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Posted
on December 04, 2001 by Thomas
McGuire
Check for videocard
prices here.
 One
of the success stories of the year besides NVIDIA has been PowerVR; reportedly
selling over 1 million Kyro 1/2 based Graphics Cards. This guide will take you
through setting up your PC for best compatibility with these Graphics Cards
& then through the mass of options available in the Drivers to get the most
out of Games/Applications with them.
Initially you should
ensure you have the latest Drivers installed for your
Graphics Card. You can find links to Manufacturers of such
Graphics Cards on our Drivers
page, although should you wish to stick with reference
Drivers then go to PowerVR
Driver page instead (In most instances the PowerVR
Drivers will be the first to be updated & most
Manufacturers will only really be changing logos when they
release new Drivers). To a lesser extent you may also want
to check into getting any available BIOS update for the
Graphics card, although these only fix certain issues &
none currently have been released that fix any problems with
Games/Applications or improve performance.
Be sure to install
Microsoft’s have DirectX
8.1 as well.
It is also highly
important to have the latest Drivers for your Motherboard
installed as well, particularly the AGP Drivers (If you have
an AGP Kyro Graphics card at least). You can find links to
updated Motherboard Chipset Drivers on OS
Updates. Installing any available BIOS update for your
Motherboard may also be of some help.
In the system BIOS it is
recommended to disable the following settings, if
available - Hidden
refresh, Byte merge, VGA palette snoop,
DAC snoop &
any Caching/Shadowing options, e.g.
Video BIOS Shadowing. The Video Memory Caching
Mode should be set to UC rather than UCSW
also. If you have a Kyro 2 Graphics card set the AGP
Transfer mode to AGP X2 at most as it
doesn’t support AGP X4 (This mode can be
used with Kyro 1 Graphics cards however).
Should you experience
problems between the Kyro & any Game/Application check
the Developers website for any patches, or apply some of the
compatibility settings as described in this guide.
For further information/tips check out the ParaKnowYa
FAQ, which covers other potential issues/queries you may
have or contact your Manufacturer of Technical support.
Click
on Start,
Settings,
Control
Panel. Open Display,
then select the Settings
tab, then the Advanced
button. Each of the following sub sections
will describe what can be done in the available tabs.
Select the Display
tab. Although you might not think it, if you adjust your
brightness levels correctly you can improve visual quality a
lot. You may be able to reduce the effect of
colours/textures being too dark, or too washed out this way.
The
Centre, Horizontal
Size & Vertical
Size sections may be used
to adjust the position & size of the current display
window. Most Monitors however have built-in controls to
allow you adjust this also.
Coarse Adjust.
When Ticked this
will allow for greater movement distance of the screen when
using the Centre
controls, this can make more precise changes awkward
however.
Gamma Correction.
This is an alternative method to adjust the brightness level
of your monitor rather than using the built-in Gamma
controls most Monitors already have. Tick
this setting if you wish to enable using the Drivers
Gamma Correction ability. This may be of some use if you
can’t adjust the brightness/darkness level of Games,
although it should be best to leave it Unticked
at all other times.
Now
select the Advanced
button. This contains more in-depth options for tuning your
display output.
Tick the Advanced
Settings option in order to adjust the settings
available here.
Gamma. This slider
can be used to adjust the RGB colour intensity. Move the
sliders (Or slider) to the Right to increase
this level, this can reduce detail by brightening up the
image too much & vice versa. Tick the Link
option if you wish any adjustments to be made to the Red,
Green & Blue
colour sliders globally, or Untick the setting to
independently adjust them.
Contrast. Use this
slider to adjust the contrast level of your display. Move
the slider to the Right to the image brighter &
vice versa. The brighter the image the more washed out it
can appear. Adjust this to suit your own needs.
Brightness. This
slider controls the brightness (glare) level. Move this
slider to the Right to increase the brightness
level, which can cause the image to appear washed out if
moved too far & vice versa. Adjust this as you see fit.
Use
the Reset button should you wish to restore the default
options for these controls. Once finished, hit the Ok
button.
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