Although I have a graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7300 LE) which supports Aero, slideshows always run in Basic mode in my Windows Vista (Ultimate) RTM system. The Help and Support indicated that the slide show theme controls only appear if the WinSAT score is atleast 3.0. Mine is rated as low as 2.8 (Graphics system being the poor scorer).

WinSATScore registry value

Soon after seeing RegMon query the WinSATScore registry value (non-existent by default), I Googled it and saw the excellent tweak posted at the Microsoft Photography Blog. It suggested that in order to get the entire Theme set for slideshows, one may try boosting the WinSAT score virtually, by creating/altering the WinSATScore value.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\SlideShow

In the above key, I create a new DWORD (32-bit) value named WinSATScore and assigned 300 as the Value data, and closed Registry Editor.

Voila! The slideshow themes magically appeared, and all the themes worked fine in my system. Of course, there is no guarantee that this tweak with work with every graphics card on the market.

Note: If one or more of the slideshow theme does not work for you, you may want to check if your graphics card supports Vertex Shader 2.0 property or not. Here is an excerpt from Help and Support:

In order to see your slide show with high-quality visuals (including videos, themes, and transitions), you need to have a subscore of 3.0 for the Graphics category in the Windows Experience Index. Some themes also require your computer’s graphics card to have a feature called Vertex Shader 2.0. To take advantage of all slide show capabilities, you might need to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card. For more information, see Ways to improve your computer's performance.

Here is the list of Slideshow Themes available:

  • Classic
  • Fade
  • Pan and zoom
  • Black and white
  • Sepia
  • Album
  • Collage
  • Frame
  • Glass
  • Spin
  • Stack
  • Travel