NVIDIA GeForce (1/2/3/4) videocard tweaking

Last Updated on March 01, 2002 by Thomas McGuire

Check for NVIDIA GeForce based videocards prices here.

OpenGL

Select the opengl tab & from the drop-down menu select the Anti Aliasing option.

Anti-Aliasing mode. This option specifies the Anti-Aliasing mode to be used in Direct3D applications. Set this to Off to disable Anti-aliasing in Direct3D, Auto will allow the Direct3D Application to determine the Anti-aliasing mode used, e.g. as can be selected in Max Payne’s Options menu. On the GeForce 3 & 4 multi-sampling FSAA is used for 2 Samples & Quincunx modes, which will provide fastest performance of all available FSAA modes (Bar Off obviously). 4 Samples works by up-sampling the Horizontal & Vertical resolutions by a factor of 2, then down-sampling by averaging the colours of a 2x2 pixel block to form 1 pixel across the entire image.

For testing performance in each of these modes (On a GeForce 3 Ti 200) I used Serious Sam & settings used can be downloaded here.

For those with GeForce 3’s you’d probably be best off sticking with 2 Samples given the texture quality remains sharper than Quincunx & the performance hit is fairly small (Being that it’s a Multi-sampling mode), though those with GeForce 4 owners should find any of the FSAA modes to perform rather well indeed so should be a lot more flexible in this area. Those with GeForce 1/2 & perhaps even 3 on slower systems would be better served enabling Anisotropic filtering instead.

Now select the Textures option from the drop-down menu.

Color depth. This option specifies the default colour depth to be used for textures in OpenGL Applications/Games. With the speed of the average system now there should no reason to set this to anything but 32 Bits, though if you have an older NVIDIA Graphics card (TNT 1/2) you might want to try 16 Bits instead to keep up performance in newer Games. Desktop Depth will (surprisingly enough) set this to whatever colour depth the desktop has been set to, don’t bother with these just specify what to use instead.

Fast Mipmap filtering. Leave this option Unticked. Most OpenGL Games allow you to set the Texture filtering mode & as such it’s best to determine it in-Game rather than using this.

Force S3TC v3 compression. As you may have read in our Creative 3D Blaster GeForce 3 Ti 200 Review, GeForce Graphics cards (All versions/models) use 16-Bit interpolation for DXT1 compression which results in rather poor quality images when it comes to textures that are compressed in the DXT1 format. Ticking this option enables a Driver workaround that translates DXT1 requests to DXT3, which effectively bypasses this problem (Though DXT3 has a lower compression ratio to DXT1, 4:1 as compared with 6:1).

The screenshots beneath illustrate the effect of this in Quake 3, with regard to using no compression, DXT1 compression where requested (Default) & using the DXT3 compression workaround. Click on the images for their full-screen version.

As you can see using DXT3 compression on the GeForce resolves the compression quality issues associated with using DXT1 on (all) GeForces – notice the quality of the sky using DXT3 as opposed to DXT1. Given the improvement in texture quality & minimum effect on performance with texture compression enabled (In one quick test at 1024x768x32 the frame rate from enabling texture compression without the DXT3 workaround was 141.9, whereas with the DXT3 workaround enabled the frame rate dropped slightly to 140.6). I’d strongly recommend that you enable this option.

Select Drivers - Troubleshooting - BIOS Settings & nVMax Miscellaneous, DirectX settings & FSAA quality comparison More Direct3D tweaks OpenGL settings & S3TC v3 compression quality comparison More OpenGL and Anisotropic Filtering quality comparison Even more OGL settings, Game specific settings & Conclusion

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