
The result being that your games all run, the new card is faster than the old card, and everything seems to be working as they should, but you're not getting the full performance that the new card is capable of. If you upgraded to a newer, better card and this happens, it's possible for the driver to still be using software emulation for a feature that your new card supports in hardware. When you upgrade video cards, in rare cases the new driver install can fail to change some of your old driver settings. If a feature is not supported by the video card hardware, the drivers are usually set to emulate it in software, rather than error out and fail when a program tries to use that feature. The reason Nvidia and AMD can release a single installer for all their video cards is because the installer auto-detects the card and enables/disables the features which are/aren't supported by that card as part of the install process.
