Bonus Catalyst Options- Unlocks 1600x900 + 1366x768 resolutions, High Quality AF & Geometry Instancing Direct3D: Regedit ->

[HKEY_LOCAL_/REGISTRY/MACHINE/SYSTEM/ControlSet001/Control/CLASS/ {4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}/0000] -> Find the following and replace the value: "GI_NA"="0" "AreaAniso_NA"="0" "EQAA_NA"="0" "MLF_NA"="0" "SurfaceFormatReplacements_NA"="0" "TextureLod_NA"="0"

Then open up the UMD sub key located [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Video\ {xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}\0000\UMD and add the following: Right click, select new, select string value and enter: MLF_DEF. Then right click on MLF_DEF and select modify. Enter 0. Right click, select new, select string value and enter: SurfaceFormatReplacements_DEF. Right click on SurfaceFormatReplacement_DEF and select modify. Enter: 0 Right click, select new, select string value and enter: TFQ_DEF. Then right click on TFQ_DEF and select modify. Enter: 1 Right click, select new, select binary value and enter: GI. If already there then skip. Right click on GI and select modify. Change the numeric value from 31 00 00 00 to 30 00 00 00. Right click, select new, select string value and enter: GI_DEF. If already there then skip. Right click on GI_DEF and select modify. Change the numeric value from 1 to 0.

For the resolutions (this is for those want to game with lower resolutions if have Full HD display): Find "DALNonStandardModesBCD1" under 0000 sub and add 1366076800000060 & 1600090000000060

Displays Allows you to switch between Monitor, TV, and Digital device, if multiple displays are connected to the card.

Color Allows you to set Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast, as well as configure profiles for the screen; i.e. Desktop or Full Screen 3D.

Direct3D Direct3D is the most commonly used form of rendering in modern games. It is a component of the Microsoft DirectX API. It provides the API that software can use to accelerate the display of 3-D graphics without requiring information about the capabilities of the actual hardware on the computer system where the software is running. It was originally written by RenderMorphics and was acquired by Microsoft in 1995. Direct3D is available only on the Windows series of operating systems.

OpenGL OpenGL is another form of rendering like Direct3D, except older. It is a software interface to graphics hardware. This interface consists of about 120 distinct commands, which you use to specify the objects and operations needed to produce interactive three-dimensional applications. It is designed as a streamlined, hardware-independent interface to be implemented on many different hardware platforms.

Anti-Aliasing

Anti-aliasing is a software technique for diminishing jaggies - stairstep-like lines that should be smooth. Jaggies occur because the output device doesn't have a high enough resolution to represent a smooth line. Antialiasing reduces the prominence of jaggies by surrounding the stairsteps with intermediate shades of that particular colour. Although this reduces the jagged appearance of the lines, it also makes them fuzzier. This feature uses up GPU power. How much it uses depends on how many samples you set, be that 2x, 4x or 8x. I would recommend you only use AA on more modern cards, otherwise you will take a very substantial performance hit, and on low-end cards, this may make games of an unplayable, because the frame rate will be too low.

Anisotropic Filtering A way of detailing textures that are far away, and clarifying textures around you for a more realistic look. Performance hit is greater on lower end cards. 16x AF may look unrealistic in some games. This feature also uses up GPU power. How much it uses depends on how many samples you set, be that 2x, 4x, 8x or 16x. I would recommend you only use AF on more modern cards, otherwise you will take a very substantial performance hit, and on low-end cards, this may make games of an unplayable, because the frame rate will be too low.

(For more info try this Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering Guide.)

Texture Preference How detailed a texture is in a game. The lower the preference the blurrier a texture will look, but with greater performance. The highest preference will make the texture look the best at the cost of performance.

MipMap Detail level How big or small a mipmap is in a game. The lower the mipmap detail level the blurrier the texture is but more performance, the higher the mipmap detail level is, the smaller the mipmap is and the clearer and more detailed at the cost of performance.

Wait for Vertical Sync Vsync limits you to a framerate equal to or a multiple of your refresh rate. If your vsync is set to 85Hz, your screen can only be updated 85 times per second, or 42.5, or 21.25, .... Disabling vsync allows your monitor to display frames as fast as your card can render them. The disadvantage is that you may see some "tearing" of the on-screen image if the video card supplies a new frame before the monitor finishes reading and displaying the previous one from the video card's memory, so you end up with frame A on the top half of the screen, and frame B on the bottom half. AFAIK, current video cards are double-buffered: the back buffer is where the video card creates the current frame, and the front buffer is where a completed back buffer frame is flipped. The monitor gets its image from the front buffer. I believe vsync prevents the front buffer from being written to unless a complete frame can be transmitted at the designated refresh rate interval, potentially leading to the monitor displaying the same frame for multiple screen refreshes, but avoiding the problem of multiple rendered frames being displayed in a single screen redraw.

