New Video card are only for gamershellip maybe

Maybe I’m the only person that have this opinion, but frankly speaking I was impressed on how bad my new video card performs on my new system. In this system I have 2 ATI Radeon HD4600, while in the old system I have two old X1550 video card, so I did not expect that dramatic loss of desktop graphics experience.

I need to confess you that desktop experience was really better with older cards. I extensively use snagit to capture screen, and with my new system I could use it only with aero disabled, because if I try to capture screen with aero enabled, the cursor of snagit move at one frame each two seconds, making impossible to select the area to capture.

When I first open Youtube to watch a video Flash shows a green video, then it blocks. After a quick search on the internet many people suggest to disable video card hardware acceleration, and this indeed solved the problem. Watching video with media player is impossible because the reproduction is crappy. When I switch Zune player from minimized version to maximized version it needs 5 seconds to show me something.

I tried to expose my problem in some forums, but people only told me that my cards are not so good for video gaming… come on… I do not care about video game performance, I want to be able to Work on my new system. watch a video of NDC, using snagit, etc, as I did on my old system.

My consideration is that video card manufacturer release TONS of new video card, but they care only about performance in gaming, so they do not care if card is Crappy on desktop experience. I have 2 video card because I use three monitor, and in a forum a user asked me Why you have two video card without crossfire enabled, it is useless, this happens because noone cares about performance of video cards outside FPS you got in some Shoot’em up game.

Now I’m working with Windows Aero disabled, I do not really care about this, because I do not need aero to work, but I’m very disappointed with ATI for these crappy video card I’ve bought :).

Another horrible feature is the HyperMemory, I really warn you to buy these CRAPPY ATI CARD if you do not care about gaming, Ati Catalyst told me that video card actually has 8GB of Hyper Memory. I’ve looked in a lot of forum and some people complain about ATI Cards to use system memory. Everyone tells Video card use the memory only when it need to but looking at how bad it performs on desktop experience I’m not sure if it is actually sucking me 8 gb of ram. And … surprise, there is no way to disable hyper memory, or reduce the amount of ram used. It seems impossible to me that ATI did not think to gave the user the possibility to set this value, so if video card driver are buggy it is possible that video card sucks 8GB of ram in my system……

Seriously, I’ll never buy an ATI card in the future, and probably I’ll throw these my new card in the rubbish and go for a couple of Matrox cards :).

Alk.