My gaming box...not so much

I have long operated under the assumption that my computer is good enough to play games on, should I ever feel the desire. Now, though, I have to seriously question that.

Today I was listening to an mp3 in WinAmp and running all my normal programs--AIM, ICQ, mIRC, and IE--when I decided to play Dynomite. I opened the program and began playing. I had gotten pretty far into the game when suddenly the game jerked and stuttered just as Whirley was going by. I missed him, which seriously annoyed me. Soon I decided to quit--I don't like playing the game with the extra egg color. It gets too hard to differentiate in my peripheral vision.

So I closed the program, and then I got to thinking. Why did it hang? So, as an experiment, I did CTL-ALT-DEL and watched the CPU usage as I played another game.

The results?

Sean says it looks like Dynomite is rendered in 3D. That's all well and good...but it still irks me that I should need a faster processor just to play what is essentially a 2D shooter.