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

Last Updated on March 01, 2002 by Thomas McGuire

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More OpenGL Settings

Filtering mode. This setting can be used to force a certain texture filtering mode in OpenGL Applications/Games. 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.

The screenshots beneath illustrate the effect each mode has on image. For reference Trilinear filtering is enabled in all of the screenshots, along with the appropriate Anisotropy level. As regards the 64 Tap image the tear that can be seen in the screenshot does not exist within the Game itself (Not sure what actually caused it either as I could reproduce it every time).

The image quality benefit is quite obvious & enhances the image a great deal, with much greater detail being visible as you can see.

To test out Anisotropic filtering performance I used Quake 3 in each of the available filtering modes & with Audio enabled & disabled.

Average frames rates were good & in my opinion a 20 frame rate hit or so for 64 tap Anisotropic filtering is well worth it for the enhanced image quality. Personally I’d be more in favour of recommending you use Anisotropic filtering than FSAA if you must make a choice as to which to use.

Now select the V-Sync tab from the drop-down menu.

V-sync limits the highest possible frame rate to your Monitors refresh rate at any given resolution. Setting this to Default on/off will allow the Application/Game to determine whether V-sync is enabled or disabled (Defaulting to On/Off respectively). Setting this to Always off will disable V-sync in all OpenGL 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 Default on will enable V-sync (In the majority of cases) & 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 Default on for best visual quality as a result unless you intend to benchmark Game performance.

Buffer flipping. This option specifies the buffer-flipping mode to be used in OpenGL. Though best left set to Auto & allowing the Driver to determine the optimal mode, in some Applications/Games you might find setting it to Block Transfer will resolve some image tearing problems.

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.

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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