Upgrading (or Not) from MSI nVidia 5600 to ATI X800XT

I bought it. I installed it. I took it out and put the old one in -
because the old one was faster.

In 2002, the MSI card won an award from Tom's Hardware. I waited for
the price to come down, and bought it.

It works good, but slows down with large geometries (e.g. Solidworks
part bigger than 15 MB).

I bought the ATI card, the "All-in-Wonder" thing with the TV tuner on
the card.

Strangely, the ATI card scores much higher than the older MSI card on a
game benchmark (Aquamark 3, 60,000 for the ATI, 20,000 for the MSI).

But - so what ? In practice, the ATI card is dramatically slower.

I went to the Solidworks website to see if there was a
Solidworks-specific driver or something.

The installation procedure on the new ATI card was glitch-free, that
is, "plain vanilla".

In the short term, it's back to the nVidia 5600 card.

The rest of the system - Pentium 4 3 GHz, Seagate Serial ATA 120 GB
drive, 4 x 512 Mushkin low-latency (2-2-2-5) memory.

Questions -
* Is there a trick to installing the ATI card, where you deviate from
the default procedure, to make it work for Solidworks ?
* What other recent-vintage video cards are Solidworks users using ?

Thanks !