Hello, I just bought my new system - E6750, Asus 8800GT, 2 GB RAM, Gygabyte motherboard and it's great. I'm playing the new games with all eye candy on with smooth framerates - Crysis included (DirectX 9.0c), (because I'm a 1024x768 player LOL).
I installed "Need for Speed: Underground 2" because I wanted to see how it will look. On my old PC the game won't allow me to move the Level of details more than 1 step above lowest. Increasing it was making my screen going black.
However, cranking all settings to the max didn't changed the picture noticeably with the only exception of the car that got shiny, with neat reflections and light coronas appeared on light sources. It looks like the textures of the road and the city are one and a same for all quality settings. The game ran with constant frame rates of 120    I think that's the maximum for my old monitor, probably it could go much higher)
The problem is that now it tends to crash whenever the game loads new map. It never happened with my old PC.
Anyone else tried playing that game recently with new hardware? Or any other old game?

I think I had some problems when I tried to play it a while back, I believe it's a fairly common problem, if you patch it to the latest version it will probably fix it.

 
Thank you for the advise, I did exactly that and now it doesn't crash.  

Also - you can use the "manage 3d settings" in Ntune to crank up graphical settings as high as you want for any game.
 
I play all of my old games at 16x AA 16xQ AF maximum quality. For games like Gothic 2 it makes a huge difference.

With the exception of REALLY old games (Pre win95) hardware rarely causes me problems.  Usually it is OS compatibility that gives me fits.  Sometimes compatibility mode helps, but not always.

Things that only run in real mode, and things that don't like it when you run it using more than 16-bit color.