PC Performance Tuning Guide
Author : Shawn Sparks......
Date : May 2002
The
purpose of this guide is to offer suggestions on how to get
a little more performance out of your PC. It is by no means
an "overclocking guide", nor is it the answer for
bringing your K/6-2 450 MHz with 64 megs of RAM to current specs,
(although these tricks will definitely help) This information
is based on Windows 98 SE though Windows ME works pretty much the same
way. Windows XP automates some of these options and is an article
for another day. They are in no particular order,
and I make no claims of success whatsoever, and will not take
responsibility for you irresponsibly tinkering and making matters
worse. Unfortunately, I can not answer ANY e-mail or phone calls
offering technical help.
First
the basics...
Drivers:
Probably
the single most important aspect to a well running machine is
running current drivers. If you have never updated a driver,
then you need to. Think about the components in your computer,
Video and Sound are the two most important things to have updated,
but other aspects of your computer utilize drivers as well.
For instance your motherboard, modem, network card, CD burner
etc… Find out what components you have and get the latest drivers
from the manufacturers’ websites. There is risk in updating
things like motherboard drivers and BIOS, so there are some
cases where the old adage: "If it ain't broke, don't fix
it" definitely applies. That
being said, motherboards with VIA chipsets in particular should
be updated with the latest drivers. VIA have simplified the
update process by using a 4in1 driver set that fully automates
the process including detecting the chipset in use. My one strong recommendation is, however, if
you have an nVIDIA based video card (GeForce, TNT), nVIDIA offers
better reference drivers than most card manufacturers, go to
their site and get the latest Detonators.
File
System:
Windows’
file system uses memory in different ways depending on the "role"
of the particular machine. Not much performance is needed from
a work station, while much greater performance is required of
a network server. By telling windows that your machine is a
network server, it allocates memory with heavy network traffic
in mind (for instance: online gaming). These
settings remain from much earlier versions of Windows where
a Network Server would typically have 16 or 32MB of system memory
so just about all systems these days will run better if optimized
in this way as few if any systems these days should be equipped
with less than 64MB. To change the ‘role’ of your computer do this:
Right-click
on "My Computer" and go down to properties; when you
click on properties, a new window will open; choose the performance
tab. Click on the button that says "file system".
Another window opens; choose the "hard disk" tab and
change the "typical roll of this computer" to ‘Network
Server’. Click "Apply".
You
may take a look at some of the other options in these tabs although
typically they are fine by default. A word to the wise...If
you don't know what it is; DON'T CHANGE IT. Changing things
like the virtual memory settings is for people who really know
what they are doing, and if you set it wrong, it can really
screw things up so, for the most part, just leave well enough
alone.
DMA:
Direct
Memory Access or DMA allows your drives access to your memory
resources directly, without routing through your CPU. Make sure that, if your drives support it,
this is enabled. The
setting is found here:
Right-click
on “My Computer”, and go down to properties; when the properties
window opens, click on the “device manager” tab.
The device manager window shows all of the hardware in
the computer, in categories with little plusses or minuses to
the left. Locate the
drive categories and click on the little plus sign to the left,
this will open the category and show the individual components
(Hard disk(s), CD ROM(S), DVD etc…).
Click on the drive you wish to edit so it is highlighted,
and click on the “properties” button at the bottom of the window.
When the properties window opens, click on the “settings”
tab. Here you will find
settings like “auto insert notification”, “sync data transfer”
and “DMA”. Add check
marks to the options that you want (Note: auto insert notification
is the same as “auto run” which automatically runs the setup.exe
on any CD you put in)
Start-up
programs:
Many
systems are bogged down from start up with tons of programs
that aren't essential yet use valuable resources to maintain.
Many of the programs that you download or install add themselves
to your start up menu so that when you start your machine they
automatically load. This is nice for some situations, like for
instance, an office machine might want MS Office to start with
windows so that the user has less time waiting for their working
programs to load. However, we are gamers and every bit of processing
power counts. In order to have a minimal resource drain, we
need to edit our start up menu.
Try
this: hold Ctrl and Alt down and tap the delete key once. This
list that pops up is everything running at this time. If that
list is long, then you are not getting nearly the performance
that you should be getting. (Keep in mind that the only necessary
items for your computer to function are systray and explorer,
however I will not advocate stripping your start tray that bare
as I cannot guarantee that you will maintain functionality if
you do.)
There
are two ways to get to our start up menu. The first way is a
bit lengthy, but will show you exactly where it is. The second
is a bit of a shortcut there.
First,
the long way: Click on your start button and go to Programs
> Accessories > System tools > System information and
click there; a new window will open. In the new menu bar go
to Tools, and down to System Configuration Utility, and click
there. When the next window opens, click on the Startup tab.
