I'm not sure if installing the newest drivers would work but again its worth a try.
To be honest, I'm a bit puzzled as to how to solve this so I've sent a PM to fable and asked if the thread can be moved to Tech Support as there might be some people who view that forum who could help.
Do any other games other than the Gothic games work? It sounds like a problem with your graphics card to me. Have you changed the card recently? I know that in other games some people have had problems when changing graphics cards and uninstalling new drivers without installing the old ones properly.
Have you tried doing a clean install of your graphics drivers? It might work. If you're not sure how to do that, head over to Tweakguides' ATI-Catalyst tweak guide right [url="http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html"]here[/url].
''They say truth is the first casualty of war. But who defines what's true? Truth is just a matter of perspective. The duty of every soldier is to protect the innocent, and sometimes that means preserving the lie of good and evil, that war isn't just natural selection played out on a grand scale. The only truth I found is that the world we live in is a giant tinderbox. All it takes...is someone to light the match" - Captain Price
You say you tried it a long time ago, is there a chance you've updated your drivers since then? I was having some probs with one game, updated the drivers, it fixed that game, but all others began having problems, so after I was done with the game, I had to rollback. I might have installed the wrong driver, but I highly doubt it.
So try doing a rollback, it could work too (you really don't have much to lose by doing it either).
In memorian: Fiona; Ravager; Lestat; Phreddie; and all of those from the 1500 incident. Lest we forget.