High Quality and 1024/768 screensize. After a minor bit of tweaking I began my first game at "marine" difficulty and prepared to forget the entire real world for several hours. Unfortunately, during the opening video the real world intruded immediately, in the form of "snow" on the monitor. But I couldn't stop, and began playing anyway. The snow continued to worsen so I exited and updated my video drivers to the latest Catalyst 4.7 version, which I hoped would solve the problem. No luck.

Thus began the great internet search for answers. I poked around various hardware sites looking to see if anyone else was having problems, and I discovered the Beta Doom 3 drivers, Catalyst 4.9. I found them at the TeamRadeon website, and bookmarked it for future reference. These drivers made no difference, and I reinstalled the 4.7 drivers.