Just got word that Systemcooling's Howard Weitzel has posted part 2 of his The 3DMark Tuning Guide! Here's a snip:
For those of you that read Part 1 of this guide, you know that we started our search for 3DMark performance by establishing a solid platform, namely the operating system. From there, we turned our attention to the system BIOS, where we tweaked and tuned our way to a 2000+ point increase in 3DMark score. In Part 2, we're going to explore the video card itself, along with its associated drivers.
Drivers
One of the most important, and in many cases, least understood aspect of video card performance are the drivers, or the software that tells the hardware how to function. There are many adjustments available, and there is often confusion about the performance gains, or losses, associated with a given setting. In the case of nVidia-based video cards, this confusion is compounded by the availability of literally dozens of different versions of the drivers for a given card. This portion of our guide will attempt to take some of the mystery out of these settings, while at the same time seeking to increase the 3DMark performance of our test machine.
The 3DMark Tuning Guide ? Part 2
For those of you that read Part 1 of this guide, you know that we started our search for 3DMark performance by establishing a solid platform, namely the operating system. From there, we turned our attention to the system BIOS, where we tweaked and tuned our way to a 2000+ point increase in 3DMark score. In Part 2, we're going to explore the video card itself, along with its associated drivers.
Drivers
One of the most important, and in many cases, least understood aspect of video card performance are the drivers, or the software that tells the hardware how to function. There are many adjustments available, and there is often confusion about the performance gains, or losses, associated with a given setting. In the case of nVidia-based video cards, this confusion is compounded by the availability of literally dozens of different versions of the drivers for a given card. This portion of our guide will attempt to take some of the mystery out of these settings, while at the same time seeking to increase the 3DMark performance of our test machine.
The 3DMark Tuning Guide ? Part 2
