So i finally bought one and i was wondering what are the best settings for it? Will it give me good performance/image quality out of the box or do i have to do anything to make it better. Never owned an ati video card in my life.
It all depends on the game(s) you play on it. With older games, or games that tend to have crappy graphics, you can crank up the res, fsaa, and anisotropic filtering to greatly enhance the graphic quality. Just don't go too high or you'll get low framerates. On newer games with better graphics, you can set it at a nice resolution, but maybe not such high settings for fsaa and aniso. filtering.
For most newer games on my 9700 Pro, I can set the res. at 1280x1024 with 2x-4x fsaa and around 4x aniso. filtering. You can probably go with slightly higher settings. Keep in mind that the settings depend on 1) which games you run, and 2) your personal tastes. I like to run FPS and driving/racing games at 45 or higher FPS. In puzzles, RTS games, etc., I can live with 30 FPS, because of the differences in the way the games are played. (They generally move at a slower pace than FPS and driving/racing games, and high framerates are not needed to catch every bit of action.) You can measure your framerates with FRAPS. That should help!
i've been wondering this, too. see, if you let it say application preference, it doesn't do much. i played zero hour and it looked not much better than my old gf2 mx400 64 meg. it was on high settings, so that helped, but everything was jagged. so i turned up the aa and af and it was much better. problem is, every game is different. ut04 will drain your card much faster than zero hour. and it seems like 'application preference' doesn't work all that well. isn't there any way you can tell it to get as high as it can, but perhaps set a frames / sec limit that it can't drop below? or are we doomed to go and alter the settings before every game? (that also means remembering every game's settings...not fun - i dunno what i had for supper the other night, and now i gotta remember 12+ games? lol)
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For most newer games on my 9700 Pro, I can set the res. at 1280x1024 with 2x-4x fsaa and around 4x aniso. filtering. You can probably go with slightly higher settings. Keep in mind that the settings depend on 1) which games you run, and 2) your personal tastes. I like to run FPS and driving/racing games at 45 or higher FPS. In puzzles, RTS games, etc., I can live with 30 FPS, because of the differences in the way the games are played. (They generally move at a slower pace than FPS and driving/racing games, and high framerates are not needed to catch every bit of action.) You can measure your framerates with FRAPS. That should help!