Someone post vid card settings explanation

[Gary R.]

I surely wish I could find a guide somewhere that explains in english (non-geekenese) what all the different vid card settings do and or mean.  Like anistrophic, mip map, bilinear/trilinear filtering and all those other funky terms.  Manufacturers never include a glossary or anything with their card software.  They just put control over all these things with weird names and expect people to educate themselves.  Or maybe they assume that people buying their product already know about these settings.

[Ivan]

MipMap: start with a 1024x1024 texture. weh you get further away, less detail is visible, so the size of the texture is decreased, resulting in lower memory usage
Anisotropic filtering: increase detail level of texture whitout changing the size. uses more memory as it does the opposite to mipmap.
Bilinear / Trilinear filtering: softens the edges by making them blend, but
Anti Aliasing: mathematically soften edges

[Gary R.]

So, bilinear/trilinear choice does or does not effect performance?  I am assuming that if anti-aliasing mathematically softens edges that it also requires more pc resource and therefor can effect performance.  Thats the kind of info that would be handy.  Sort of like the vid card comparison that Gixer often posts.  If somebody would draw up a vid card setting cause and effect guide to help people balence performance desires with visual quality desires it would be real handy because I know if I have been tinkering with pc's I've owned for 6 years and don't fully understand all the vid card techno I'm sure there's a lot of others that are mystified by it to.  Anyway, thanks for that info so far.  ;D

[Gixer]

Generally anything that will make things look nicer visually will hit performance in some way or other.  Trilinear will use a bit more gpu processing power so will slow things slightly.  Anyway I did a bit of searching online for the information you wanted, hopefully its ok and explains it all for you:

32-bit Colour / 16-bit Colour

This option will also be present within your windows desktop, and most users will have it set to 32bit by default. This option is usually tied in with choosing a resolution for the game to run at, if you look in your
options for resolution, you'll see the format as xxxx X xxxx xx-bit, for example 1600 x 1200 32-bit or 640 x 480 16-bit. The two options refer to how strong the colour depth is during the game, the amount of colors
displayed. If the game is run in 16bit, then the engine will do its best to emulate 32bit color, the difference is noticeable to some, but not others.

Resolution.

The resolution options should be present in any form of game, and can range from 640 x 480 (pixels wide and high) to 1600 x 1200. The range that you have available depends both on the size of your monitor, your driver set, and the limits set within the game engine. The greater the resolution that is set within the game, the more viewable area you may have when
playing and the smoother the graphics appear to be, because the system can use more pixels to represent objects on-screen. Increasing the resolution in a game does impact performance and depending on your graphics hardware the framerate drop can be quite severe. The standard setting for games years ago used to be 640 x 480, this then increased to 1024 x 768, and it now nestled somewhere between 1024 x 1280 and 1600 x 1200. The best resolution to use when playing a game also depends on how graphics intensive the game itself is. For example, I have no problems playing Warcraft 3 at 1600 x 1200 with flawless framerates but
when it comes to Unreal 2003, 1600 x 1200 can roduce slowdown when there is a lot happening on screen.

Filtering:

Filtering is a computer method of determining the color of a pixel based on the texture maps provided in the game engine. It comes into play for instance, when as a player you get to close to a polygon texture map, the texture doesn't have enough information to determine the "real" color of each pixel you're viewing, so it uses the colors of the surrounding pixel's do determine the best color based on mathematical averages. Have I lost you yet? I hope not. Filtering gives the 'blurred' effect to textures you are viewing up close, designed to
hide the jaggedness of the texture, however this can result in a vague/washed out effect to the texture. An example of filtering would be the monsters in Quake. When you get close to them, they appear blurred and
at best, unrealistic. The best application for filtering is texture maps that are vague by nature, roads, floors and walls use filtering best.

Filtering types are divided into the following types, some are applicable to modern gaming, some are not really in use anymore:


Point filtering:

Point filtering will just copy the color of the nearest real pixel, so it actually enlarges the real pixel. This creates a blocky effect used in software 3D rendering because it requires very little calculation power. This type of filtering will be in place if you choose software rendering over Hardware T&L or pure Hardware T&L.

Bilinear filtering

Bilinear filtering uses four adjacent texels containing real color information to determine the output pixel value. This results in a smoother textured polygon as the interpolation filters down the blockiness associated with point filtering. The disadvantage of bilinear texturing is that it results in an approximate fourfold increase in texture memory bandwidth.

[Gixer]

Trilinear filtering

Trilinear filtering will combine Bilinear filtering in 2 Mip levels. This however results in 8 texels being needed so memory bandwidth is multiplied by 2. This usually means that the memory will suffer serious bandwidth
problems so trilinear filtering is usually used as an option, although higher end graphics cards should be able to handle this filtering with greater levels of success.

Anistropic Filtering:

Anistropic Filtering addresses quadrilateral shaped and angled areas of a texture image. A sharper image is accomplished by interpolating and filtering multiple samples from one or more MIP-maps to better approximate very distorted textures. This is the next level of filtering after trilinear filtering. While it will create the best looking images it comes at a serious price and should only be used when your system can handle it. If your system is performing slowly try turning off Anistropic filtering for better perfomance.

