GPU, PPU, GRAM and your system part 2

(Editors Note: This is part 2 in a 2 part series, to see part one, click here )

So, you’ve just got your new video card installed and the game all setup, but the game is still jerky and unresponsive. Sure, the video looks spectacular but it’s like watching a slide-show instead flying past beautiful scenery in your new flight simulator. Here are some things you can do. First, defrag your hard drive, this can increase game performance spectacularly. It helps the game/system by moving all the files that might need to be accessed at the same time to the same location on the hard drive so they can be recovered by the hard drive in the shortest amount of time possible. Next, open the utility that came with your video card, usually running in the system tray by the clock. Here you can manually change its settings. Most games will want to control the video card directly, but if you change the settings so that the card keeps control, you will usually get better performance. This is because game developers don’t know specifically what kind of video card you will have, so they try to write their games with generic instructions. If you tell the video card to control the game settings, you will get better performance because the video card knows itself better than the game does.

Another thing to watch are the in-game settings. If you go to the video or graphics portion of your game setup, you can usually change how the game presents itself to the computer’s operating system and video card. You may see filtering settings, usually Bilinear, Trilinear and Anisotropic. Filtering smoothes the edges of pictures that are displayed larger or smaller than they were intended. Usually game backgrounds are repeated pictures that change size as you move closer or further away from them. As they change size, the edges become obvious and take away from the realism of the game. Filtering fixes this, but at a cost to frame-rate. Bilinear smoothes images in 2 dimensions, trilinear 3D, and anisotropic uses 3D and takes into account smoothing at an angle when the image is viewed from very far away. Anisotropic is important for flight simulators or games with huge maps where you may see objects from very far away, or at a very steep angle. Bilinear filtering is ok, tri is better, anis is best but the better the filtering, the slower the game will run. Anti-Aliasing is a similar technology, but uses much less processing time to smooth the edges. It does a good job but will not look as good. Anti-Aliasing will make the game run faster than Bi/Tri/Anis. The best look for your game will always be Anis filtering with Anti-Aliasing, but that will make your frame rate the worst. Try to find a balance where you can still enjoy the game’s realism and it runs smooth so game play seems normal.

I have an ATI X-series video card, so I can explain basic ATI settings and what they do. (Editors Note: Obvoiusly I'm too cheap to give him a 2nd card for testing!) The NVidia settings should be very similar. For those of you who want to get right into playing your game, ATI has a slider that changes all of the controls at the same time. You can set it for max performance, or max quality. Max performance will set the card to be controlled by the card, and have all of the graphics options on the card set to lowest quality. This is different than the in-game graphics options, as that sets the level of the picture given to the system by the game, and this changes how the GPU deals with the pictures the game gives it. Setting the slider to maximum performance will make your game run smoother and raise your overall FPS. There is usually no need to individually adjust the individual settings, unless your game’s documentation suggests it. For some flight simulators it is necessary to adjust the anisotropic level to the 2x setting. This will only allow the GPU to sample each pixel it is sent twice. Most flight simulators present anis instructions at 8x, where the GPU samples each pixel 8 times before displaying it. Unless you have a High-Definition computer monitor and an HDTV capable video card, your monitor can’t properly display anis renderings greater than 2x, so no matter how long your GPU crunches the pixel, your monitor ignores the extra information. If you set your card to only sample it at 2x you will get much better performance, and the display will look the same. For all of the settings you manually set, you should un-check the box or otherwise disable letting the application control the settings. Letting the application control the settings overrides all of the hard work you’ve done by manually changing them.

Finally, make sure you have downloaded and installed the latest drivers for your video card. Drivers are software programs that tell the computer how to use the new fangled hardware. Your video card will come with the most recent drivers available, but if your card is last year’s model, or even more than 2 or 3 months old, likely there are newer drivers available at the chipset developer’s website (http://www.ati.com or http://www.nvidia.com). Downloading and installing the newest video card drivers can give your game a boost in performance by telling it how to best use the video card. Also, you should check your game’s website to see if there are any patches for the game. This will improve game performance as the developers find and fix bugs in the system, or take into account new technology and drivers. (Click here if you missed part 1)

By Brandon Brown