Need for Speed series, the popular Half-life Counter Strike, and all those 3D games are very entertaining. What are going to be shared today is how to optimize your Windows XP for gaming so that it will has a faster performance when running those processor-intensive games.
Improving games performance has the similarity with improving performance in any other application which involves removing software bottlenecks and change the operating system settings where necessary. Games are unique that they can benefit greatly from certain types of hardware, such as 3D accelerators and sound cards with digital signal processor.
The conventional concept is..the better your hardware are, the better the performance is. But it would be better if you do some tweaks to squeeze more performance which means less money for more performance.. Here are some recommendations to get the best out of your games without spending a buck (that is, by tweaking):
1. Get the latest DirectX driver from the Microsoft websites since most-high end game rely on DirectX, which is basically a set of optimized video, sound, and game input drivers supported by Microsoft. This is also to ensure that your computer have the latest compatibility with the latest games in the market out there.
2. Many games are also optimized to work with specific types of video and sound hardware. For example, a particular game’s setup screen might allow you to choose between Direct3D and OpenGL for the video out-put; sometimes you even need to choose a particular video chipset (e.g.,nVidiaGeForce4).Your 3Daccelerator might support several standards, but a given game might run better using the DirectX drivers, and another game might prefer the OpenGL setting. As example, Counter-Strike works better with OpenGL setting rather than Direct3D.
3. If you’re playing your games on a local network, make sure that you have at least a Local Area Network connection with 100 mbps speed. This is to reduce latency, and nowadays LAN with 1 gigabit speed works best. Most PC has LAN port which is built-into the motherboard, get the latest driver for them.
4. If you’re running your games from a DVD or CD, it is the time to use your hard disk instead of the two drives. Windows Autorun feature can sometimes interrupt data transfer. Thus, you will experience slowness in your games. A good way to solve this problem is by using CD/DVD Emulator like Daemon Tools which can emulate the CD/DVD drive using your hard disk. It will eat up your disk space according to the size of your game file, but really worth it considering the huge increase in your game speed later. After you have done that, defrag your hard disk for more performance increase.
5. Most graphic card/ 3D accelerator allows you to modify or disable certain 3D features using some tweaking software. Go to the support forum for your games and learn which setting should be enabled and vice versa to get the best performance out of your graphic card. Overclocking your GPU clock is not recommended though since it may damage the component and void the warranty.
6. Finally, make sure that your computer did not run unnecessary background application while running game, such as Yahoo Messenger and Bittorrent client. The reason is to conserve your CPU cycle. Disable Windows XP visual style and system restore to save even more CPU cycle.
Have some tips to share with us? Feel free to leave a feedback in this post.