GETTING STARTED
To access your nVidia card’s most powerful tools, right-
click your Windows desktop, and then click Properties
from the pop-up menu, then the Settings tab in the
Display Properties window, and then the Advanced
button. Next, click the GeForce tab. The GeForce
tab tells you everything you need to know about your
videocard, and if you have a motherboard with an nVidia
nForce chipset, it’ll tell you about the rest of your system,
too. If you want to know if you have the latest videocard
driver installed, compare what you see here to nVidia’s
website. The menu attached to the left side of the nVidia
tab within the Advanced Settings window is where the
action is (see screen to the right).
Some of the tips we’ll discuss below depend
on nVidia’s nView Desktop Manager features being
activated, so let’s do that now. Click Desktop
Management in the left-hand pop-out menu, and then
move your mouse back to the main GeForce menu,
which should now display the subtitle nView. In the nView
Desktop Manager box, click the Enable button. This will
open a new set of Desktop Management options in the
pop-out menu. We’ll use some of these later.3 NVIDIA FORCEWARE
54 MA XIMUMPC OCTOBER 2005
how 2 IMPROVING YOUR PC EXPERIENCE, ONE STEP AT A TIME
You can tweak nearly every aspect of your nVidia videocard from
within this properties window.Use nVidia’s application profiles to set specific display
parameters for your favorite games and other programs.TWEAKING APPLICATION PROFILES
nVidia has created custom display profiles for a broad range of applications, including
many popular games. Click “Performance and Quality Settings” in the left-hand pop-
out menu to access these profiles and you can easily tweak them to your liking or
even create new ones from scratch. For games you
regularly play in both single- and multiplayer mode,
consider defining a single-player profile that trades a
little performance for enhanced visual quality, and a
multiplayer profile that compromises some visual effects
in the name of faster frame rates.
Profile settings reflect the options that are available
within a given application. Choose the Doom 3
application profile, for example, and you’ll see settings
for antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, image quality, and
vertical sync. AA and aniso have an additional checkbox,
labeled “Application Controlled.” If this box is checked,
the driver will use the settings defined within the
application; uncheck it, and you can change the setting
within the profile. If the box is ghosted, AA and aniso
options are not available for this app.
When you’re finished, click the Modify Profile button
and save the profile under the same name, so that it’s
automatically activated when you launch the application.
You can easily restore nVidia’s original profile by selecting it from the list
and clicking the Restore button.
You can follow similar steps to create a profile for a new game from
scratch. Set the application listed under the Active Profile heading to
“global driver settings,” click the Add Profile button, and give the new profile a name. You can associate this
profile with any application listed in the window. If the application you want to work with isn’t listed, you can
add its executable to the list by clicking the Browse button and searching for it.Continued from page 52