I am going to have to deal, but I like everything being the same format, everything having X and Y not some things X and somethings Y.


Pretty much this app is looking at the driver information. From that information it is able to compare it to a database and tell you if your computer is fast enough.

Well it may need to look at the "hardware ids" property of the graphic card to determine the chip being used and compare it to the database. That said knowing my chip is 9460 is useless information for that is not used by anything in the real world besides the driver. It should then call the "device description" and output this information for this at least tells you the model number (or in some cases such as mine the model series even though not the specific number.) This is what Steam does and if they have access to the drivers information which this program does, then there is no reason they can't do it.


If you have a dedicated card and your motherboard or OS is adding more memory to it as shared memory, it reports the total memory instead of just the dedicated memory.

This is not good for in games they never used the shared memory it is just too slow (too low of memory bandiwidth by an order of magnitude). Only time that shared memory helps performance with video cards is when you are doing heavy photo editing or video editing and it uses the shared memory as a swap pool/buffer.


Every chipset has shaders. How the shaders work, how powerful these shaders are, whether they are unified, or just pixel or vertex is dependent on which chipset we are talking about. The mhz of these shaders are not really important. If you have 8 shaders at 1000 mhz or 16 shaders at 500 mhz they should have theoretical equal performance and practically they are the same. (I am ignoring things such as rops and texture units right now for simplicity sake.)

The only reason why the number of shaders matter is this. When ATI and Nvidia make a generation of hardware they chip design between the low end card and the high end card are very much identical on a design level. What is different from one chip vs another is how many calculation units it possess (pixel shaders is the main type of calculation units, but texture units and rops are other types). For example a 210 graphic card has 16 shaders, while a 285 has 240 shaders. Thus if these shaders were operating on the same frequency then the 285 is 15 times faster than the 210. Sometimes games can't work on the 210 it just isn't fast enough. Yet the 210 and the 285 have the same video logic, the same vertex shader version and pixel shader version. The vertex shader and pixel shader version is important for when DirectX or OpenGL has a call on the software side the driver is able to covert that hardware call into something the video card can understand.


ActiveX instantly runs on Internet Explorer unless you manually go into the settings and modify it. It has been the delivery mechanism for numerous viruses because of that. You have to pretty much trust the sender. Thus I don't use ActiveX areas unless I pretty much have too


It cost me $1600 for my current hardware at the time of purchase. (It originally cost me almost $1750 for I had two 4890s at the time, after I build it I even won a third one in a random drawing, but after a month of playing with them I sold them for I didn't need 3x4890s).

These computer parts were bought 13 months ago. Now the processor and the OS I got for cheap through intel retailedge for $129 (a "bribe program" if you work an electronics retail, intel has a website where on your own time you learn about intel products, which they hope you sell more of, and in return you gain prizes and deep discounts). The rest I got through buying from various websites and my work place hunting for the best deal, because of this I saved about $600 dollars from my reckoning.

With the exception of a couple games that actually needed all that hardware, I have not used this system to its full potential (I couldn't get crysis to over 60fps with two video cards with everything maxed at 1080p, low 40s fps with 1 video card and mid 50s with two). For non game playing I haven't seen the cpu go over 50% or the memory used more than 9 gb. I bought 12 gb for at the time memory was relatively cheap (not as cheap though as jan through march 09). It was about Sept to Dec 09 when memory prices suddenly doubled, and memory prices are starting to drop in the last month.