I decided to give XNA another try, so I'm using XNA GS 2.0. I started a new windows game project and built it just to make sure everything was in order. It compiled fine, but upon running, it threw a NoSuitableGraphicsDeviceException, which confuses the crap out of me. The error message says that Direct3D hardware acceleration is either not available or disabled. Well, I have a Radeon X550 and I checked its settings to make sure hardware acceleration was enabled and it's set to full acceleration. I also know it only supports up to SM 2.0. Does XNA GS 2.0 require a higher shader model or something? If not, does anyone know what might be the problem? One other thing I did was to run a couple games and they all worked fine, which just confounds the issue. Thanks.

The X550 should indeed do Vertex and Pixel Shader 2.0 and the default Windows Game (2.0) only sets the GraphicsDeviceManager to require Shader Model 1.1

The default BackBuffer and DepthStencil formats should also be supported on the X550 so I am not really sure what to suggest other than making absolutely sure you have the latest Catalyst drivers and your DirectX runtime is bang up-to-date.

Sorry I can't be of much more help than that [headshake]

Regards,
ViLiO

I did both of the things you suggested and it didn't work. I did some searching on MSDN and found a few threads on the forums from people having the same problem. The suggested fix seems to be to disallow multi-sampling in the device. The problem is, upon analysis of the exception details, the exception is being thrown in the GraphicsDeviceManager constructor, before I have a chance to disable multi-sampling. Any suggestions?