[RatzaTM]

VIDEO CARD TWEAKING

AGP Card Users NOTICE : If you use an AGP video card , download PCI Latency Tool. This tool, when launched will allow you to set the Latency of the AGP slot to 16 instead of it's default 255. This is an utility to set PCI Latency and possibly prevent game stutter or improve FPS.

STEP 1. Open the PCI Latency Tool
STEP 2. Rightclick on your graphics card and click change setting(s)
STEP 3. Change to desired setting and hit OK
STEP 4. Click settings and select apply at startup so it has a tick next to it
STEP 5. Click settings and select save so everything you have just done is saved
STEP 6. Right click on your video card and click quickset latency (if you want to set it straight away).

Now, to continue with the tweaking.

NVIDIA Based Chips : This applies to all nVidia Video Cards

You will need Riva Tuner in order to do this. After you install Riva Tuner, it will create a Database. Let it finish this operation and you will be in this window.



Click on System Settings and at the third tab, Compatibility, check the last box, the one showed in the picture below, to enable a small performance boost from motherboard optimization. (In the jpeg i didn't activate it, but you guys should)



To continue, press OK. Now you're back in the main menu,



Choose DirectDraw and D3D Settings. You will be taken here



Choose the IntelliSample tab, as in the above picture and make sure all 3 types of optimizations are checked. Also, move the slider towards high performance (REMEMBER : This will reduce the number of layers the video card uses to render the objects, therefore your texture quality will drop, boosting the speed)

The last step, go to the VSync tab, and make sure it is set to ALWAYS OFF as in the below picture



VSync, when activated will try to limit the FPS to the refresh of the screen. If you use a LCD monitor that has a max of 60 - 75Hz, this will also make the game block the FPS to that value. Even worse, it fails to do so properly if you DO NOT reach the refresh value with your FPS using your config, so unless you want to reduce the FPS drastically, i suggest you keep this on Always OFF. Counter-Strike players know what i am talking about. (playing CS requires 100+ FPS's and it cannot be achieved on LCD monitors with 60Hz unless VSync is turned off)

ATI Based Chips : This applies to all Radeon (be it Mobility or normal PCI-X/AGP Radeons)

You will need the following tweaking tool : ATI Tray Tools

IMPORTANT NOTICE : Cabal is not working properly while ATT is running, so make sure that you set it NOT TO START WITH WINDOWS automatically, and also after you finish tweaking, close it before running Cabal.

During install, you will have the following screen.



Make sure you uncheck AUTOSTART WITH WINDOWS, and all the others for that matter.
Next up, a secondary list of options in which you should also leave every box unchecked.



Next step, you will receive a message stating that ATI Hotkey Poller (installed with Catalyst Control Center) needs to be shutdown in order to enable low level overclocking. Just press NO as it not needed and make sure you check the box above, to make ATI Tray Tools do this every time it is launched.



After running ATI Tray Tools and running it, you will find the shortcut to it in the TrayBar, next to the clock. Right Click the icon and as in the attached picture, browse to Direct3D and then Settings.



You will be taken here



At Anisotropic Filtering, select 2X from the drop-down list, then the options above it will no longer be greyed out. Select Performance (above the Anisotropic Filtering option) and then at Anisotropic select Application Controlled from the drop-down list. Basically you need to change to any value so that the boxes are no longer greyed out, and then put Application Controlled back on, which greys them again but retains the selection.

Do the same with Adaptive Antialiasing. Check the box near Adaptive Antialiasing, select Performance in the drop-down list at Mode, and then uncheck Adaptive Antialiasing. This has to be done because that Performance / Quality value affects all types of Antialiasing not only Adaptive one.

At the Performance section below them, make sure to set High Performance values for both Texture and MipMap Quality. And, as in the case of an nVidia card, choose Always OFF at VSync option.

Choose the Additional tab, at the top of the window. Here, you will be able to set the following options :



The 2 Support .... options will be checked by default.
You will have to also check Anisotropic Filtering Optimization, Trilinear Filtering Optimization.
Geometry Instancing will make the GPU and CPU "read" what the capabilities of the engine and driver are, and optimize them accordingly. It's good to check it also.
NOTICE : If you do not have a powerful processor (over 2.5Ghz in real clock time) do not activate AI Catalyst. It will only slow down your performance when trying to use the optimizations of the driver.
Do not activate it on a Pentium 3, AthlonXP, Duron, Sempron or Celeron processor as it will only slow down your PC.

Click OK to save the changes.

