A while ago, we did a video demystifying all the different settings in your computer's BIOS
that we think you should tweak. But today, we're gonna take a look at certain graphics cards options
that you might wanna fine tune, because hey, who doesn't want more performance, you know?
But hold on a second, I have all my settings the way I like them inside of the games I play.
Isn't that good enough? Well, to some extent, but there are other options
that you can instead turn on in either the NVIDIA control panel or Radeon settings
that can still make things look quite a bit better. Let's start with a very simple one, resolution.
Modern LCD displays have a fixed amount of pixels arranged in a grid, meaning that optimally,
you want your graphics card output signals at the screen's native resolution.
If you don't have that, your system will have to upscale the image
in order to fit into that pixel grid. And in exact science,
that will leave your images looking not quite right. So make sure that your resolution is set correctly
before doing anything else. And on the subject of scaling,
one scaling method that actually will make your images
look better is super sampling. This is essentially when your GPU renders frames
at a higher resolution than what your monitor supports
and then downscales this image to fit. It's essentially a supercharged version of anti-aliasing,
but do keep in mind it's very computationally expensive.
So it might only work well if you're pairing a powerful GPU with a low-res monitor,
or if you're trying it on an older, easier to run game.
If you have an NVIDIA card, super sampling is called dynamic super resolution,
while AMD calls it virtual super resolution.
And you can force these settings on even if the game you're playing doesn't offer them.
A couple of other settings that you can force on outside of games are ambient occlusion
and anisotropic filtering. Ambient occlusion is a technique
that makes shadows look better by examining how bright pixels should be
based on geometry, and then figuring out where light should be blocked.
It's almost like a simpler form of ray tracing, almost. Meanwhile, anisotropic filtering
helps make objects in the distance look sharper. Although many games do have an option for it,
turning it on in your GPU settings instead can look better in some circumstances,
and it's also not very hard on your frame rate. So why not?
Another good thing to check is your power management settings.
Typically, your GPU will operate at a fairly low clock speed
and then ramp up when you're playing a game. And while this usually happens without a hitch,
power management has been known to cause issues in some games that shouldn't be very hard to run.
So if a game like this is behaving strangely, try turning the settings to max performance,
though expect a little more fan noise. Moving on, one setting that you should probably
always have turned on as long as you have the drive space for it is shader cache,
which helps to speed up loading times, especially for larger levels.
If you're rocking a Radeon card, setting it to AMD optimized means shader cache is turned on.
And if we're talking improving frame rates instead of loading times, consider setting vertical sync to triple buffering
if you're using v-sync to avoid screen tearing. Triple buffering keeps an extra frame
in your GPU's frame buffer, so it's not waiting around for something else to work on,
which can result in better performance if you're having slow downs with v-sync.
However, do keep in mind, it can introduce input lag.
So pick your poison. And speaking of tearing,
verify that either g-sync or free-sync is actually enabled if you have a monitor
and a card that supports these technologies. Sometimes they aren't active by default,
and you obviously don't wanna have spent a bunch of money on a fancy variable refresh rate monitor
just to discover that you've left the feature disabled for the last six months.
And one last thing to check on, if some of your older games look a bit too dark
and there's no way to fix it in the in-game settings, try playing with your GPU's gamma options.
However, graphics cards only tend to let you adjust this globally,
so you'll have to remember to change it back once you're done gaming.
So that's it then. What are your best pro tips for getting the most out of your graphics card?
Let us know in the comments and feel free to scream if we've missed your favorite tweaks.
So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section below
with your ideas for topics that we should cover in the future.