Computersight -

It is an accepted fact that many people only use about 25% of the ability of their graphic cards. Many people just install the driver which comes with their hardware and then they forget about it.

The reality is that if one is aware of their graphic adapter he can even make a 64 mb low end card give performance that is normally observed in 256 mb cards, and yes mind you I am not Joking.

Lately Nvidia has been announcing several powerful but low cost Graphics cards, although Ati cards are also good but I would recommend you to use Nvidia, because of my personal experience Low end Nvidia’s fare better than the low end Ati’s.

Now the other grimy side of my discussion is that no company either big or small does not want to lose its market share, the companies manufacturing graphic hardware are one of them, there is cut throat competition in the graphics card market, every five minutes there emerges a new graphic card with entirely new features, and speaking frankly is that persons who test these graphic cards do that through benchmarking tests, to fare better in these tests the card manufacturers tweak their cards and supply along certain drivers that although give a high benchmark scores in benchmarking tests but they fail to deliver the best performance in Games.

Many low end nvidia and ati cards supports pixel shading, but due to being a low end they might support only upto 1.4, so that these cards achieve higher benchmarking results the ordinary Nvidia and Ati ‘Supported Drivers’ report to the benchmarking software of having no pixel shaders!!! this does help as the card is then removed from the high end category of heavy weight cards (having 3.0 pixel shaders) and thus gives a good benchmarking score. This greatly helps in the sale of the Nvidia and Ati Graphic cards, but the downside is that the consumer fails to recognize and use the full power of their graphics adapter, resulting in low performance in games even in very high performance cards.

The best thing which i suggest is that you log on the net and downoad Nvidia “omega diver”, Nvidia “detonater driver” and Nvidia Stereo patch driver based on your existing force ware(Searching Google will help), omega and detonater drivers are not supported by Nvidia, so you will not find them at the Nvidia official website.

Now install the omega or detonater driver, you should experiance some change in the frame rate in your favorate games. Keep experimenting and keep the driver which you think gives you high performance, although installing sterio driver is optional, you can install it if you own 3d glasses or if you could make one at your home. Sterio driver will install on your exisiting omega or detonater wihout any problems.

If you are using Xp then right click on your desktop and click on the properties, a new window will open, now click on the settings tab and then click the ‘advanced’ button, now a new window will open, head over to the Nvidia tab, and wait for a few seconds. Now all the Nvidia settings which your card supports will be listed there, you can also enable and disable Sterio 3d from there (if you have installed the patch), now head over the performance tab, from there you can force anisotrophic filtering and antialaising even in games that do no support these features natively!! while browsing through all the tabs you will also come accross the overclocking slider, althouh overclocking your card may increase the perfomance exceptionally, but be beware that execcive overclocking may burn and damage your card.

Always keep in mind that the more you experiment about your graphic card the more you will be able to uncover, so keep Experimenting!!