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DeZmond's Guide to Tweaking SiS drivers
Written: May 2006
Greetings to everyone (it's my first post, after all), I'd like to introduce myself - I am DeZmond, one tech-obessive from Scotland. I use an Acer Aspire 5002LM which has become my main PC after a catastrophe took my main PC away... as a result I have taken to tweaking it's performance to maximum gain.
This guide is intended for those poor souls who have SiS integrated graphics on their notebooks and want to squeeze every last drop of power from the chipset. A word of warning: Don't expect warp speed. The SiS chipsets have poor 3D performance by nature in hardware and not much can be done about that. In this case we are looking to aid compatibility and improve performance slightly.
Before we go any further, I'd like to point out that I take no responsibility for what may happen as a result of following these instructions; these settings were discovered by accident and manipulated by experimentation. Use common sense when applying these settings. And if you aren't confident in the use of your PC, don't bother trying this - you could mess up your system. You have been warned.
The Overview
As far as I'm concerned, SiS drivers are a joke. I've yet to see any useful improvements in the last few incarnations of the drivers they periodically release online. In addition, there is no configuration for our 3D options! Well, let's fix that now.
Historically SiS had a 3D wizard bundled with the driver utility but this has been long gone from what I can ascertain. That means it's down to us.
Nurse, scalpel please
At this point I'm assuming that you are running a chipset that uses SiS integrated graphics (not the discrete cards like the Xabre or 6326) and that you have the latest drivers installed. For simplicity, I'm assuming Windows XP is installed and working and that the user has some previous computer knowledge.
To see the bountiful options that await us, we need to visit our good old friend, Mr Registry.
1. Open regedit by hitting 'Start' followed by 'Run...' and typing 'regedit'.
2. You should now be confronted with the registry in all it's glory. You'll need to navigate to the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Controlset001\Control\Video
3. Once in this folder, you should see 4 folders with long hex names. As far as I can tell these vary from system to system so open each one individually until you find a folder with '0000', '0001' and 'Video' inside it, with the first two having subfolders.
4. Now that you've located the correct folder, open '0000' inside it.
5. You'll see a long list of keys, with names like '2D_BI01' and so on. Scroll down the list until you see the command 'SiS.3D.3DCOMMAND'. Then you will know that you have found the 3D settings.
Some of the functions of the keys are unknown at this stage - no documentation on this issue is provided and it seems to be a guessing game, although if anyone can map some functions that would help immensely. However, those I have tested and would recommend are:
(set the following keys and values)
SiS.3D.AAEnable - 1
SiS.3D.CompressTex - 1
SiS.3D.FSAA - 1
SiS.3D.LightTurboMode - 1
SiS.3D.TnLGuardBand - 1
Beyond that I can't really offer much advice on settings - experiment according to your needs and post up your results; we can try and assemble a list of what helps and what doesn't and hopefully improve compatibility and performance a little bit.
Making the best of a bad situation, it could be said...
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hey thanks right now i have sis card and i hate it, love teh acer but hate the card text on Mircrosft word doesn't display proporly so maybe this will fix that, thanks alot
Attention! Does your notebook have SiS graphics? Then look here...
Discussion in 'Acer' started by DeZmond, Jun 1, 2006.
