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In the Forums... |
Posted: October 29, 2000 Written by: Tuan "Solace" Nguyen Introduction We’re back again with another tweak guide for all you tweakers and hardware junkies out there. But this ain’t for everyone. This guide is for the 3dfx fans. Did you just buy that brand new 3dfx Voodoo5 and already you’re craving for more power? Well, it happens. No real tweaker will ever be completely satisfied with the speed of a video card (at least, in the near future, it seems). But first, you have to understand that what you have just purchased is 3dfx’s top of the line offering available on the market and it stands up well against other cards. So if you’re not already happy with the performance of your card, you basically have to tweak it. If you are happy with your purchase, then all is well. But if you were truly happy, would you be reading this guide? Are You Sure It’s The Card?  The Voodoo5 5500 has lots of potential to go higher than it can reach out of the box. It’s all up to you to make sure it performs to its fullest potential. The first place you can start is not the card itself, but your system's settings. Have you made sure unnecessary programs and background functions are closed or disabled when you play your game? Have you made sure all your other devices have the latest drivers? These things don’t have anything to do with the card itself but they can definitely affect game performance and lag graphics, making you think that the card is the culprit, when in fact hiccups and chops have nothing to do with the card at all. If you have upgraded over another graphics card, make sure you uninstall the remains of the older card just to keep your system clean and healthy. Having redundant driver sets are bound to eat up space and cause cavities in your registry. You don’t want that. If you want to make sure that 100% of the old driver junk has been removed from your system prior to installing the new drivers, read page three of our GeForce/2 tweak guide. Once you’re sure everything is nice and clean, you should go ahead and try out your games. If they don’t perform like you thought they would, you can do a number of things. You can reinstall your game (sometimes changing hardware causes some games to go crazy – UT, I’m looking at you!), or you can tweak the hell out of your drivers. Driver Tweaking Drivers are fundamental programs that control your hardware devices. Without them, there wouldn’t be a way to communicate with the device. It is the software that drives the hardware. Hence, they are called “drivers”. Drivers are the most important thing other than the device itself. They can mean the difference between an excellent piece of hardware or the little tike that could have been. So knowing this, it’s best to have really good drivers that are fast, and stable. It’s also good to have drivers that are tweakable. So let’s do just that. Before you continue, download the latest drivers from 3dfxgamers.com. |
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