The Graphics Card - Updating the Drivers --
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Just as it’s important to keep your motherboard drivers up-to-date, it’s vital that you keep your video card drivers up-to-date. You can use the drivers provided by your card manufacturer, but sometimes they lag behind updates that ship directly from chipset makers. Drivers from chipset makers are called reference drivers, and it’s best to use them when they’re ahead of the drivers offered by the card manufacturer.
You can acquire reference drivers by heading directly to the chipset makers’ web sites, such as www.nvidia.com and www.ati.com, depending on the chipset of your graphics card. Head to the tech support or driver download link on the main page and follow the instructions to download the proper driver for your operating system. Your download will come in the form of an executable file. Driver installations are automatic: just run the executable that you download and the installation program will take care of the rest.
ATIDriverControls -- ATI throws in a curve by packaging the driver control program separately from the drivers themselves. Without the driver control program, you can’t adjust things like anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The driver control program is usually packaged with driver updates, but ATI recently began packaging it separately. Watch the ATI web site for updates of both drivers and the driver control interface.
Follow news sites like www.bluesnews.com or make regular visits to your chipset manufacturer’s web site to keep your drivers current. New drivers often squeeze more performance out of your graphics hardware. They also contain bug fixes, compatibility updates, and other important bits of code.
Some sites, like www.3dchipset.com, offer graphics device drivers that are still in beta form. Use them with caution, because beta drivers usually haven’t been tested with a wide variety of applications. If you use beta drivers, you may see performance gains or losses compared to the current final reference drivers. You may also experience incompatibilities in the form of graphical glitches, crashing games, system hangs, or spontaneous reboots. You can always install final drivers over beta drivers to restore stability.
Gauging Your Performance: Benchmarking Your Graphics Card While it’s nice to play games that run smoothly at high frame rates, it’s somehow nicer to put a number on your gaming machine’s prowess. That’s what benchmarks are for. Benchmarking a graphics card with various settings enabled gives you an idea of how well your card can run games with the conditions you set for the benchmark. Want to see how big of a performance hit that 4X anti-aliasing causes? Benchmark it. Wondering how well your rig does at lofty resolutions like 1600×1200? Benchmark it.
Two types of benchmarks are used:
- Synthetic benchmarks Run theoretical simulations through the system and spit out arbitrary numbers or scores
- Real-world benchmarks Actual games that include a routine in which you can run a segment of a game (a demo) to get a score in frames per second
Benchmarking Guidelines When you benchmark your graphics card, you should follow a few simple guidelines to ensure that you get accurate, repeatable results. Controlled testing conditions will give you the best and most useful benchmarks.
- Don’t run any programs in the background. Shut down any application that’s open before you run a test.
- Reboot in between benchmarks, and don’t run anything you don’t have to after you reboot and before you run the benchmark.
- For each set of testing conditions, run each benchmark three to five times and average the results.
- Don’t make any changes to other aspects of the system between benchmarks.
- To compare one piece of hardware to another (for instance, to compare two graphics cards), run them on the same system with the same parameters, changing nothing except the hardware you’re comparing.
Here’s an example: Let’s say you’re comparing the performance of your graphics card before and after you update its drivers. First, you’d run several benchmarks with the old drivers. Then, without changing anything else, including the resolution, anti-aliasing settings, other display settings, any other drivers, and so on, run another set of benchmarks with the new graphics card drivers. If you change anything but the graphics card drivers, the comparison between the two driver revisions won’t be accurate.
Try benchmarking at different resolutions and with different features enabled to get a feel for how well your system runs games under different conditions. You should see decent scores with the details turned up.
 This chapter is from Build Your Own High Performance Gamers' Mod PC, by Chen and Durham (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072229012). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now. |
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