Fill Rate

the number of pixels that a video card can render (textured and shaded) over a given time period (millions of pixels per second, MPPS). This is taken into account when determining the "grunt" of a given video card over others, the higher the fill rate, the better the card will perform.

Fogging

Creates a fog like effect by placing a haze over the scene. Is used to make object appear slowly to avoid the sudden appearance of objects. Im not sure if this effect is as widely used in modern games as 'back in the day' of DOOM and Quake.

MIP mapping

A technique using scaled down versions of a texture image, generated beforehand and stored in memory, are then used in rendering a 3D scene to provide the best quality. This technique allows objects to look more
detailed when coming closer to them by defining multiple texture maps- very detailed textures maps are used when the object is close and less detailed
ones used when the object is further away. This helps to avoid the blocky textures, and the step effect on lines. Usually they talk about MIP-levels or Level of Detail (LOD) which refers to the quality of the texture map used.

Sideband Signalling

An extra 8-bits of addressing capability built into AGP which, in effect, allows the AGP graphics board to request information over AGP at the same time as it is receiving data over the 32-bit datapath of the bus. This is yet another way that AGP graphics board can create better efficiencies and improve overall graphics  performance.

Texture Mapping

In 3D graphics, texture mapping is the process of adding a graphic pattern to the polygons of a 3D scene. Unlike simple shading, which uses colors to the underlying polygons of the scene, texture mapping applies simple textured graphics, also known as patterns or more commonly "tiles", to simulate walls, floors, the sky, and so on.

Vertical Synch (V-Synch) refers to a video-card synchronizing its output to the monitor's vertical refresh rate. A monitor's refresh rate is the number of times per second that the monitor redraws the screen at a given resolution (expressed in Hertz).


Video cards typically use two or three frame buffers to process and display 3D graphics. When V-Synch is enabled, a video card will hold a completed frame in a frame buffer until the display is finished drawing the current rendered frame on the screen. This forces the video card to match its display speed to that of the monitor. Disabling V-Synch lets the video card render frames as fast as possible regardless of the display's refresh rate. This will eliminate a refresh rate bottleneck, but you may (or may not) notice some visual anomalies during gameplay.

No mention of Anti Aliasing but I think most know that it gets rid of the jaggie edges.  The higher level of AA you choose the smoother the lines.  AA generally does work a graphics card quite hard.

[GunnerMan]

hmmm someone should make that a sticky Gixer.... good info and BTW what LOD is better as in mesh wuld LOD 9 or LOD 10 be better? I am guessing LOD 10

[Gixer]

I would think so as LOD = Level of detail so the higher the number I would think the higher the detail.

[Politically Incorrect]

hmmm someone should make that a sticky Gixer

Agree! Nice bit of info!!

[the_autopilot]

No mention of Anti Aliasing but I think most know that it gets rid of the jaggie edges.  The higher level of AA you choose the smoother the lines.  AA generally does work a graphics card quite hard.

Anti-aliasing works by darkening the edges of models so that jaggies are less apparent or gone. It shades the edges.

Computers display everything in pixels which are squares. Now, try drawing a diagonal line with squares. You can't.  You can create a step-like "line" through the pixels, but that will look very jagged (hence the name jaggies)


A diagonal line is impossbile as it only uses parts of pixels (which do not worked that way, think of it as a lightbulb, you can't have one side lit and one side dark).


A line can be simulated by creating step like jaggiess. You get the illusion of an line, but it is ugly. Anti-aliasing solves this problem by shading the sides as seen below.


Of course, this is all done mathmatically with different colors (not just black and white) and puts immense pressure on the gfx card and/or the CPU (anti-aliasing use to be done on the CPU, but with the complexities of gfx, modern gfx cards built AA (Anti-aliasing) processing into the GPU.

The differences between AA off and AA on can be huge, though it does depend on other factors.

Without AA


With 4xAA


Of course, the amount of AA you use depends on the abilty of your gfx as it can be a huge performence heat.

AA levels range from none to 8x. Generally 4x is perfect.
Newer games like Half Life 2 have support for up to 8x AA

[Politically Incorrect]

Another good explanation, Thanks autopilot, it is always easier to understand with some visual help

[Gixer]

agreed on the 4xAA.  1600x1200 with 8xAA would be pointless really.  I dont notice any jaggies with it set to 4x.

Same with AF not really worth going higher than 8xAF.  My card does 16xAF but I can't see the difference so its not worth the small performance drop.

Nice pics autopilot but I dread to think what your score was with an FPS or zero in both shots  ;) hehehe jok  ;D

[the_autopilot]

Actually, those aren't my pics, just linked from another site.

I have gotten 0 fps in 3dmark before, but that was when i was testing my cpu's multitasking ability by playing HL2, Doom3, 3dmark, and Maya 6 (rendering) all at the same time (with the highest settings) while burning 2 DVD, one with alcohol and the other with nero. It was awesome, while i got a crappy fps is all of them, my comp did not crash nor did the dvd turn out to be currpted or antyhing like that.

I want to do another stress test when i have SLI and run every game i have all at the same time.

[Gary R.]

Thanks for all the vid reference. I will save it.