Tips and Tweaks for 3D Video Cards
By Robert Heron - Posted Dec 05, 2002
However, we do recommend checking the display control panel to insure your desktop is displaying 32-bit color, the resolution is set to taste, and that your monitor is set to a refresh rate of at least 75 Hz for CRT displays.
While you're at it, check for a sound card driver update and polish it all off with a fresh coat of DirectX.
For those who wish to tweak and learn,
Anisotropic filtering is the most hardware intensive of the three forms of texture enhancement. It also provides the best quality. Anisotropic filtering offers a more accurate way of depicting oblique angled textures. This method of filtering works great with textures incorporating alphanumeric characters. Think of a billboard in a 3D scene being viewed at an extreme angle.
Anti-aliasing is the smoothing of jagged edges along a rendered polygon. Individual pixels are squares. Drawing an angled line with squares will result in a "stair-step" effect, or "jaggies." Current AA methods use computationally intensive filtering techniques to achieve the desired results.
Bilinear filtering is the worst-quality filtering. It approximates texture gaps by sampling the color of the four polar adjacent texels. All modern video cards can perform bilinear filtering in hardware with no performance penalty.
MIP maps are scaled versions of a unique texture used in a rendered frame. As the distance between the viewpoint and a textured polygon increases, increasingly scaled-down MIP maps are used to achieve a more realistic effect. Likewise, as a textured polygon's distance decreases with respect to the viewpoint, higher-resolution MIP maps are used to increase the detail of a rendered object. MIP maps can be generated by the application or in hardware via the video card itself. MIP is short for the Latin phrase "multum in parvo," which means "many things in a small place."
MIP map levels refer to the regions of a rendered scene that are using MIP maps of a similar level of detail (LOD). Without advanced filtering techniques, MIP map levels appear as concentric rings of decreasing detail expanding from the viewpoint. Trilinear filtering or better is needed to effectively blend adjacent MIP map levels.
Pixel is the smallest unique point calculated at a given video resolution.
Texture is a 2D image (usually a bitmap) covering the polygons of a 3D world.
Texel is a textured pixel.
Trilinear filtering is medium-quality filtering. This filtering technique expands upon bilinear filtering by averaging a second MIP map level into the interpolation. This helps eliminate the "banding" effect that appears between adjacent MIP map levels. Most modern video cards, such as the GeForce2 GTS or later, are able to perform trilinear filtering without any performance penalty.
Vertical Synch (V-Synch) refers to a video-card synchronizing its output to the monitor's vertical refresh rate. A monitor's refresh rate is the number of times per second that the monitor redraws the screen at a given resolution (expressed in Hertz).
Video cards typically use two or three frame buffers to process and display 3D graphics. When V-Synch is enabled, a video card will hold a completed frame in a frame buffer until the display is finished drawing the current rendered frame on the screen. This forces the video card to match its display speed to that of the monitor. Disabling V-Synch lets the video card render frames as fast as possible regardless of the display's refresh rate. This will eliminate a refresh rate bottleneck, but you may (or may not) notice some visual anomalies during gameplay.Using these tips can help you get more out of your video card, whether you just bought a new one or are still chugging along with your current card.
Tweaks
- Drivers
Use the latest software drivers from the chipset manufacturer. In addition to fixing bugs, the manufacturer often optimizes the drivers for better performance. Uninstall all traces of the old drivers to prevent inadvertent use of them. - Tweak the video settings
On every video card prior to ATI's Radeon 9700/9800 or Nvidia's GeForce FX series, leave anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing disabled (for older titles, anisotropic filtering or anti-aliasing can be enabled on most cards without significant performance loss). You can also disable V-Synch, set color depths to "always 32-bit," and set MIP map quality to best.
Be aware that some of the graphics settings within game software may conflict with the settings within Windows' display properties. Because every game is different, we suggest adjusting the in-game graphics settings to taste while leaving the video card's 3D settings at a "globally acceptable" performance level for all your games. - Screen resolution
Most folks play games at 800x600 or 1024x768 screen resolution for best performance when using maximum details. Tweak the image position to your taste. It's easiest to do these adjustments in-game after setting the resolution to be used. - Auto config
Some great games we've seen lately offer an "auto config" that looks at your system and adjusts the settings to match system performance. For these games, stick with the recommended settings. Maybe bump up the resolution a notch or two. - Color depth
Older games often default to 16-bit color. Image quality can be improved by going to 32-bit color and using a better form of texture filtering, but a command line and/or a tweaked config file must be used to enable these features. Tweak3D.Net is a great site with info regarding tweaking older games. - Fine-tuning
Performance still not as smooth as you'd like? Try the following:- Run at 800x600 screen resolution. (With any decent system made in the last two years you shouldn't have to go any lower.)
- Turn off shadows.
- Reduce visibility distance.
- Turn down texture quality until frame rate is acceptable.
- Check for viruses
A virus can drive you nuts when you're trying to figure out why something isn't working the way it should. If you don't have an antivirus program, PC Pitstop has a free, Web-based virus scanner. - Get rid of software
Uninstall all unused applications and eliminate as many icons from the System Tray as possible. You can uninstall applications by using the Add/Remove Programs control panel. To remove System Tray items, you may have to go into the application the icon represents and look at the settings, or you can right-click the System Tray icon and look for an option to remove. SiSoftware Sandra is a sweet tool for listing the services that can be disabled. - Improve your mouse
Use a USB-based mouse. PS2-based mouses are too slow for today's games. Why? If your mouse is sampling slower than your in-game frame rate, it induces a stutter effect that you might think is caused by the video card. You can tweak the sample rate of a PS2 mouse with a separate program, but why bother? Get a high-performance USB/optical mouse. Here are other tweaks for your mouse:- Check your mouse surface.
- Make sure everything is tracking accurately and not skipping.
- In the Mouse control panel, turn off Mouse acceleration.
- In your game, turn off mouse smoothing.
- Tame the BIOS
Here are our BIOS settings recommendations for optimal performance:- Disable system BIOS, video BIOS, and video RAM caching.
- Disable video BIOS shadowing and all shadowing address ranges.
- RTFM
Read the Free Manual, or at least read the Read Me included with a game patch. The developers usually include a list of tweaks for users experiencing performance issues. Known issues are also listed (usually).
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