NBA Live 2003, texture filter, vsync and AA...

[donkey]

Just got home and finally ran the demo on my system (Had been playing on another).

I have an Athlon 1800, 512 MB DDRAM, GeForce 4 MX 440.

It looks so sweet. The graphics are crisp. I have all options turned up to max (even the ones that were not on when max is selected) and it plays so smooth.

I got a question about some options though. In texture filter there is bilinear, trilinear and anisotropic.

I actually don't know what any of them mean but I know trilinear is better than bilinear and I am wondering what anisotropic is. Is it the next step above trilinear or is trilinear better.

Also, I checked in my cards settings and anisotropic is always disabled. Should this be enabled if it is good.

My other question is, what's vsync for. I know it's vertical sync and has something to do with keeping everything in line or proportion or something like that but I had it on, then turned it off and didn't really notice a difference. Is it better on and in my settings, the option on is render no more frames than 3. If this is set higher or lower what happens.

And lastly, anti-aliasing. Can someone tell what it is. Is it good. Does it make games look better. I'm not sure if my card can even handle it but I'd still like to know about it.

Thanks to whoever can answer some of these.

 

[donkey]

I just turned on anti-aliasing in the cards settings to 4xS (Direct 3D only).

I played 2 games. Both these games had anisotropic texture filtering, triple buffer on and vsync on.

The first was at 1280x1024x32. The models looked awesome but the game was choppy. Playable but not really. Looked great though.

Screenshot here (http://www.geocities.com/fwfowner_2000/1280x1024x32.jpg)

The second game was at 640x480x32. The game still looked good. Not as good as before but good and played smooth.

Screenshot here (http://www.geocities.com/fwfowner_2000/640x480x32.jpg)

Now, I don't really want to play a choppy game so the question is, is it better to play at 640x480x32 with anti-aliasing set to 4xS (Direct 3D) or is is better with no anti-aliasing (Or the games default option) with the settings at 1280x1024x32.

Thanks