One of the joys – and frustrations – of being a PC gamer is the ability to tweak and configure our systems. It’s why many of us are so passionate about the PC, and the joy of getting a system zinging is akin to tuning a performance vehicle. The only problem is that there are myriad different ways to tweak your PC, so we’re going to cover some of the basics. Note that this article won’t cover overclocking; you can find that guide elsewhere in this issue. Let’s start with the simple stuff – maintaining the health of your PC.
BLOATWARE BE GONE
It’s amazing how much junk software your PC accumulates over time. It’s easy to spot as well – do a clean install of Windows and your PC and applications will boot within seconds. Six months later and you can go make a cup of tea while you’re waiting for the Windows loading icon to stop moving. The best solution to this problem is to do a systematic wipe of your Operating System as regularly as possible – at least every year. However, we realise that not everybody has the time to spend a day or two each year backing up all their games and reinstalling Windows, so there are other ways to get rid of that rubbish.
For starters, head to your PC’s System Configuration Startup tab. The easiest way to find this is to type msconfig into the search bar of windows.
From here it’s a simple matter of seeing which applications are run when your PC boots up, and changing their Status to Disabled. However, even this doesn’t always show all of the applications that are loading in the background. For that we recommend a free application called Process Explorer, which is available from https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/processexplorer.aspx
When you load this up, you’ll see every single process that is running on your PC. Yep, it’s incredible just how much junk is loaded after a few months of installing programs. Go through this list and identify programs that you no longer need, then hit the control panel to uninstall them all. You’ll save more CPU cycles than you thought possible. Another option is to install a process manager such as Razer’s Cortex Boost. This will automatically close down any unnecessary processes and Windows services before you fire your game up, and can be downloaded for free from www.razerzone.com/au-en/cortex. Just be careful about manually choosing hich services to close, as some of them are crucial for Windows to operate. Sticking with the automatic mode is a much safer bet.
VIRUS AND MALWARE SCANNING
This might sound blindingly obvious, but it’s amazing how many people rely on the rather average virus scanning that is included by default with Windows. It’s not too bad, but it doesn’t handle Malware very well. This author personally recommends the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware to take care of this threat, which is downloadable at www.malwarebytes.org. Ensure you update and run this at least once a week, especially if you’re a prolific downloader. As for virus scanning, we reckon Avast! Free Antivirus is pretty damn good, and it seems to top a lot of the freeware virus tests. Grab it from www.avast.com and ensure it too is updated and run weekly.
GIVE YOUR PC A BLOWJOB
Most of the hot bits inside your PC are cooled by little spinning blades otherwise known as fans. There’s usually one on your CPU, your graphics card, inside your PSU, on the front and rear of your case, and possibly even on your motherboard. The problem is that these make damn fine dust-collectors, and as they clog up they stop working well. When they’re not working, heat becomes a problem and your hardware could automatically slow down to stop it burning out. This is especially a problem if you’ve got fur-covered friends in the house or you smoke whilst gaming. The solution is to buy a can of compressed air and to give all of your fans a good blow every six months or so. A can will set you back around five bucks, though you can also buy a high-speed air blower specifically designed for electronics cleaning for $100 or so. One thing to remember if you’re using the canned variety is to always keep the can perfectly upright, otherwise moisture can be sprayed from the can. Not only will removing the dust ensure your PC remains cool and fast, you’ll be amazed at how much quieter it runs.
DRIVING MISS LAZY
It continually boggles us how often friends and family can’t get games to run, simply because they’re too lazy to update their graphics drivers. It’s crucial to keep your GPU’s drivers up to date, so always check for new drivers on a weekly or fortnightly basis – you’ll find Nvidia and AMD usually release a major new set whenever a big game is released. It’s not uncommon to see a 20% performance boost in a game simply from new GPU drivers. Your motherboard also uses chipset drivers, though they tend not to be updated anywhere near as regularly. Still, it’s worth hitting your mobo maker’s site every six months or so to grab new drivers for the motherboard chipset, onboard LAN and audio, and any storage devices. Finally, all of your other peripherals such as mice and sound cards usually need drivers too, so it’s worth checking for new ones every few months.
