Reducing artifacts

The following tips should help you to enable HSR in games while keep any image artifacts to an absolute minimum.

1. Right click on the Desktop & select Properties. Click the Settings tab, then the Advanced button. Now go to the 3dfx Advanced Features tab.

In the OpenGL/Glide section scroll down to Vertical Sync setting & set this to Enable.

2. In the games that support HSR you will need to limit the maximum frame rate. This is fairly easy as the supported games use the Quake 3 engine, simply open the config file for the game, e.g. q3config.cfg or efconfig.cfg with Notepad. Search for the setting seta com_maxfps “x” (x is a number, probably defaulting to 85). Change the value of x to 60 (or lower), e.g. seta com_maxfps "60". Although depending on the game you may need to use a lower value to reduce the visual artifacts. 40 is generally the minimum value you should have to use.
3. Should you experience controller lag in the games simply open the config file for the game, e.g. q3config.cfg or efconfig.cfg with Notepad. Search for the line seta r_finish “x” (x will either be 0 or 1). Change x to 1 to enable sync every frame (This should also be available in the in-game menu settings), this ensures proper timing of controllers, although may reduce frame rate a little.
4. Using shadows in the supported games seems to be rather glitchy when HSR is enabled (Shadows are miscast a lot of the time). As result it is preferably that you disable them altogether for best visual quality. Simply open the config file for the game, e.g. q3config.cfg or efconfig.cfg with Notepad. Search for the setting seta cg_shadows "x" (x is a number from 0 - 2). Set x to 0 to disable shadows.

NOTE – If you do not feel like making permanent changes to your config files you may enter in the change to the in-game console, e.g. to disable shadows via the console enter in /cg_shadows 0 & so on.

Test system

Before I get onto benchmarks I may as well outline the system on which this was tested. For the purposes of testing, vsync was disabled & nothing in the system was overclocked.

·         Pentium 3 700E.

·         128MB RAM (Mushkin REV2 PC133).

·         Asus P3V4X.

·         Voodoo 5 5500 AGP.

·         Sigma Designs Hollywood Plus DVD decoder.

·         SoundBlaster Live! Platinum, with Live! Drive installed.

·         DTT 2500 Speakers.

·         6X Pioneer DVD drive.

·         Generic floppy disk drive.

·         US Robotics Sportster Flash V90 modem – ISA.

·         15” monitor.

·         Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer.

·         Generic keyboard.

All latest drivers are installed (Official drivers that is) & any other relevant updates. Unless noted otherwise BIOS settings & others were set as shown in the appropriate Tweaking guides.