Question about auto-detect settings on PC games

[Zak]

I just bought a new PC. A pretty powerful one IMHO. However whenever I install a game, the auto-detect settings seem pretty low. For example: I just installed Dawn of War and the expansion pack. When I went to the video settings, the game auto-detected the models and textures to low! I then proceeded to manually max out all the settings. When I did this, I played a six-player skirmish against the AI and I experienced no lag or slowdown. My Comp Specs are below:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+
Video card: NVIDIA 7900 GTX 512MB X2
Memory: 2GB RAM

Does anyone know why the PC would do this? Thank you.

 

[peterdiva]

It's a pretty useless setting, most games will always use conservative settings. With your system, just crank everything up. You can then reduce the settings if you get any slowdowns (doubtful).