ATI & NVIDIA Video Card Tweak Guide - Page 6

Direct 3D Settings

Performance and Compatibility Options

In general you will want to leave the options here alone. Fog table emulation is on by default and should be left on. Some games may not be able to query NVIDIA's vertex or table fog therefore they both will be emulated if the game cannot correctly support either feature.

Mipmapping

This will allow you to adjust the Level of Detail bias for mipmaps. The higher the detail levels the crisper mipmaps will appear at the cost of performance. It is recommended that you select the highest value for this as the performance impact is negligible.

PCI Texture Memory Size

This is extremely similar to the AGP setting, and will allow the video card to access a certain amount of system memory for texture storage. This feature is only needed if you are using a PCI-based video card.

More Direct 3D (button)

Here you are presented with two different features. Texel Alignment allows you to position the texel (texture element) origin between the upper-left hand corner and the center of a texel. This slider does not need to be moved in most cases, and should only be changed if you think that your texel alignment may be off.

Vertical Sync will limit your frame-rate to the vertical sync rate (refresh-rate) of your monitor. You will want to set this to Always On whenever possible (again, unless you're running benchmarks), as there could be shimmering and tearing when playing games if your frame-rate is faster than your monitor's refresh-rate.