BIOS
The first place to start tweaking is your BIOS. Enter your BIOS by hitting a key combination on system boot (look out for F1, Del etc). A word of warning though, the BIOS is a very powerful tool, but can cause damage if pushed the wrong way.
AGP fastwrite
Most recent cards support this feature. Enabling this setting creates a shortcut between the motherboard chipset and the graphics memory, taking the system memory out of the loop.
AGP mode
AGP modes (2x, 4x, or 8x) must be supported by both your video card and motherboard. Look for and set the maximum possible AGP mode. Note: despite this BIOS setting, your card will not work at its maximum AGP mode until the correct (OS) drivers are installed.
Video memory cache
Your BIOS should offer two options: UN (Uncacheable) and USWC (Uncacheable Speculative Write-Combining). Selecting USWC will allow the write cache of your graphics memory and slightly increase performance. If, as a result, you encounter abnormal behaviour – switch to UN.
Video BIOS shadowing
Enabling this allows the video card's BIOS to be copied onto the system memory for faster access. Modern computer systems bypass the BIOS completely when accessing a video card, so unless you have a very old card disable this.
VGA palette snoop
Only used when the computer is in 256-color mode, so leave this disabled.
Graphics aperture size
This tells your computer how much system memory should be made available for your AGP card to use if it requires it. The best option is to leave the setting at half your system RAM (eg. 128MB aperture if you have 256MB RAM).
Windows
Before you go about tweaking game settings, it's important to make sure that your card is performing to its best potential in your operating system. Here are a few Windows tweaks to get you started.
Latest drivers
It goes without saying (though I am saying it now) that you should obtain the latest drivers for your video card. New drivers may have been released between the time you purchase your card and when you plug it in. Always check the manufacturer's Website for new drivers; also look out for updated software utilities and tweaking tools. You can also use reference drivers from NVIDIA or ATI.
Finding your monitor
Though most screens will work on the generic monitor drivers that ship with Windows, they may not let you use the monitor to its full capacity. Drivers supplied for your monitor tell the operating system the range of refresh rates the device is safely capable of.
Resolution and colour depth
High resolutions and colour depths will place a greater strain on a system. If your system is performing poorly, try lowering your resolution to a safe 800 x 600 and 16-bit colour depth; most office applications do not require 32-bit colour. Games can set their own resolutions and colour depths independent of your operating system.
Windows hardware acceleration
By default Windows sets graphics hardware acceleration to maximum (Control Panel | Display | Settings | Advanced | Troubleshoot). If you're experiencing problems with video performance, this should be a definite pit-stop. When lowering this setting, Windows will let you know what features are to be disabled.
Refresh rates
The refresh rate is the number of times that the monitor 'redraws' the screen per second. Higher the refresh rate, the more solid the image with less flickering. Low refresh rates, those around 60Hz, can cause eye strain. Set a high refresh rate by navigating to: Control Panel | Display | Settings | Advanced | Adapter. 85Hz should be your minimum. You can also use the card's drivers to set the refresh rates in games.
Latest version of DirectX
Make sure you have the latest version of DirectX installed. It's backward-compatible,
so cards supporting older versions should run fine. To check your version of DirectX, you can run 'dxdiag' at Start | Run. DirectX 9.0 is also on our cover CD.
3D and gaming
Performance vs quality tradeoffs are exemplified in the 3D gaming arena. Tweaking some basic settings will transform a choppy, jagged, and jerky experience into something more bearable. If you have frames to spare, then you can afford to bump up the quality.
Resolution
High resolution means sharper graphics. It also means a lower frame rate as your graphics card has more pixels to render. Changing the resolution will have the greatest affect on performance of any of the options here. Ideally, set the quality of image you want, then adjust the resolution down until it runs smoothly. If that means a resolution that's too low, then start turning off quality options and bump the res up a notch. Also consider lowering it for network gaming, where high frame rates are essential for good gameplay.
Colour depth
32-bit mode offers a larger range of colours and will reduce your framerate. Your game will run smoother in 16-bit, but you might experience visual-anomalies, such as dithering and banding.
Texture compression
Some games offer a toggle for texture compression – which reduces the amount of memory and bandwidth for textures. For best effect, use this with a high texture-detail setting and at high resolution, but leave it off at low res.
Lighting
The common modes are 'vertex' or 'lightmap'. Use vertex lighting for a faster framerate and lightmap for better lighting.
Texture filtering – bilinear, trilinear, and anisotropic
Bilinear filtering, the most common form of filtering, blends the pixels together in textures to prevent the overly pixelated look of early games. Mip-mapping is the practice of using lower resolution textures for objects further away, thus saving memory. Trilinear filtering creates a smoother transition between these up-close and far-away mip-maps, but performance can take a hit. Bilinear and trilinear filters are known as isotropic filters – beyond that you will find the new anisotropic filtering. This is the most hardware-intensive form of texture enhancement, and has the best quality results.
If you're getting high framerates, enabling anisotropic filtering is well worth it.
Full-scene antialiasing
Antialiasing refers to the smoothing of jagged edges in polygons, which is especially useful at low resolutions. There are many different types of full-scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) with different levels of detail and performance loss. Most cards support 2x, 4x and 6x, which refer to the number of samples the graphics card takes around each pixel to smooth out the scene. Other types such as NVIDIA's Quincunx, take five samples per pixel. It's worth experimenting with FSAA – try a lower res with FSAA on, then a higher res with it off to find the best performance and quality. Generally, 1,024 x 768 with 2x FSAA will give a good balance.
V-sync
In the time it takes for a monitor to perform a single refresh, a video card may supply the monitor two or more frames for drawing. This leads to a 'tearing' effect, with the top half of the screen displaying one frame and the bottom half displaying the next frame. When v-sync is enabled, these frames are held back in a frame-buffer until the monitor has finished drawing its current frame. It improves the quality but framerates take a tumble. If that's a problem, turn v-sync off and jack up y