How come only the games I buy through Steam run slow on my PC?

I recently bought some games through steam, but they all seem to run slow on my PC. I made sure to check the specs on my machine before buying and my specs seem to far exceed the requirements. Example: Dawn of War II, Home Front. Other games that I have purchased through other means work fine (Dead Space II, StarCraft II), it seems to be only the Steam purchesed games. These are my specs: OS Name Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium System Manufacturer MSI System Model MS-7642 System Type x64-based PC Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor, 3200 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s) Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB ATI Radeon HD 4290 What could be the problem?
Answer:

your videocard is crazy slow, would have been decent 10 years ago, maybe. homefront requires a 4850 which is about 8x faster than what you have dawn of war 2 is x1600 which is about 1.5x faster dead space 2 is a 3850 which is about 4x faster starcrap 2 is a 9800 pro or something which your card is actually a little faster than. some games can perform alright with your cpu, which is alost faster then required for most of these games, but other games need a real videocard no matter what

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