ok heres 2 images

1st one is this computer without pixel/alpha blending on textures (sharpened image a bit to enhance it)

the 2nd one is my computer upstairs, which uses a crappy kyro chipset, but has lovely texture blending.
Problem is my upstairs computer's card has 1/3 framerate of the GeForce 4MX

(btw fyi tried the method of deleting directx entry and then restarting to 8.1 to reinitiate, but no change)

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

Have you tested the card in another machine yet?

(Though, it would take one hell of a perfect hardware fault to just break texture filtering.)

It's an integrated graphics processor, not an actaul AGP card.

An impossible one. The GF4MX didn't have, like, programmable samplers or anything, they had fixed hardware texture mapping units. It's not like a glitch in the firmware or something.

JK wasn't... er... written well. There's a certain degree of ambiguity in how it's setting up its render state that lets the graphics card essentially roll dice to decide how it's going to do chromakeying. But that would affect alpha blending not the mag filter.