There it is. This list with check boxes is everything that starts when Windows
boots up. You allow these programs to start with Windows by
checking the boxes. Likewise,
UN-checking the boxes stops the program from loading when Windows
starts. Be careful though, some proprietary systems like Dell
and Compaq have necessary items here that, when unchecked, can
cause problems. However, things like MS Office, Realplayer,
and ICQ can bog your system down or take valuable bandwidth
when running, and can easily be removed without consequence.
Now
that you understand what it is we are looking at, you can use
the following shortcut:
Go
to Start > Run. In the box type "MSCONFIG" and
hit OK. The System information window opens; click on the Startup
tab and edit away.
As
yet another precaution, really look into what you are removing
from here, some systems need certain things running to be stable.
If you are unsure what a program does, leave it alone, or only
remove one thing at a time, restarting Windows between tests,
so you don't get confused as to what it was that you last removed
that screwed things up.
Video
Settings:
Every
video card out there has it's own interface, and settings options.
The key to performance is finding the balance of display quality
and speed. Since many games are run in OpenGL, I will start
there. One of the biggest things holding most video cards back
is Vertical Sync (VSync). VSync limits the FPS in OpenGL and
DirectX games to the vertical refresh rate of your monitor or
60 whichever is lower. By disabling the V-sync on your card,
you open up higher FPS options. The down side is that sometimes
you can cause tearing where due to the screen being regularly
updated in the middle of a screen redraw, so if you run into
trouble follow the golden rule of "refresh +5" just
find the max refresh rate of your monitor at the resolution
you are running and add 5 to the max FPS.
"But
how do I find my refresh rate" you ask?
Try
this little program called Powerstrip.
It allows you to manually control the refresh rates of
your monitor at different resolutions. It also opens up a world of tweaks for most
any video card, and whole system for that matter, offering up
treats like clock speeds, memory recovery, and color profiles.
All in all, it’s a great tool for tuning your system.
Other
FPS limiting factors are color depth, resolution and antialiasing
(on newer cards).
Lowering
your color depth to 16 bit (if it is at 32 already) can really
boost performance and there is very little visible difference
in-game between 16 and 32 bit color. However,
some modern cards are actually optimized for 32bit so check
your framerates in both 16 and 32bit. If the difference is minimal
you may as well stick with 32bit.
Remember,
antialiasing takes lots of processing power to accomplish, so
take heed: if you have low FPS or choppiness while running games
at 4X antialiasing, drop down to 2x and see what happens. Or
try none at all. Furthermore,
take time to assess the differences between running games at
lower resolutions WITH antialiasing on versus higher resolution
with none.
Also,
make sure you are using the best hardware settings for the particular
game engine you are playing on. The Half-Life engine is optimized
for OpenGL, where say, the Unreal engine is optimized for Direct3D.
Obviously, running a game built for OpenGL in a Direct3D
environment will generally result in much lower performance.
As
stated earlier, every card has its own interface and available
settings so I obviously can't cover all bases here. There are
some good resources online, look at manufacturers websites or
ask questions in our forum.
Well,
your system should show at least a slight boost in performance,
but like I said in the beginning, this is NOT an overclocking
guide. All of these
settings simply clear the path for information to flow freely;
avoiding bottlenecks wherever possible, and give a little headroom
for your CPU, memory and GPU to really give their all.
There is tons of information on overclocking, cooling
and other major performance tweaks out there, but not everybody
is ready to jump in and void their warranties right away.
I hope this guide did its job and helped you squeeze
a bit more from your machine while at the same time, showing
you some of the basics. Happy
tweaking.
Quick
Checklist :
MEMORY
: Do you have enough? 128MB should be considered
a minimum requirement for modern systems and gaming.
Graphics
Card : Are your graphics handled by a separate card
or is the graphics chip incorporated into your motherboard?
Integrated graphics (built onto the motherboard) are almost
always slower and will use your system memory as it has no dedicated
memory of its own. Even if you have a separate graphics card,
if it’s more than 18 months old you may find it’s simply too
slow to play today’s modern games.
Processor
: Processor (CPU) speeds have increased greatly
and for ultimate performance you need to be aiming for a minimum
processor speed of 1GHz (1000MHz).
Hard
Disk : Hard disk performance hasn’t increased as
much as their capacity has but even so, older ATA-33, slower
ATA-66 or badly fragmented drives can slow your system to a
crawl. Remember to Defragment regularly and if you’re using a pre ATA-66
hard drive start saving for an upgrade. Another point often
missed is that ATA-100 drives need different IDE cables (the
flat cables that connect your drives to the motherboard and
to each other) in order to maximize their performance. For details
see our HDD installation guide.
DMA
: As I mentioned earlier, if DMA is supported
the benefits from enabling it
can be huge, particularly for drive intensive tasks like
installations and DVD playback. One of the easiest and most
often missed performance options is enabling DMA. Windows will
almost always disable DMA by default.
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