Now that we’ve shown you a few basic maintenance tips to keep your PC running sprightly, let’s look at the control panels of both AMD and Nvidia to see what options are there for improving game performance. This is especially timely given that AMD has just overhauled its entire graphics control panel with the release of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition.
AMD RADEON SOFTWARE CRIMSON EDITION
The day before this article was written, AMD released the biggest graphics control panel and driver revision in many years. It’s called Radeon Software Crimson Edition, and we love it. For starters, it fires up in just 0.6 seconds compared to 8 seconds for the last version – to do so, simply right click on your desktop and select AMD Radeon Settings.
The most important tab here is the Gaming one, and clicking on this reveals the new game tweaking interface. From here you can select Global Settings, which applies all graphics settings to every game, or you can create a custom profile per game. If you do choose to create custom profiles, you’ll need to set all of the following options for each individual game profile. For our guide we’re going to focus on Global Settings to deliver the best performance and visuals across all of your games.
ANTIALIASING MODE AND METHOD
You can leave your game to handle the antialiasing settings, or you can override it from these two settings. The Mode will select whether to use the game’s antialiasing, enhance the game’s antialiasing (this rarely works though) or to override it entirely. If you choose either of the latter two options, you can then select the antialiasing method. Multisampling (MSAA) is the traditional method used by games, while Supersampling (SSAA) is a much more powerful, demanding method that will clean up more jaggies, but can cause a severe performance hit. Adaptive multisampling sits somewhere between the two in terms of quality and performance hit.
MORPHOLOGICAL FILTERING
This is basically a method of antialiasing that is applied after the image is rendered, and not during like traditional antialiasing. This means it’s great for games that don’t support traditional antialiasing, but it can introduce some graphical errors such as blurred textures. It’s also rather performance sapping, moreso than MSAA, but less than SSAA. Only enable this if your game doesn’t have native support for antialiasing.
ANISOTROPIC FILTERING LEVEL
Want a fantastic free way to improve your game’s appearance without a performance hit? Anisotropic filtering basically sharpens the appearance of textures, especially over distance, and it can be enabled with a minimal performance hit of one or two percent. We suggest cranking this to x16. Interestingly enough, it turns out that Anisotropic filtering is a major performance hit on the consoles due to the way their CPU and GPU share memory. Scratch up another win for PC gaming.
SURFACE FORMAT OPTIMISATION
This cryptically named setting apparently asks the driver to change some rendering surface formats, which should result in improved performance without any quality decrease. Yeah, it sounds confusing to us too, so just leave it on unless you hear of any specific game-related issues.
WAIT FOR VERTICAL REFRESH
This is the basic control for enabling V-Sync. Leave it on to lock your framerate to your display’s refresh rate, and you won’t have to endure torn frames. However, it can decrease performance massively, and also introduce stutter. Disable it to maximise framerates and lower latency, at the cost of torn frames.
OPENGL TRIPLE BUFFERING
This setting only works in games that use the OpenGL API, which is relatively few these days (think Id Tech games). It uses some clever programming to increase the framerate and lower latency while V-sync is engaged. Always leave this on.
SHADER CACHE
This is a brand new option found in the Crimson software, and it allows the drivers to “transparently cache compiled game shader routines, reusing them rather than recompiling them each time they’re used.” Apparently DirectX doesn’t do this, and enabling this setting has benefits in two scenarios. Firstly, games that preload lots of shader compilations can now simply reuse those shaders, which should help on systems with slower (cough AMD cough) CPUs. Secondly, games that have an especially large amount of assets which compile shaders on the fly can cause stuttering – this new setting should reduce said stuttering. We’d suggest ensuring this setting is enabled as a result, as it can have significant performance improvements, and AMD claims it’s noticeable in Battlefront.
