Game Setting Questions

Hey all, I was just wondering if anyone could give me a run down, or know of a good place in the forums to figure out what all of the different graphics options for PC games do. More specifically though, I want to know which options rely more on the GPU, CPU, system RAM, etc. I am using ATI Tray Tools to overclock my x300 and i am getting good results, and keeping tabs on the free texture memory, system memory used, and the framerates trying to sort the stuff out. Basically, it seems like some options can be configured fairly high even with the x300, I am wondering if they rely on the CPU more. Hopefully this makes sense. I guess to sum this up, I would want to know what graphic options I could crank up, with a 2.13 Pentium M and 1 gig of RAM, and the not so good ATI Radeon x300. Any help or suggestoins would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

PS: The display setting I am talking about are things like anit-aliasing, texture quality, special effects quality, etc. just the typical setting you would find in your first person shooter game like CoD or FarCry.

 

I'll give you a basic rundown -

Anti-Ailasing: It makes edges smoother - for example, your normally see the 'stair-stepping' effect on diagonal lines on your screen. Anti-Ailasing blends the colors around the polygon (or edge) and it looks smoother. It is a high-end option, Far Cry is going to become unplayable if you enable that. I wouldn't use it unless you have a GeForce 6800 at least.

Antistrophic Filtering - it makes textures look better. To quote a definition:

Texture quality - if you look at the ground, there are textures, such as sand, rocks, etc. The higher the quality of the texture, the more memory it will use to store them. Low settings is like using low-quality pictures for the ground, objects, etc., and high textures is like taking a high-quality picture and using it for a texture. With only 64MB of VRAM, I'd use low, maybe medium textures, and if you have a 128MB+ card (minimum), then use High.

Special effects - when you blow something up, there are particles - the smoke, etc., is all compromised of little dots and stuff called particles. It can be difficult for a low end card such as an X300 to use high quality, because it does use a lot of power.

Chaz

 

Thanks Chaz. So from what you have said it seems that most gaming settings rely strictly on the GPU, and not the CPU for processing. So I should set my setting with the limitatoins of my GPU in mind. One last questoin...in Far Cry, it has a setting for machine speed, and you can set low, medium, high and very high. I was wondering what effect your CPU has on the game itself. Thanks again!

 

As you thought, the game mainly relies on the graphics card. The CPU will become more important in future games, but most games right now are GPU limited, hence why the load falls on it.

With an X300, even having a powerful AMD Athlon 64 FX top-of-the-line processor won't make a huge difference. It will, but since you aren't getting good performance to begin with, the percentage increase in performance it will provide isn't going to drastically affect your gameplay.

Your CPU is more than powerful enough for any game. The Pentium M is excellent at gaming. Just play with the settings until you get the right balance. Use the Frames per second counter in ATI Tray and get your frames. Shoot for the 30-40 FPS. 30 is the minimum that I consider playable.

Chaz

 

Yea, I love the Pentium M, graet processor! I typically do just shoot for about 30 FPS, its look darn good to me. I also overclock the card when I game to about 400/300 (processor/memory) which helps quite a bit too. Thank you for all of the help!