Ok, when I first had Vista I was quite excited to be getting Aero as it was an improvement to previous Windows styles to say the least. I was quite shocked when I found my computer "score" was only 1.0 because my old PCI (my computer was about 5 years old) graphics card didn't support pixel shading properly. So I bought another graphics card to find out this one actually rated worse, so no glass.

I recently built my own PC and so far have:

21" Wide-screen TFT Monitor
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor (4600+ 2.40 Ghz)
895MB RAM (1 x 1GB Stick DDR2)

As you will notice, no graphics card. I thought I'd prepare though and make sure Vista could use Aero, so enabled it with the registry settings. Low and behold, Aero start working when the computer is reset.

Now from what I read about Aero, it NEEDS pixel shader 2.0 and certain other graphics card related things to run. My girlfriend's Sims 2 with all the expansion packs seems to run faster than it used to, Counter Strike: Source, Zombie Master and Team Fortress 2 all seem to work (better than they used to!) despite all clearly stating higher minimum requirements.

Does anybody know what's going on? Is it common for Aero to work like this? Why do games that refused to run smoothly with a graphics card (a fairly decent one too tbh) run almost perfect without anything even though they shouldn't run AT ALL?

NOTE: 2400th Post

What are the on board graphics of your new motherboard like?

I currently do have a graphics card in my new computer, but I know that my motherboard graphics won some award recently...it's even got an HDMI output so I'm guessing that the on-board graphics are fairly decent!

could just be that the on-board graphics have a higher spec than whatever graphics cards you'd been trying

I don't now, but the motherboard is a GeForce 7050-M chipset with a standard VGA output. I'm guessing the ~100MB RAM missing is partially because the RAM is less than it should be (as usual), but mainly because it's being used for shared memory

er, ram is usually less than it should be? i think you're thinking of hard drives....

anyway, geforce 7s support directx 9 and pixel shader 3.... where does it say they're less than the minimum requirements?

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Originally posted by ShawnZ
anyway, geforce 7s support directx 9 and pixel shader 3.... where does it say they're less than the minimum requirements?

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Originally posted by Spunky
I didn't think I'd be able to use on-board graphics for it.

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Originally posted by ShawnZ

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Originally posted by Spunky
I didn't think I'd be able to use on-board graphics for it.

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well i don't think your gpu's physical package has anything to do with its capabilities

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