Shoutbox

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