Last week I received several emails and forum posts from our readers asking how I got such great shots for the Devastation Game Review. It has been a while since I wrote a tweaking article so I figured you readers were do for one. Now I realize that a growing majority of your are going to ATI cards but the majority are still NVidia based. However if you have some good tweaks for ATI cards put together a little article about it and I will gladly put it up on the site. Let's jump right into this.

System Specs
My current Rig consists of the following components (mind you I consider this a middle of the line setup): AMD Athlon XP +2000 o/c to 1.750 Ghz, 512 megs of Crucial PC2100 DDR, Visiontek Xtasy GeForce Ti 4200 (128 meg version) running at 300/533, Realtek ALC650 5.1 audio chip. Now I do have 3 components being overclocked: video, cpu and memory. You don't have to have an overclocked system to run these tweaks. While overclocking the video card help it is not necessary. The same is true that you don't need a GeForce 4 to get nice quality pics. I have used the same tweaks since my first NVidia card the GeForce 2 MX.

Driver Importance
Now this is something that is often overlooked by even avid gamers. Whether you like installing drivers or not it is imperative you try out new drivers from time to time. While not every driver revision is good for you, there are features and tweaks that are added to them all the time. I try and make myself a guinea pig and test them out before I have you grab them.

First off you want to grab DirectX 9.0a from Microsoft. The latest version has a couple of compatibility tweaks added to it for helping with current games. The next thing you want get are your drivers. The best version to date are the 43.51's. These are being looked at as a WHQL Certification candidate release. Before you uninstall your current drivers grab the Detonator R.I.P program. Now I want you to use Control Panel to uninstall your drivers and then run the RIP proggie. Now install the new drivers and reboot. The next thing I want you to do is grab my good friend A-KO's program called NVRefresh Tool. This is a tool that let's you set custom refresh rates in Direct3D. This is important because you want to make sure the video card is drawing the best refresh rate that the monitor can support. For example I use 85mhz at 1024x768 (my gaming resolution not my desktop resolution).

Now before you reboot after setting your refresh rate you will want to grab one more file (yes I know it's another download but this one is the last). The last file is called the 'Cool Bits' Registry Hack. What this does is enable several video card features that are not turned on by default by NVidia. (see picture to the right)

If you take a look at the list of features they have are cool but most don't need to be adjusted. The key ones we are going to focus on are the D3D settings (both basic and advanced).

As you can see that this tweak also allows you to overclock your card as well. Now if you do choose to test out overclocking it remember that always go in small increments. Please remember that you do this at your own risk and I am a poor boy so you can't sue me if you mess up as I warned you. On that note it takes a lot to fry a card so just use your head and you should be ok.

The next thing I want you to do is click on the D3D Settings tab. This will bring up an area that lets you get into more precise control of the video card.

The first thing that you will want to do is set the fog table emulation to on. This will enable some very cool features on the card and cost no frame rate hit at all.

Now I want you to use the Mipmap Detail Level dropdown. This will set what I call the 'texture quality' features in a D3D video game. What I mean by this is if you remember the UT1 flyby demo that showed the Liandri Corp building.

If you used the Best Performance option it would blur down the texture details in order to give you better frame rates. The best blend of frames to texture quality ratio is using the High Image Quality option. This is where the secrets to my great screen shots come into play is because of this feature.

We are almost finished with the tweaking if you take a look at the picture above you will see that there is a tab labeled 'More Direct3D'. This is where you will turn off the vertical sync option. Vertical sync is only important when you are playing older video games and you need to drop frame rate. Dropping frame rate is the opposite of what we are trying to do. So with this feature you want it turned off (see picture to the right).

Well that is about it for this article. We touched on updating your API (Directx 9), drivers and tweaking the video controls. Now I am confident that you will see at least better image quality at the worst and at the best you will see an improvement in your frame rates.

I hope you found this article useful and if you have any comments please feel to post them in our forums.

Sincerely,

Tycho