How to optimize your PC frame rates
By: Sarju Shah – Posted on Friday, Apr. 20, 2007
Games have several graphics settings that you can tweak to get better performance. Most games don’t have the exact same menu settings, but several graphics options appear time and time again. Knowing how these game settings affect performance is crucial to helping you set a game to its proper level. Crank the settings too high, and your frame rates will plummet into the single digits. Go too low, and you might end up sacrificing too much image quality for nominal performance gains.
Roll your mouse cursor over the image to see the comparison shot. The first shot has the game running with 4x antialiasing and 4x anisotropic filtering. The second shot has both of those settings cranked to 16x. Both settings look great, but the 4xAA, 4xAF settings will give you a much higher frame rate for a smoother game. Knowing how far to push the settings will help you get the most out of your hardware.
WeÂ’ll cover six settings you’re likely to encounter in games. You can find the first three settings in just about all games or in the driver settings for your video card. The latter three settings are common but you probably wonÂ’t find them in all types of games. In the following pages, we’ll examine the performance costs associated with each setting and show you the image quality benefits each setting offers.
Antialiasing If you look at the edge of building or even along a character model, you’ll often see a jagged stair-step pattern that doesnÂ’t look quite natural. Antialiasing smooths out the lines and reduces the amount of crawling, but the process uses a significant amount of graphics power. Even the most powerful video cards can have trouble if the antialiasing is set too high. Depending on the game you’re playing, you might see frame rates fall into the single digits if you crank antialiasing all the way up. Anisotropic Filtering Anisotropic filtering helps preserve texture detail on angled surfaces. It’s also used to clean up mip-maps. Games swap in low quality textures called mipmaps when rendering objects in the distance, and high quality textures for items closer to the player. Anisotropic filtering helps to clean up the picture by bridging the area where these sets of textures meet. Most modern video cards handle this setting without a problem. Resolution Increasing the resolution is the easiest way to make a game look better. Higher resolutions add more detail through extra pixels. Processing more pixels also makes the workload for your video card that much harder. Draw Distance Increasing the draw distance setting lets you see farther into the game’s field of view. Of course, the farther into the distance the card has to render, the more work the video card needs to do. You’ll typically find this setting in 3rd person games such as Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights 2. Shadows Good lighting and the shadows (that are created with good lighting) save us from boring rooms full of uniform colors and drab, lifeless objects. Try playing Doom 3 without shadows and youÂ’ll notice that much of the suspense disappears. Enabling shadows usually has a performance cost, but the amount can vary greatly from game to game. Textures The detail of a game appears in its textures. Large textures can turn a simple black street with yellow lines into a gritty stretch of asphalt full of cracks and gravel. Some games will automatically use high-resolution textures if it detects a powerful video card with lots of fast memory.
- Jesterofthesky
Posted Apr 12, 2009 7:19 pm PT
Dawg 9000 Vsync means that the game will only allow itself to render up to the number of frames your monitor can display. if you’re running you’re monitor at 60Hz, then it means the game will never try to render more than 60fps.
Its mainly a setting you’d enable if you’re running an older game on a new PC. If you don’t enable it in this case and your computer is rendering like 200fps, the monitor and the computer get out of sync and you can get ‘tearing’, visual artefacts that look like seams in the image, especially visible when the image moves side to side.
on the other hand, of you’re running a new game, and you’re PC is working hard (doing like 40FPS or whatever, beneath the monitor refresh rate) then the Vsync is unnecessary and will actually reduce the FPS, with that being a bad thing in this case!
pretty much if its an old game you’re PC will thrash, turn Vsync on if its a new game you’re PC works hard on, turn Vsync off
hope you could bear with my rambling!
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- AnnoyedDragon
Posted Aug 13, 2007 8:46 pm PT
Most of this stuff is general knowledge to anyone who has been gaming on PC long enough; you really have to see these settings at a full screen resolution to get a idea of the impact on visual quality, seeing them on these shrunken screenshots really doesn’t do them justice. Anything above the playable frame rate is free for upping eye candy, no point in getting 120+ fps when you can slap some more AA or AF on there.
I see console users are complaining about the performance tweaking that goes into PC gaming, and how it is too much of a bother for them. That’s why we will always have superior looking games, because we do bother. While they get what they are given, each new generation of hardware lets us push games further than consoles can ever achieve.
Whose looking forward to Gears Of War at above 360 resolutions with full AA and AF?
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- ldavidtw2000
Posted Aug 5, 2007 11:52 pm PT
That’s why console sells, so many people don’t even know how these stuff works, all they know is play, no technical intelligence.
consoles are basically PCs, but smaller ones and dedicated only for gaming and perhaps some degree of internet. Gears of War looks stunning but suck at the same time on console cuz they can’t turn on AA, and they won’t allow you to choose it. which doesn’t give console gamers the “hey, it might look even better if I turn this on.”
and you don’t get to choose 2560×1600 resolution, cuz consoles only give you 3 options, and highest only goes to 1920×1080. 2560×1600 on 30″ monitor means dots are a LOT closer which means detail is WAY better than only 1920×1080 (and they advertise it as if that’s the highest end, ha!) on a 50″ TV.
simple enough, consoles= for lazy@$$/clueless gamers, but you don’t get to do all kinds of fun tweaking, and that’s what keeps you clueless, and that’s what make their pocket bigger.
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LouieV13 posted Jun 16, 2007 3:35 pm PT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)
- xophaser
Posted Jun 13, 2007 11:47 pm PT
airwalk-
There are there are no sale tax and shipping on most stuffs are free for newegg in the US. Some US States and our government charge income tax, but not stores.
I don’t know about international policy. Maybe buy something cheap first or email customer service.
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- xophaser
Posted Jun 9, 2007 3:25 pm PT
bennycal-
newegg is the best if you want to buy and compare and tomhardware guide is where you learn about PC components or devices. That how I built my rig. Gamespot used to review PC hardware, but cnet it’s mother company does most of that. For consumer stuff, it is cnet. Cnet reviewed some stuff way after they are release.
bigmicki- that is really bad for top games, more for everyday softwares and web-surfing
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jACkaTacK1107 posted Jun 7, 2007 10:33 pm PT (does not meet display criteria. sign in to show)
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