Video driver settings

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Video driver settings

Basically, there are only two driver settings that can influence your FPS strongly enough for you to notice. These are AA (anti aliasing) and AF (anisotropic filtering). Cranking up these two can get most computers on their knees.

If your video card manufacturer is Nvidia, these settings can be changed in Nvidia Control Panel, whereas AMD/ATI users can access them through Catalyst Control Center. Click on your desktop's background with right mouse button and open run one of these two. Make sure you are in advanced mode. Se images below for additional instructions.

Both these features improve your image quality in exchange for performance and every individual should find the correct AA and AF settings for his computer for every game separately. Just keep in mind, that you have to have very high fps with these two settings turned off, if you want to play smoothly with them enabled. Faster (newer) video cards will usually get smaller performance drop than slower (older) video cards when one of these two settings is enabled if we measure it in percents. That is because newer video cards work at higher frequencies, have more video memory and are better optimised for anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

All we got to know about AA and AF to this point in the article, is that you should not turn them on, if you have a slow computer. Let's move forward and see what do they do and how much they can improve in-game image quality.

Antialiasing is a technique for smoothing out stair-step effect on edges in all kinds of 3D graphics. Without antialiasing any line your computer reproduces will appear jagged unless it is in perfectly vertical or horizontal position. Antialiasing works the pixels on edges, changing colors of some to soften the look. Below are parts of screenshots from Crysis: Warhead shot at different AA settings for you to compare.

Anisotropic filtering is a method for enhancing quality of textures in 3D applications. Textures are images, that cover all 3D objects and if you look at them at an angle, the surface is not sharp. Textures, especially those in distance, appear heavily blurred and lack the crispness. By enabling anisotroping filtering you can almost eliminate this effect. Below are parts of screenshots from Half-Life 2 (top) and Crysis: Warhead (bottom) shot at different AF settings for you to compare.

Look at above comparisons in full size and decide, whether the extra image quality is worth the FPS drop. I think we can agree that setting 4x more than good enough both for antialiasing and anisotropic filtering in most cases. If you have a really fast computer, you could go to 4x AA and 8x AF - going higher is kind of pointless.