ATI & NVIDIA Video Card Tweak Guide - Page 3

This tab is really the meat of the Rage 3D Tweak program as it is where one will do most of the advanced tweaking. While it's not possible for us to cover every little tweak in this article we will try and take a look at the most popular and beneficial options that not covered with the standard drivers.

3D DirectX Options

ColorFill - A simple little tweak that may improve the color saturation in Direct 3D games.

D3D Anisotropic Filtering Level - You can use the slider to indicate the level of D3D Anisotropic filtering you would like. The higher the value the greater the increase in visual quality, and also the larger the impact that will have on performance.

D3D Mipmap Detail Level/Texture Preference - The same as before you can change the level of detail for these two items using the slider. The higher the setting the greater the increase in visual quality and the larger the performance hit.

Disable Wait for Monitor Refresh - Uncheck this option as it will then sync your frame-rate with the refresh-rate of your monitor.

SmoothVision Enable - Here you can play with the FSAA options of your card and select between performance and visual quality options.

TCL Hardware - Checking this option will ensure that the Transform Clipping and Lighting hardware are enabled.

OpenGL Options

3DNow! - Enable this if you have an AMD-based processor.

Anisotropic Filtering Level - Here you can change the Anisotropic filtering level of your video card. The higher the value the greater the image quality, but depending on the speed of your ATI board, it may come at the expense of performance (frame-rate).

Convert Textures from 32bit to 16bit - Checking this option will convert any 32bit texture to a smaller 16bit texture conserving memory bandwidth and increasing performance slightly. This is done at the cost of visual quality, so unless you need the extra bandwidth, it is recommended that you uncheck this option.

OGL Mipmap Detail Level/Texture Preference - Just like the Direct 3D version of this option, you can change the level of detail for these two items using the slider. The higher the setting the greater the increase in visual quality and the larger the performance hit.

SmoothVision Quality or Performance - Selecting the Quality setting will give you a higher application of Anti-Aliasing and a decrease in performance. However, selecting Performance will greatly increase the performance of your games when FSAA is enabled by applying the FSAA to a lesser extent.

SSE - Check this if you have an Athlon XP or and Intel Processor greater than or equal to a Pentium III or newer Celeron.

SSE2 - Check this option if you have an Intel Pentium 4 processor.

TCL - Checking this option will ensure that the Transform Clipping and Lighting hardware are enabled.

Wait for Monitor Refresh - Check this option to enable your frame-rate to sync with your monitor's refresh-rate. Doing so prevents tearing or shimmering if your frame-rate goes above your monitor's refresh-rate.

Driver and Display Settings

Accelerate Alpha Blending - This will enable the video card to better handle alpha blending through hardware, and you will want to have this option checked. Alpha blending is an event where the computer combines a translucent color with a background color, producing a new color based on both colors' data.

Enable Shimmer Fix - Check this only if you are using a Trinitron-based CRT monitor and are experiencing an odd shimmering effect on your screen.