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Last
Updated on March 01, 2002
by Thomas
McGuire
Check for NVIDIA
GeForce based videocards prices here.
Now
select the Textures option from the drop-down menu.
Level
of detail.
This slider controls the LOD parameter used for textures, where
adjusting the position/value of this slider can yield sharper, or
blurrier appearing textures. Reverend
has a more detailed explanation of what this does exactly – This modifies
the calculation of texture level of detail parameter LOD. Often a
texture is oversampled or filtered such that the texture is band limited
at lower frequencies in one or more dimensions. The result is that
texture-mapped primitives appear excessively blurry. LOD bias provides
biases in the LOD calculation to compensate for under or over sampled
texture images. Mipmapped textures can be made to appear sharper or
blurrier by supplying a negative or positive bias respectively. A
value of 0 for this setting is equal to setting the Mipmap
detail level to Best image quality in Display properties.
I’d recommend leaving this set to 0 (Or slightly lower) if you
don’t intend to use FSAA, though with Anti-Aliasing enabled
(Particularly Quincunx) you should set this to –.7 with 2
Samples Anti-Aliasing or –1.3 with 4 Samples &
perhaps even –2 with Quincunx.
Texel
alignment.
Leave this at the default value of 3 unless you find an
Application displaying textures incorrectly, in which case adjust this
slider until the problem is resolved. This shouldn’t be required for
most modern Games/Applications though.
Filtering
mode.
This setting can be used to force a certain texture filtering mode in
Direct3D Applications/Games. There’s no reason set this to anything
lesser than Bilinear or Trilinear, i.e. Nearest Point
given the reduced texture quality & minimal performance benefit. Trilinear
texture filtering operates by taking 4 samples (texels) from 2
neighbouring Mipmaps, applies a bilinear filter to them & then
interpolates the results. This results in improved image quality, with
more seamless transitions between Mipmap levels & enhanced texture
detail compared to Bilinear filtering. The various Anisotropy
Level options (2,
4 & 8)
provide significantly reduced texture aliasing & maintains texture
sharpness over greater distances & as such is highly recommended to
use anisotropic texture filtering where possible, with the higher levels
offer increasingly better quality, though with increasingly greater
performance hit. Check the OpenGL section of this guide for both image
& performance comparisons between the various filtering modes
available.
Now
select the V-Sync
option from the drop-down menu.
V-Sync mode.
V-sync
limits the highest possible frame rate to your Monitors refresh rate at
any given resolution. Setting this to Auto
will allow the Application/Game to determine whether V-sync is enabled
or disabled (Defaulting to On). Setting this to Off will
disable V-sync in all Direct3D Games/Applications, which can improve
performance (Frames are rendered as fast as they can be regardless of
refresh rate), although you may experience image tearing &/or input
device/controller lag as a result. Setting this to On will enable
V-sync & should provide best image quality (As there should be no
visible tearing associated with it being disabled) & no controller
lag should occur either, though the maximum frame rate will be limited
as described earlier. I’d recommend leaving this set to On for
best visual quality as a result unless you intend to benchmark Game
performance.
Frames
rendered ahead.
The number specified here determines how many frames ahead the system
can prepare to render with V-sync disabled. As mentioned above disabling
V-sync can cause input device/controller lag, though using a lower value
(1 or 2) here can reduce or even eliminate the lag
altogether. I wouldn’t recommend setting this any higher than 4.
Now
select the Miscellaneous option from the drop-down menu.
Fog
Table Emulation.
Ticking this option will enable your Graphics card to emulate fog
table support, which is only required for Applications/Games which fail
to correctly query the hardware for vertex fog or table fog support.
Supposedly one such Game that does this is Shadows of the Empire. Leave
this Ticked for maximum compatibility.
Show
‘Powered by NVIDIA’ logo.
Leave this option Unticked. This will provide the fastest loading
times & negligibly improved overall performance for Direct3D
Applications/Games by disabling the NVIDIA logo from being displayed.
This option is probably of most use to those of you running PC stores
& such who want to give a hint of what Graphics card to buy based on
your demo machine.
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