I surely wish I could find a guide somewhere that explains in english (non-geekenese) what all the different vid card settings do and or mean.  Like anistrophic, mip map, bilinear/trilinear filtering and all those other funky terms.  Manufacturers never include a glossary or anything with their card software.  They just put control over all these things with weird names and expect people to educate themselves.  Or maybe they assume that people buying their product already know about these settings.

So, bilinear/trilinear choice does or does not effect performance?  I am assuming that if anti-aliasing mathematically softens edges that it also requires more pc resource and therefor can effect performance.  Thats the kind of info that would be handy.  Sort of like the vid card comparison that Gixer often posts.  If somebody would draw up a vid card setting cause and effect guide to help people balence performance desires with visual quality desires it would be real handy because I know if I have been tinkering with pc's I've owned for 6 years and don't fully understand all the vid card techno I'm sure there's a lot of others that are mystified by it to.  Anyway, thanks for that info so far. 

Trilinear filtering

Trilinear filtering will combine Bilinear filtering in 2 Mip levels. This however results in 8 texels being needed so memory bandwidth is multiplied by 2. This usually means that the memory will suffer serious bandwidth
problems so trilinear filtering is usually used as an option, although higher end graphics cards should be able to handle this filtering with greater levels of success.

Anistropic Filtering:

Anistropic Filtering addresses quadrilateral shaped and angled areas of a texture image. A sharper image is accomplished by interpolating and filtering multiple samples from one or more MIP-maps to better approximate very distorted textures. This is the next level of filtering after trilinear filtering. While it will create the best looking images it comes at a serious price and should only be used when your system can handle it. If your system is performing slowly try turning off Anistropic filtering for better perfomance.

Fill Rate

the number of pixels that a video card can render (textured and shaded) over a given time period (millions of pixels per second, MPPS). This is taken into account when determining the "grunt" of a given video card over others, the higher the fill rate, the better the card will perform.

Fogging

Creates a fog like effect by placing a haze over the scene. Is used to make object appear slowly to avoid the sudden appearance of objects. Im not sure if this effect is as widely used in modern games as 'back in the day' of DOOM and Quake.

MIP mapping

A technique using scaled down versions of a texture image, generated beforehand and stored in memory, are then used in rendering a 3D scene to provide the best quality. This technique allows objects to look more
detailed when coming closer to them by defining multiple texture maps- very detailed textures maps are used when the object is close and less detailed
ones used when the object is further away. This helps to avoid the blocky textures, and the step effect on lines. Usually they talk about MIP-levels or Level of Detail (LOD) which refers to the quality of the texture map used.

Sideband Signalling

An extra 8-bits of addressing capability built into AGP which, in effect, allows the AGP graphics board to request information over AGP at the same time as it is receiving data over the 32-bit datapath of the bus. This is yet another way that AGP graphics board can create better efficiencies and improve overall graphics  performance.

Texture Mapping

In 3D graphics, texture mapping is the process of adding a graphic pattern to the polygons of a 3D scene. Unlike simple shading, which uses colors to the underlying polygons of the scene, texture mapping applies simple textured graphics, also known as patterns or more commonly "tiles", to simulate walls, floors, the sky, and so on.

Vertical Synch (V-Synch) refers to a video-card synchronizing its output to the monitor's vertical refresh rate. A monitor's refresh rate is the number of times per second that the monitor redraws the screen at a given resolution (expressed in Hertz).


Video cards typically use two or three frame buffers to process and display 3D graphics. When V-Synch is enabled, a video card will hold a completed frame in a frame buffer until the display is finished drawing the current rendered frame on the screen. This forces the video card to match its display speed to that of the monitor. Disabling V-Synch lets the video card render frames as fast as possible regardless of the display's refresh rate. This will eliminate a refresh rate bottleneck, but you may (or may not) notice some visual anomalies during gameplay.

No mention of Anti Aliasing but I think most know that it gets rid of the jaggie edges.  The higher level of AA you choose the smoother the lines.  AA generally does work a graphics card quite hard.

I would think so as LOD = Level of detail so the higher the number I would think the higher the detail.

Quote:


Anti-aliasing works by darkening the edges of models so that jaggies are less apparent or gone. It shades the edges.

Computers display everything in pixels which are squares. Now, try drawing a diagonal line with squares. You can't.  You can create a step-like "line" through the pixels, but that will look very jagged (hence the name jaggies)


A diagonal line is impossbile as it only uses parts of pixels (which do not worked that way, think of it as a lightbulb, you can't have one side lit and one side dark).


A line can be simulated by creating step like jaggiess. You get the illusion of an line, but it is ugly. Anti-aliasing solves this problem by shading the sides as seen below.


Of course, this is all done mathmatically with different colors (not just black and white) and puts immense pressure on the gfx card and/or the CPU (anti-aliasing use to be done on the CPU, but with the complexities of gfx, modern gfx cards built AA (Anti-aliasing) processing into the GPU.

The differences between AA off and AA on can be huge, though it does depend on other factors.

Without AA


With 4xAA


Of course, the amount of AA you use depends on the abilty of your gfx as it can be a huge performence heat.

AA levels range from none to 8x. Generally 4x is perfect.
Newer games like Half Life 2 have support for up to 8x AA

agreed on the 4xAA.  1600x1200 with 8xAA would be pointless really.  I dont notice any jaggies with it set to 4x.

Same with AF not really worth going higher than 8xAF.  My card does 16xAF but I can't see the difference so its not worth the small performance drop.

Nice pics autopilot but I dread to think what your score was with an FPS or zero in both shots  hehehe jok 

Thanks for all the vid reference. I will save it.  Handy stuff.  Wow, I want a 64.  A test like that would have frozen mine with less goin than that and mine isn't exactly primitive yet.  I just started using riva tuner. That really woke up this 6600GT.  In fact, I tested it out with some scenery creation in TRS2004 (Trainz).  I wasn't prepared for how quickly the panning around would be and made myself right dizzy. I had to jack up the graphic settings just to slow it all down and make it controllable. I didn't have any time to set up and fly. Over the next few days I will be conductiong flight tests. I will be using the Wiings of Power planes.  They are somewhat vid drags because of their detail and systems implementation.