Up until just recently, ease of use generally wasn't a heavily weighted consideration when developing hardware and their respective drivers. Now, we're starting to see some teams of engineers take greater care to make your video card experience one of simplicity. These considerations include physically installing the card, software and driver installation, driver configuration, and general use.

Ease of use, here at the Black Mesa SharkyExtreme research facility, makes us smile. It's that feeling of relief, seeing that traction control light come on as we sweep around the hair-pin at 120 miles per hour. We like that. Of course we don't DO that as it would be against the rules, but if we did, we would feel just like when a hardware installation goes flawlessly.

• Video cards should fit in their respective slots with very little effort. They should not block other hardware access points, such as memory bays or IDE interface ports.
• The drivers should install flawlessly, boast honest, commonly used default settings, and require as few reboots as possible.
• The video memory and core should run well at the normal default clock speeds.
• Configuration of the video settings should be simple and easy to follow.

• Attempting to force 16-bit textures even when 32-bit textures are requested.
• Forcing all video rendering to use the Windows desktop color depth, over-riding the color depth that is requested.
• Requiring multiple re-boots to install hardware drivers.

At any rate, plan to see ease of use as an evaluation criteria on all Sharky Reviews in future.