670 General Optimization Questions

[Takachsin]

I have a few general questions about optimizing my graphics card.

I have always just used the in-game graphics settings to change the quality. My friend recently pointed out to me about all the settings in the Nvidia control panel to boost how good the games look. I was wondering if anyone knew what the best settings to choose in the control panel (I had tried changing these on my 560 awhile back but never really noticed much of a difference).

Also I just have my fan on auto, should I setup a fan profile to make it keep the GPU cooler?

I run dual monitor (only one for the game, one for chat, internet, etc). I have been using windowed full screen because of alt tabbing and switching between the monitors. Does running in windowed full screen as opposed to full screen hurt the graphics significantly?

I am also confused by the fact that I am only getting 35-40 fps on the Witcher 2 at the ultimate graphics settings. In all my other games I am easily pulling 80-120 fps, including the Witcher 2 on high settings.

 

[17seconds]

Feel free to play around with the Program and Global settings in the Nvidia Control Panel. Here are a couple guides:
http://www.geforce.com/optimize
http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html

In June you should be able to use the new "GeForce Experience" to automatically opitmize your game settings with the press of a button.

Please just leave your fan on Auto. The Nvidia engineers know what they are doing and are targeting a certain GPU temperature. Once at that target temperature, the fan will adjust up or down to keep it close to that point. Manually adjusting your fan will only make it louder.

If you turn on Ubersampling in the Witcher 2, the framerates will plunge dramatically. Your framerates are playable and the game is graphically intensive. But if you want better performance, turn off Ubersampling.

But your framerate issue with the Witcher 2 also gets at what you should be doing with the Nvidia Control Panel. Open up the Program Settings tab and see what the settings are under Witcher 2. You might want to play around with Ambient Occlusion, or some of the many Antialiasing settings. With a 670, you really should be cranking everything up to Quality, unless the game does not support it (Ambient Occlusion is one, for example), then that could be culprit for low framerates.

Here is what I use for my Global Settings:

Ambient Occlusion Quality
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Antialiasing FXAA On
Antialiasing gamma correction On
Antialiasing Mode Application-controlled (this is changed in the Program settings tab)
Antialiasing Transparency 2x Supersampling (this may cause slowdowns in some games)
CUDA GPU's All
Maximum prerendered frames Application controlled
Multi-display/mixed GPU Single display performance mode (you are using multiple displays, so set accordingly)
Power management mode Adaptive
Texture filtering aniso Off
Texture filtering negative LOD Clamp (may need to set to Allow under Program settings)
Texture filtering quality High quality (with a Kepler GPU, why not?)
Texture filtering trilinear On
Threaded optimization Auto
Triple buffering Off
Vsync Off (the Adaptive setting is good for games where you are bothered by screen tearing)

 

[DM186]

^+1
You have to just play around in there and yes it will take a while. The best thing to do is learn about each setting or just try and see what is good and what is bad and keep a record so you don't forget what you did.

Also yes set your fan to increase whan the temps increase it is like setting way points. When I put my fans on auto it would wait untill the last second then jump to max.

It is better to set the fan to climb and the heat does. I believe what you are doing with the two monitors is not hurting your GPU's. Well I hope this has help a little and Good luck to you.

 

[Takachsin]

Thank both of you for your help. It's nice to get answers that I can actually work with and learn how stuff works. I'm sure I can tweak it even more but I just did some basic stuff like you guys posted (Diablo III stole all my time, when the servers were up that is...) and it's running like a champ.

 

[Takachsin]

Best answer selected by Takachsin.