Question for my new video card.

[dfgasner]

I just got a Gigabyte 6600GT the Turbo Force one AGP.

Saph was nice and helped me get it installed and now that it is working awesome (because I upgraded from a MX420 LOL).

So now I got the question that before I was trying to up my 3DMark score and Saph said about the Nvidia driver and the Quality and Perfomance slider. So now i don't know if it's the new card or the new driver but the slider now has 4 options - High Quality, Quality Performance, and High Performance.

Before Saph told me that I should set it at Quality but now should I leave it at Quality or set it at High Quality.

I was also wondering what kind of performance impact this has on the graphics. In other words if I was to put it on High performance would it give me a big jump in performance and what impact would it have on the look of the graphics??

Thanks for all the input

Davey

[ski]

The 'High Performance' setting should render the highest 3DMark score, but as you already have guessed this setting will water down quality.
Try all of the available settings for a specific application/game, and select the one that displays a quality that's to your liking, and renders frame rates that do not cause studdering.
Then, repeat if necessary for different applications/games.

[dfgasner]

Thanks a lot that's what I was planning on doing,

I was just wondering about other opinions

Thanks Ski
Davey

[saphalline]

The real gamers and benchmarkers and tech sites out there will tell you to use only one setting: the highest one you can!

That slider in the driver control panel (for both D3D and OpenGL) determines the quality of the texture filtering when the texture is applied to the 3D model matrices. The drivers from both NVidia and ATI are capable of taking "shortcuts" within the GPU/VPU code that lower the quality of this. It gives you more performance, but lower quality textures (in terms of image quality).

Let me put it to you this way: if you set the slider to "High Performance" and played Doom 3 with the texture quality set to "Maximum", are you going to get a good-looking image? If the driver takes a shortcut, it doesn't matter much if the game uses a higher resolution texture. The two will cancel eachother out and your overall performance may even drop. Performance gain due to the slider: 3-8%. Performance loss due to in-game max res textures: 10-20%. Not only do the numbers not agree, but your image quality will be bad, too. You may not notice it right away, but a side-by-side comparison will show you what you're missing.

Set the slider to "High Quality" for both D3D and OpenGL.

[dfgasner]

Thanks a lot for the reply

Yea that's what I did, the performance is way above my expectations by far
this is mainly because my download of FEAR finally finished and it plays that in 1024x768, of course with no AA or FA

But it still looks awesome without any studdering

Thanks a lot for the help guys

Davey