Now, right click on the ATI Tray Tools icon in the traybar and select Tweaks -> Standard Tweaks.



Here, you will see these options :



Again, make sure Geometry Instancing is checked.

VERY IMPORTANT : This is the most important tweak you can do in ATI Tray Tools. It is called Force Mip-Map Filter. What this will do basically, is force the filtering of the textures (filter the mipmapping). Because of this, your textures will change and become less blurry, because the smoothing goes away in order to improve the FPS. Check it and see how the textures appear in-game. If you cannot get used to the way your texture appear in-game, just uncheck it

NOTE : If at any point, you cannot access the driver, the tweaker software, or any other 3D application, reinstalling the video driver will reset all the options you set up, and it only takes 2 minutes to do so. It's the safest way to revert to your original settings.

INSTALLING WINDOWS XP FROM A BOOTABLE CD / DVD

How to make your PC boot from a CD-DVD unit :

First of all you will need a bootable CD/DVD Windows image. Then, enter the BIOS and set up the booting device order to CDROM first, HDD second. Depending on the manufacturer of your BIOS, you will need to press :
F1 – AMI BIOS’es (the ones with a red icon)
DEL – AWARD BIOS’es (the ones with the green+yellow icon)
F2 , F10 – For certain Laptop manufacturers
After you enter the BIOS, you must look for one of the options FIRST/MAIN/PRIMARY Boot device. They are usually in Advanced Bios Settings or a separate tab called BOOT. Depends on manufacturer. All 3 serve the same purpose, so make sure your first boot device is CD-ROM/DVD-ROM and second is HDD-0 (that is the primary/master hard disk unit in your PC). Then Save and Exit BIOS and the PC will reboot. When the PC reaches the after-POST status (POST being the Power-On Self Test – the tests the PC makes on itself after power-on), you will receive a message stating … Press any key to boot from CD.. Time to press a key J
Install Windows using the CD-KEY. (I will not get into detailed steps since everything that you must do in Windows Setup is press Next and fill some fields with information). I will assume you can press Next without issues J

As soon as the installation is done, you will see the desktop. Now it’s time to start tweaking it.
Press Start – right click on My Computer – Manage. In the left side of the screen double-click Local Users and Groups. Then click Users and in the right side of the screen, delete all users that are not Built-In Users (all except Administrator and Guest). Right click each account name and choose delete. When you try to delete the account you are logged in with, you will have to press Yes twice, to delete it after re-logging. Now you only have 2 accounts : Administrator and Guest. Right click Administrator and choose rename . Use your desired account name. Close the window and restart the PC.
As soon as the PC boots again in Windows, double click the Windows Tour icon in the traybar (the part of the Start Bar that is near the clock). Choose Play the Non-Animated Tour and close the window.
Double click the red shield (Windows Security Center) in traybar, and in the left side of the screen, choose Change the way Security Center alerts me and uncheck all 3 boxes. Click OK and then close the window.
Right click the Taskbar (the one with the START button on it) and choose properties. Uncheck “group similar taskbar buttons” , check the “show quick launch” , uncheck “hide inactive icons” and press Apply.
Then go to the next tab, called Start Menu and choose Classic Start Menu, press apply, then press Customize and at the Advanced Start Menu options, uncheck the last box called “Use personalized menu” , then click OK and again OK to exit.
Open My Computer, click Tools in the menu bar, choose Folder Options, at the General tab choose “Use Windows Classic folders” and click apply. Go to the View tab and uncheck “Automatically search for network folders and printers”, check “Do not cache Thumbnails”, check “Show Control Panel in My Computer”, uncheck “show pop-up description for folder and desktop icons”, and then click OK to close the window and save the settings.

Time to install the motherboard drivers. You should use the latest drivers that are DESIGNED For your hardware. That means that if you use an older video card, you must not install the latest driver available, because the drivers are generic and not wrote specific for your old card. After you install all the drivers that are needed from your motherboard manufacturer (audio on-board, video on-board, network on-board, etc), it’s time to install the video card drivers. After motherboard and video, you can install the drivers in any order you desire, just make sure to restart the PC after each driver is installed. Also update Windows using Automatic Updates or Windows Update and make sure your DirectX version is up-to-date.

THE BEST PART OF A WINDOWS INSTALLATION - Tweaking it

When you finish installing Windows, don't think you are ready to go.. the fun part just begins. Now it's time to customize the Operating System, and turn it from the generic installation towards a PC specific configuration.