Vsync is desirable from an image quality point of view, but not from a smooth frame rate point of view. The solution is triple buffering, which takes up more memory but adds an extra (front) buffer for a vsync'ed monitor to draw from if the video card hasn't rendered a new frame in time for a new screen redraw, thus eliminating the multiple-of-refresh-rate-framerate problem.

TruForm Truform is a technology made by ATi that, if the game supports it, it will detail things better making them smoother, but with a performance hit due to more polygon rendering.

Temporal Anti-aliasing: Good info from WildStyle! Quote: Temporal AA is a way for ATi to allow antialiasing "for free" so to speak, i.e., little or no performance hit. What it does is that it takes different, programmable samples for AA and varies them by frame. As you may know, most MSAA (multisample antialiasing) techniques are based on one sample pattern based on the level (2x,

4x, 6x). What temporal AA does is use a slightly different sample for each frame (2 or 3 samples). Since it changes each frame, it should not be noticeable if your frames/sec is high enough - more on this in the next paragraph. The next result is that you can use regular AA with temporal AA to achieve much greater levels of AA with only the frame rate hit of non-programmable/standard AA.

There are some drawbacks to temporal AA:

* Vsync is required to be on, or should I say, is forced on if you enable temporal AA. For some users, this may be a problem.

* A relatively high frame rate is required to avoid flickering (>= 60 frames/sec). On the flip side, you can set a frame rate threshold. If the frame rate drops below the chosen rate, temporal AA turns itself off.

* It is only present in D3D as of Catalyst 4.6, but it should be available in OpenGL when it is formally released in 4.7. You can activate with 3rd party tools such as Radlinker. Options Allows you to set various driver and software tool options.

Rotation This is used for rotating your screen if you were to put your monitor horizontal or upside down.

Overlay Controls the look and feel of video playback; these settings are automatically set when any video playback begins.

SmartGart

Automatically performs a variety of bus tests to determine the optimal setting for the graphics card. This can used for changing the AGP (Accelarated Graphics Port) speed. On some motherboards you may only have a speed of 4x. The faster the AGP the faster data will be sent through to the AGP slot. The performance difference between 4x and 8x is only about 2%-3%. And Fast Writes should be off if you are having problems. What it does is it sends info through everything else and straight to the AGP, no performance difference is seen with it on or off.

VPU recover Allows the ATI display driver to reset the graphics accelerator when and if it stops responding to commands from the display driver. Enabling the VPU recover setting will, in most cases, allow the graphics card to recover without a system re-boot.

Changing Temporal threshold value For changing Temporal AA threshold, you can use tools like Radlinker, or do it by editing the registry.

Start->Run->Regedit , then navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Video\{GUID}\0000

Note that the GUID section will be a series of random characters that will vary from machine to machine. You may also find more than one section with different GUIDs (usually from old driver installations and the like), so find the ones with values for TemporalAA.

Find TemporalAAFrameThreshold regkey, if there is none, create a new Dword value with that name.

The value for this key should be the framerate at which you desire Temporal AA to activate and deactivate (i.e. 60). Setting this value to 0 will leave Temporal AA enabled at all times. If you are using the value of 50 and for example 2xAA + TAA, if the FPS drop above this value, TAA will turn off and normal 2xAA is shown, avoiding egde flickering.

Once the value has been created or set, you need to restart your machine. You will also want to make sure that at least 2x AA and TAA checkbox is enabled too.

What is Triple Buffering First of all, this only works with Vsync, or with TAA since TAA forces Vsync ON.

Double buffering only allows even 1/n fractions of the refreshrate to be rendered when vsync is enabled. For example, if the refreshrate is set to 75hz, a double buffered game can ONLY display at 75,37,25,18,15,9,etc fps, and its very noticable when it switches between those fixed framerates. Also, if the video card is capable of rendering 60fps at a given scene, it'll just render at 37fps anyway and throw away the other 23 frames.

If you turn on Triple Buffering under OPENGL Compatibility button, and that same 75hz refresh is used, the game can display EVERY frame that the video card can render, with the refreshrate itsself being the only limitation. That way, it'll be able to display 75,74,73,72,71,70,etc fps with no problem, keeping fps transitions between simple and complex scenes completely smooth and keeping the framerate high, even if the video card cant render exactly at the refresh rate.

Note that all Direct3D games that use DirectX9 have TB forced on by default, unless manually disabled.

So TB can improve performance in most cases using Vsync, but it depends on the game, and your video card. Triple Buffering uses more video memory and if it causes you to use your AGP memory then it will be a LOT slower. If you use high resolutions and FSAA with Triple Buffering and you will need a at least 128Mb Video Card... But try it and choose.