General rules for 3D games in Nvidia CP

[b4thman]

Sorry if this is not the right place to put this.

I am just curious to know if there are specific general recomendations to take advantage of some Nvidia Control Panel parameters..., any rule that we should set correctly when playin 3D games. I play sometimes without knowing exactly if what I normally choose is the best choice to maximice the smoothness of the game.

Every game may be a bit different respecting to some specific parameters in Nvidia CP, but there must be some general rules/recomendations to set in the Nvidia CP Global Configuration for we 3D players.

Some examples:

- Vsync vs Adaptive Vsync (by default I have Adaptive Vsync in the Global Configuration, but I am not totally sure if this is the best idea). I normally choose vsync off in the game and let the driver to do the job. But for example I feel this is not working in the same way with UE4 games, and some other specific games.

- Triple buffer. I have no idea if I should enable it by default (now it is disabled in Global Configurarion).

- Shadow cache. I have it activated by default in Global Configuration (and again, I have no idea if this is the right choice).

- And any other parameter relevant for 3D games. Nvidia Control Panel parameters are by default set supposed to be used with normal 2D games, but maybe there are some specific suggestions to change for 3D games.

Nvidia Contro Panel is a complete CAOS in temrs of managing profiles. It has lots of exes (not games) that I never use and I prefer to remove from the list (but I can't), caos in alphabetic order, etc. Nvidia Profile Inspector 2.3.0.12 is what I use instead (sometimes), but it is also no exactly the intuitive program that I would like.

It would we awesome to have the information of all the parametes of the NVIDA CP shown on the screen when playing with a toggle key (information similar to what MSI Afterburner does). And that would be even better to change the parameters in the fly without leaving the game, to see the real impact on visuals and performace (for example Anisotropic Filtering on/off in the fly). I really don't understand how this is not done yet. Maybe there is already a program that gives me the possibility, and I don't know that exists.

[RAGEdemon]

My settings after any driver install:

1. Force 16x anisotropic filtering in all games. The quality improvement vs performance hit is a no-brainer.
2. Set textures to "High Quality" instead of "quality".

VSync is a per-game issue, and NVInspector does a good job of handling this. The 3D driver is a hack relying on VSync and it does weird things from game to game. Some games perform best with VSync OFF - you have to live with tearing but the input lag is gone - Source engine games such as HL2 and Portal. Other times, VSync does a stellar job in games such as Life is Strange.

If you can get it to work, there is the RTSS ScanlineSync option of having the benefits of vsync without the input lag issue - it takes some testing and time investment to have the tear appear off-screen.
https://www.resetera.com/threads/guide ... nc.138764/

Helifax's driver/game fixes use their own version of VSync.

VSync forced on in GTA5 will cause a lot of stutters and horrendous gameplay - adaptive sync sometimes works and is better. The list goes on...
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Triple buffering only affects OpenGL games which is a pretty useless setting nowadays.

Settings to my specific system which won't work well on others:
DSR to 4s + 0% smoothing + Sharpening slider to max + Grain slider to minimum + Vibrancy to high.

[b4thman]

Yes, I also set "high quality" (instead of just "quality") in many games and I do not feel any noticeable performance penalty. The same with anisotropic filtering, I just want to be sure that those parameters are giving me the best picture.

Apparently there is no other special thing to know about this thread question. So maybe the only thing that I am still not sure about is the use of "adaptive-vsync" in the "Global configuration" (to use it by default with any game). In the other hand, if I choose in the Nvidia CP to let the application decide the use of vsync, the game normally does not let me the option to choose adaptive-sync, and so I have to specifically change that parameter in the profile of the game if I want to take advantage of adaptive-sync. I think (and again, I am not sure) that "Adaptive-vsync" by default seems not to hurt most of the games, and in the contrary it gives visual advantages in some of them. There seems to be no "magic" rule in the use of it, so just try and see what happen.

I also don't know if there is any difference of using multithreading (BIOS setup) when playing 3D games. I think (if I am not mistaken I read it in the past) the bottleneck that we suffer playing 3D is because only 3 CPU cores are used, and it does not matter if your CPU has 8 cores (+8 with HT), because in the end what the computer uses is the equivalent of using only 3 cores at full.

So maybe it is even a good idea to disable HT in the BIOS (I did not try and test what happen). Or maybe it is a good idea to use an aplication to force the use of only 3 CPU cores when playing a game.

[3DNovice]

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[3DNovice]

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[3DNovice]

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