For this, i always use registry editing and a software called TweakXP. Here is the download link for it : http://dl.totalidea.com/files/public/txp4trial.exe

Don't worry about it being trial. The only thing that differentiates it from the Full version is the fact that you cannot launch it more than 30 times. Not that you need to anyways, since any modification will be done in the registry so you can even uninstall the software after modifying the settings. They will still be enabled.

TweakXP Usage :
I will post a few screenshots with what you need to modify, other options are not needed or don't give any major boost to the performance.

When you start TweakXP , click System Tweaks and choose Hardware Tweaks on the left side



At the Display Adapter field, choose either GeForce (Standard only) or ATI Radeon. I doubt anybody uses anything else these days. At the CPU Tweaks field, check the round box near Intel or AMD (depending on your CPU type) and select the processor model that you have. You can use CPU-Z to see the type of processor you have (http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpuz_145.zip)
After selecting the Video Adapter and CPU, click Tweak it! and Enable CPU Tweak.

At the CD / DVD Drive Tweaks, choose Large at Cache Size, 24X for DVD-ROMs and 72X for CD-ROMs, even though your speed is less.




It will give a small boost due to the modification in buffer. Make sure that Disable the WindowsXP CD Burning feature is disabled. It kinda sucks hard and has incompatibilities with the other Burning software.
Next, click the Other Hardware Tweaks and you will be taken here :



Check the "Optimize overall system performance by increasing the IRQ priority of the CMOS real-time clock" and press Enable Processor Check.

Now, let's move on to the System Tweaks -> Harddrive Tweaks. Click it on the left panel and you will be taken here :



Check the box near Enable Core System Performance ONLY IF YOU HAVE MORE THAN 512MB of RAM.... That will make Windows system files and executables, remain in the RAM memory instead of being paged on the hard-drive.
Check the round boxes for Applications on both "Optimize Memory Usage for" and in "Optimize CPU usage for"
At System Cache, check the round box and choose the appropriate amount of cache, depending on how much RAM you have in your PC. For 1GB of RAM (or more) use the last setting.
At "Other Cache + Memory Tweaks" , DO NOT check the Optimize Page-Entry as that will screw your Windows up ...
Instead, check the Disable File Caching for ... box
Moving on, to the Hard Drive Performance Tweaks, the second tab here.



Check the Disable 8.3 Name Creation box and the Increase NTFS Performance by Disabling the Last Access Time Stamp. Make sure that the Optimize Windows Server Service is set to Minimize Memory.

OTHER WINDOWS REGISTRY / SETTINGS TWEAKS

Cleaning the Prefetch Folder
It is necessary to wash registry and TEMP files for Win9X/ME/2000 periodly. Prefetch is a new and very useful technique in Windows XP. However, after using XP some time, the prefetch folder can get full of rarely used or obsolete links which can slow down your computer noticeably.
Open C:\Windows\Prefetch, delete all files. I recommended that you do this each week.
Note: Deleting prefetch files too often (Every reboot) can decrease system performance!

AVI Files cannot be deleted / CPU 100% when selecting an AVI.
This happens because when you click the AVI files in Windows, it automatically looks for Size, Screen Aspect Ratio, Codec, Bit Rate, etc etc. To prevent this do the following :

1. Open up regedit (click Start - Run - write regedit and hit OK)
2. Go to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SystemFileAssociations\.avi\shel lex\PropertyHandler
3. Delete the "Default" value which should be "{87D62D94-71B3-4b9a-9489-5FE6850DC73E}"

Now you won't see the bit rate, resolution, etc etc in the explorer Status bar, and the PC won't hang.

Disable Indexing Search
Indexing services is a small program that hogs HUGE amounts of RAM and can often make a computer endlessly loud and noisy. This system process indexing and updates lists of the files on your system, so you can search for them quickly, but it's completley unnessesary.
To disable it, go to the Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs. Click the Add/Remove Window Components. Simply unclick the Indexing services and click next!

Optimize NTFS volumes
NTFS is a great filesystem, but its feature-set comes at a slight cost in performance. You can negate this a little with the following tips:
By default NTFS will automatically update timestamps whenver a directory is traversed. This isn't a necessary feature, and it slows down large volumes.
Disable it by pointing regedit to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\FileSystem and set 'NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate' to 1.

NTFS uses disparate master file control tables to store filesystem information about your drives. Over time these core MFT files grow and become fragmented, slowing down all accesses to the drive. By setting aside a little space, MFT's can grow without becoming fragmented. In the same key where you disabled the last access feature creat a new DWORD value called 'NtfsMftZoneReservation' and set it to 2.
Note: This tweak will not work on FAT32 file systems!

