ATI & NVIDIA Video Card Tweak Guide - Page 9

Driver Settings > Customize Direct Draw and Direct3D Settings

The Direct Draw and Direct3D Rivatuner options are presented in a series of application tabs, and each deals with a specific area. These include mipmapping, depth buffering, texture filtering, and anti-aliasing. Some of the tabs, like Vsynch, are pretty standard, but we'll be taking a more in-depth look at some of the more detailed sections.

Mipmapping Tab

The first setting you are presented with is the mipmap LOD (Level of Detail) setting. You can move the slider either to the left or to the right, and the negative values offer a sharper and more aliased texture at the cost of some performance. A positive value offers smaller, faster, and lower-quality images.

Depth Buffering Tab

The most notable feature in this tab is its ability to enable 24-bit Z-buffer. We recommend that you leave this option checked as it will increase the image quality of games. If you'd rather have a little extra speed boost in your D3D-based games, you can uncheck this option to force a 16-bit depth buffer.

Textures Tab

The important portion of this tab is texture filtering for Direct X 7.0 and 8.0. Here you can manually set the level of anisotropic filtering per application rather than let the application decide (most of the time there will be none applied). Once again, the higher the level you choose, the greater the image quality and the performance hit.

Anti-aliasing Tab

Here we have the opportunity to change the level of anti-aliasing in D3D-based applications. The last feature in this tab is concerned with multisampling. You will generally want to be careful changing this option, as it is only available on GeForce3 and higher GPUs. This setting enables the use of the multisample buffer as an accumulation buffer allowing the GPU to do multipass rendering of geometry, where each pass updates a subset of samples.