TESSELLATION MODE
Tessellation is a method of increasing the triangle count in rendered scenes without dramatically impacting performance. In other words, it gives you a richer, more detailed world without hurting your frame rate. Well, that’s the theory at least. AMD cards have a relatively weak tessellation engine compared to NVIDIA cards, so AMD includes this setting to give them a leg up. AMD claims many games that use tessellation overdo it, adding too much detail with no visual benefit. Enabling the AMD Optimised setting here reduces the amount of tessellation so that AMD performance doesn’t suffer, but the rendered scene should still look more detailed than without any tessellation.
FRAME RATE TARGET CONTROL
This is another setting that has been massively updated in Crimson. It does exactly what it says on the tin – limits the game to run at the framerate decided by the slider next to it. The benefit of this is that a gamer can limit the game to run at the native refresh rate of their display, say 60Hz or 60fps, and get the benefits of V-sync without the performance hit or lag. The major improvement in Crimson is the range of framerates now supported – it used to only be between 55 and 59fps, but now goes all the way from 30fps up to 200fps.
VIRTUAL SUPER RESOLUTION
The last setting we’re going to discuss is AMD’s take on downsampling, called VSR for short, which is the process of running games at a resolution higher than that supported by the display. For example, using a 1920 x 1080 monitor, enabling VSR allows the user to set the display as high as 3200 x 1800. This is a fantastic way of cleaning up jaggies in games that don’t support antialiasing, but obviously comes with a major performance hit, depending on how high you run your resolution. To enable it, go to the home page of Crimson, then select the Display tab at the bottom. Turn Virtual Super Resolution on, and you’ll now see a range of higher resolutions available in your games.
AND IN THE GREEN CORNER
Now that we’ve explained the main game-related features of AMD’s new Crimson driver interface, it’s time to check out Nvidia’s Control Panel. We have to say that in the past we favoured Nvidia’s control panel for its speedy loading and relatively clean layout, but AMD’s new Crimson interface has leapfrogged Nvidia here – it’s faster and sexier. Having said that, one feature we LOVE about Nvidia’s control panel is that it gives the user a basic text description of each setting. Let’s check out which settings are unique to Nvidia products – note that we won’t cover settings that aren’t game-related. To access the control panel, right click the desktop and select NVIDIA Control Panel.
AMBIENT OCCLUSION
Invented by ILM for use in the film Pearl Harbour, Ambient Occlusion eventually found its way into PC games since 2007’s Crysis. It is a method of applying light and shadows to a model that mimics the way the real world works. There are three settings – Off disables it, Performance applies a low-performance hit version of AO, while Quality applies the most detailed, but most performance-sapping, version of AO. It’s worth experimenting to see which setting you like most. Those with high-end GPUs can crank it to Quality.
ANISOTROPIC FILTERING
Exactly the same as AMD’s setting, this should be set to x16.
ANTIALIASING – FXAA
FXAA stands for Fast Approximate Antialiasing, and is a method of killing jaggies that requires far fewer GPU cycles than traditional MSAA. It’s also compatible with certain games where traditional MSAA doesn’t work. However, it’s not quite as good as MSAA at removing jaggies, and can introduce some blurring to textures. We suggest sticking with MSAA if you have the horsepower, and only use FXAA if you find MSAA slows your games down too much. You can also try enabling both FXAA and MSAA at the same time to really wipe out aliasing.
ANTIALIASING - GAMMA CORRECTION
Leave this setting on, as it brings a slight image quality improvement to traditional antialiasing for no performance hit.
ANTIALIASING - MODE
This is the same settings as AMD’s.
ANTIALIASING – SETTING
If you select “Override any application setting” in the Antialiasing – Mode field, you’ll now be able to set the level of antialiasing in this box. There are three values – x2, x4 and x8. As they increase, the level of antialiasing improves, but performance drops drastically at the higher values. Experiment with this setting.
ANTIALIASING – TRANSPARENCY
Ever noticed a wire fence in a game? Each individual wire probably isn’t made up from polygons, but instead is a transparent texture with the wires drawn on it. This means traditional antialiasing won’t smoothen out those wires, which is wear this setting comes in. Enabling it will look for straight lines in transparent textures, and antialias them. Be aware that this comes at a performance cost on slower GPUs.
