The promised anisotropic performance increase is here!

[DIMA]

Since the forum was down, I wasn't able to post these news, but here they are:

The 11.1 canditate release of Riva Tuner was released some time ago and does indeed contain aniso perfomance improvements in OpenGL & Direct3D!

Download it here:

http://www.nvworld.ru/downloads/rivatuner.zip

Note: The Direct3D optimizations require quite a bit of knowledge about the texturing stages in different games and it will influence perfomance greatly if used correctly!

Note #2: Keep in mind that you can customize these optimizations ONLY with the latest leaked detonator set 30.30, which can be found here:

http://www.guru3d.com/files <-- you know where to go from there

Here is a suggestion by Unwinder himself on the Beyond3D forums:

Just my two cents: first, I strictrly recommend to read context help on these options (just click RMB on the list of texturing stages) before using them, you must perfectly understand the settting you use in order to acheive good results.
Second, you must understand that such AF optimization (limiting the maximum degree of anisotropy on per-texturing stage level) cannot be absolutely free. The resulting image quality totally depends on your understanding of these options and specific of the game's engine. For eaxample, I know that UT's d3d renderer utilizes two texturing stages and it always uses texturing stage 0 for filtering base textures and texturing stage 1 for lightmap filtering. In this case, I can safely go to RT's optmization settings, leave texturing stage 0 unchecked, check texturing stage 1 and select AF limiter to 1. In this case, the driver will filter base textures with the level you've forced, but lightmaps will be filtered with level 1 (i.e. bilinear filter) only. But these settings can be bad for the rest 3D engines, everything depends on the game engine's texturing stage utilization behavior.
Basically you've to leave only one texturing stage unchecked and limit AF for the rest texturing stages, so the most usual settings are:

stage 0 - unchecked
stage 1 - checked
stage 2 - checked
stage 3 - checked

AF limit - level 1

Just run 3DMark2k1 with these settings and compare IQ with the original AF. You'll see that thes settings are really good for Game2, but they are bad for Game1 (texturing stage 2 brings the most of details in this test).

The OpenGL perfomance increase is close to 10% (much less so than Direct3D increase). As far as I know, nothing special needs to be done in OpenGL settings to get aniso pefomance increase, but others seem to suggest that a script has to be executed, u should check that out...

One guy managed to get 50fps increase in Direct3D!

[Kruno]

keeping aniso nearly off eh?
I can get a 60fps increase, just turn aniso off completely
The hit really depends on the angle and game complexity (ie: if it's fillrate limited). If game is fillrate limited then you will notice a massive frame rate increase by turning off aniso.

[DIMA]

Originally posted by K.I.L.E.R
keeping aniso nearly off eh?
I can get a 60fps increase, just turn aniso off completely
The hit really depends on the angle and game complexity (ie: if it's fillrate limited). If game is fillrate limited then you will notice a massive frame rate increase by turning off aniso.

The whole idea of this release is to optimize aniso perfoamance at different levels in different games, not turn it off completely!

[netape]

I heard that some people didn't get any improvements out it (they have gf4's btw)

Whee, my first post

[DIMA]

Originally posted by netape
I heard that some people didn't get any improvements out it (they have gf4's btw)

Whee, my first post

Look above.

As I said, if u don't know how to use the optimizations, what texturing stages take place in what game, then of course it's useless!

[Kruno]

In other words you need to be Chalnoth to use it

[DIMA]

Originally posted by K.I.L.E.R
In other words you need to be Chalnoth to use it

LOL

[Babel-17]

Lol, it took me all of two minutes to figure it out and I'm not a guru. Unwinder really came through for us.

[SnakeEyes]

Now it'd be nice to be able to create game-specific profiles with different settings in RivaTuner. That way I could launch UT with the settings he recommends, and run Warcraft 3 with another, etc., without having to go back and change settings each time I switch games.

Still, great work!

[Cotita]

Originally posted by SnakeEyes
Now it'd be nice to be able to create game-specific profiles with different settings in RivaTuner.
Still, great work!

You can use the launcher to make game-specific profiles. Of course you have to create them yourself, but you really don't expect unwinder to do all the work right?

[SnakeEyes]

Uh no. I'm fairly new to RivaTuner, thanks to problems the last time I had it. But I didn't say I expected anyone to create the profiles, just that I'd like to see the ability to create them. Meaning, for myself, so that I wouldn't have to change settings myself for each game.

Thanks for informing that 'it's in there'.

[Phyre]

How do you update RivaTuner? Do you just unzip the files over the previous installation, or do you delete the previous directory and then unzip? Also, I'm thinking it would be wise to set the core and memory back to stock settings before upgrading RivaTuner.

Phyre