| 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. 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.
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.
Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0alpha3
!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved." |