CUDA – GPUS
For the purposes of gaming, ignore this setting. It’s really only relevant for applications that use CUDA acceleration, which are usually scientific or mathematic in nature.
DSR – FACTORS
DSR stands for Dynamic Super Resolution, and is Nvidia’s take on downsampling. This setting allows you to set which resolutions you want to open up – we suggest ticking every box in the drop down menu to make every downsampled resolution available.
DSR – SMOOTHNESS
This option is only available if you check the boxes in the previous setting. When using a DSR resolution that doesn’t fit your native resolution well – say, a DSR of 2560 x 1440 on a 1920 x 1080 display – there can be some sparkling or noise found in the final image. DSR smoothness irons this out, but at high values can lead to an overly soft image. We’ve found 30 to 40 percent is a good value to keep the image crisp.
MAXIMUM PRE-RENDERED FRAMES
NVIDIA has made a big song and dance about this recently, as lowering the value can improve input latency in MOBAs. This option controls the number of frames the CPU prepares in advanced of being rendered by the GPU. Higher values result in smoother, yet laggier play. However, it can also cause extremely weird stuttering in most games if it’s set too low, so we highly suggest leaving this as is, unless your game specifically runs well with it set to a low value, such as DOTA 2 or LoL.
MULTI-FRAME SAMPLE AA (MFAA)
Nvidia sure does love its proprietary antialiasing techniques, and MFAA is the latest one they’ve unveiled. It’s only supported on Maxwell GPUbased cards. It’s another method of antialiasing that delivers image quality that rivals MSAA, but with a lower performance hit, up to 30% faster in fact. It’s not quite as good as MSAA, but you’ll be hard pressed to pick the difference, so we suggest enabling this if your hardware supports it.
SHADER CACHE
You guessed it, exactly the same as the AMD setting. Nvidia implemented it first though…
TEXTURE FILTERING – ANISOTROPIC SAMPLE OPTIMISATION
NVIDIA should remove this setting, as we always suggest setting it to off, as this setting aims to increase the performance when anisotropic filtering is applied. The thing is, anisotropic filtering has such a low performance hit that there’s really no need to optimise it.
TEXTURE FILTERING – NEGATIVE LOD BIAS
This is another setting that we think NVIDIA should cancel, as it’s now seemingly obsolete. The weird thing is that the default option is the worst of the two, as it delivers slightly better performance at the cost of aliasing. Set this to clamped and forget it ever existed.
TEXTURE FILTERING – QUALITY
The term texture filtering replies to a range of anisotropic and trilinear filtering optimisations that are applied to textures in your games. Setting this to High Performance applies the maximum level of these optimisations to deliver better performance at the cost of texture clarity. Change it to High Quality and all those optimisations will be disabled, slightly lowering performance in return for crisp, clear textures. Unlike normal anisotropic filtering options, this can have a big impact on performance. Try each setting until you find the right level for your GPU.
TEXTURE FILTERING – TRILINEAR OPTIMISATION
Very similar to texture filtering, this determines whether or not to apply bilinear filtering when trilinear is not necessary. Leave this on if you have an old GPU, but turn it off if you’re running something decent.
TRIPLE BUFFERING
Use this if you’ve enabled V-sync, as it will help to prevent any FPS loss caused when your GPU’s framerate drops below the refresh rate of your display. However, if you’ve got V-sync disabled, turn this off, as it eats up memory.
VERTICAL SYNC
Identical to the AMD “Wait for Vertical Refresh” setting, but with two extra options – Adaptive and Adaptive (half refresh rate). Adaptive leaves V-sync disabled until the framerate of your game hits the refresh rate of your display, removing the lag of V-sync until it’s really needed. Setting it to half refresh rate will tie your framerate to exactly half that of your display.
Phew, we didn’t realise just how many new options are to be found in the Nvidia and AMD control panels until we started this guide, so hopefully we’ve explained the key ones. Just remember that finding the optimal settings is all about trial and error, so only adjust one setting at a time to see exactly what impact it has on your games.