[Broque]

Definitely a stick'it thread =D.

Itadakimasu,
Broque.

[7more]

Omg omg great guide , Ok almost doubled my FPS in Cabal, but on the most laggy places i got 10 more and I can play TG without freezes now. Thnx Thnx Thnx!!!

[Havefun]

Nice thread, i won't change anything because atm i'm running smooth, but i like to ask something, what is Detonator 6.xx?

[arsimo]

uff.. after i run ati tray tools, pc restarts..

[v1rg1n1ty]

stickeyyyy

Ratza ftw

well in any case, this works great. unfortunately i am a poor lost soul with Virusta (Vista) and would love to know what to do in Vista or if i can just apply this on Vista aswell ^^.....

not really that i need it though, things are running quite good, but u can always improve something especially something as flawed as Vista.

[RatzaTM]

Yes, these also work in Vista but i do not like that OS therefore i didn't mention it here.


As for the PC restart, reinstall your video drivers ... and if you are using Vista64, don't run ATI Tray Tools, it's only for 32bit operating systems.

[Snowland]

You should add a big warning to this thread, as you can blow up your pc/laptop (whatever you use) with RivaTuner...

[RatzaTM]

If you only modify texture settings like i said, there is no problem

If you choose to overclock, that's your problem.

[muach]

Mybe it helps:

http://www.mediafire.com/?2ty0vmj2hbe

it put gameguard at low priority, no keylogger or other stuff, if u don't trust me don't use it.

[v1rg1n1ty]

Originally Posted by RatzaTM

Yes, these also work in Vista but i do not like that OS therefore i didn't mention it here.


As for the PC restart, reinstall your video drivers ... and if you are using Vista64, don't run ATI Tray Tools, it's only for 32bit operating systems.

hehehehe k

but i got my hands on a GeForce card now ^^.... 8600 GT 512mb .... finally GeForce again <33333...!
well anywho, im running 32bit so it shouldnt be different ^^

and i like Virusta, except the fact thats its CRAP, its actually quite nice ^^!
i really need to pull myself together and format to have XP+Vista on my comp....

anywho ill look into this some day tyvm.

Originally Posted by RatzaTM

If you only modify texture settings like i said, there is no problem

If you choose to overclock, that's your problem.

hehehehehe anyone knows that overclocking will blow/fry ur comp if u dont have the proper cooling/etc ^^....but also the fact that some types CAN be overclocked but SHOULDNT as they cant handle it even if cooled properly.

[7more]

Originally Posted by muach

Mybe it helps:

http://www.mediafire.com/?2ty0vmj2hbe

it put gameguard at low priority, no keylogger or other stuff, if u don't trust me don't use it.

Any1 tested yet?

[Eck0o]

Originally Posted by 7more

Any1 tested yet?

Yes , it works.

EDIT : For nVidia users - You can use also the nVidia Control Panel in advanced mode( If you have the lastest drivers ) , instead of the Riva tuner ^_^ GL&HF

[RatzaTM]

Bump this sucker

[v1rg1n1ty]

yea! bump and STICKY!

[Sortex]

Originally Posted by 7more

Any1 tested yet?

my kaspersky antivir found trojan :/

[v1rg1n1ty]

Originally Posted by Sortex

my kaspersky antivir found trojan :/

updated completely to latest ?

[RatzaTM]

Bump da sucker.

[onnenonkija]

Great Great guide, only thing is that like you said "Click on System Settings and at the third tab " I HAVE NONE, this was just the quide i was wanting because my comp goes into slowmo in every game, and id like to do something about it, so your guide isnt working for all nVidia cards, at least not for GeForce SE6150 nForce 430 piece of fart card.... bah

[Eck0o]

Originally Posted by onnenonkija

Great Great guide, only thing is that like you said "Click on System Settings and at the third tab " I HAVE NONE, this was just the quide i was wanting because my comp goes into slowmo in every game, and id like to do something about it, so your guide isnt working for all nVidia cards, at least not for GeForce SE6150 nForce 430 piece of fart card.... bah

Go Control Panel -> nVidia Control Panel -> Advanced Settings and turn off :

Anisotropic filtering -> off
Antialiasing setting -> none
Texture Filtering -> High Performance
Vertical Sync -> Force off

should help :P

[-0mega-]

Cabal works fine with Ati tray tools on for me btw.

[7r!p3!r0]

Thank you Ratza ^^
NOW MAKE IT STICKY!!!