Nvidia 66.93 winXP

[Sir Taleisin The Seer]

I thought I would just post some basic tips for anyone running a Straight EQ2 machine.

And by Straight I mean it's the only program on your machine aside from maybe anti-spware anti-virus and the OS it'self.
BLUE = Normal Tips
RED = Overclockers Tips

optomization is as much External as it is Interal

1| Remove your computer's cover. Take a small, and fairly quiet house fan, no bigger than your computer tower case, and have it blowing directly on your computer internals.

2| Remove your computer's cover. Put on a Jacket. Aquire a Portable-AC Unit and position it to cool into your systems internals( the one I use is http://www.store.yahoo.com/air-n-wat...2btuairco.html )

3| Create a Nvidia Settings Profile for EQ2, Make sure to Enable Texture Clamp

4| Shutdown your Machine, Remove your video card, remove the heatsink and fan and replace with a large heat spreader. Crank up the Portable-AC Unit

DX Tweaks/Tips
Mipmapping: This will allow you to adjust the Level of Detail bias for mipmaps. The higher the detail levels the crisper mipmaps will appear at the cost of performance. It is recommended that you select the highest value for this as the performance impact is negligible.

PCI Texture Memory Size: This is extremely similar to the AGP setting, and will allow the video card to access a certain amount of system memory for texture storage. This feature is only needed if you are using a PCI-based video card.


MISC Tweaks/Tip

Clear Desktop Wallpaper at Game Launch: Checking this option will free the bit of video memory your desktop's wallpaper may have been using.

Disable Icons on Desktop: Disabling Icons will again clear up a tiny bit of video memory.

Kill The Big One: With the task manager open, RightClick and End Process Tree the explorer.exe, this will free up alot of resources, however leave you with a blank desktop.

BIOS

Video BIOS Shadowing: This allows for the BIOS to copy the BIOS of the video card to system RAM for faster access. While this sounds like it should be left on do not be fooled, today's systems will bypass the BIOS completely when accessing a video card so there is no need to waste precious memory.

AGP Master 1WS Write/Read: By default, the system is set wait two cycles before it will make a read/write transaction. Enabling 1 WS will allow the AGP card to wait only one cycle before a read or write transaction occurs, slightly increasing overall performance.

AGP Mode: As long as your motherboard and video card support it, you will always want to select the highest possible setting, either 2X, 4X, or 8X, the latter of which offers optimal performance.

AGP Fast Write Control: This is by far one of the most beneficial, and overlooked video card tweak one can perform in the BIOS. You will need to make sure that your video card supports this feature as it can cause major problems if you try enabling this feature without the proper support. AGP Fast Writes can increase video speed roughly 1-5% and is supported by most recent video cards. Fast Writes allows the computer to send video-based calls directly to the video card, thereby bypassing the system's main memory system.

Video Memory Cache Mode: When selecting this option, you are usually presented with two options, UC (UnCacheable) and UCWC (UnCacheable Speculative Write-combining). Here, you will want to select UCWC as it will enable the write cache of your video card's memory which will offer a slight increase in overall performance.

AGP Aperture Size/Graphics Window Size: This is a numerical number which represents the amount of memory your video card is allowed to access over the AGP bus. You are given choices such as 32, 64, 128, 256, 512-MB, and as a general rule you will want to select about 1/4 or less of your total available RAM. The default for this option is generally 64-MB, usually the size one will want to run.