Graphics card settings...what do they mean?

[Cadastrophic]

I was looking for an updated driver for my NVIDIA Quadro card when I came across a PDF user manual.
I never really did much tweaking of the card's settings because I was largely ignorant of what they all were. Mind you, having read the manual, I'm not sure I'm any wiser. "Vertical Sync...Select the type of vertical synchrony." isn't exactly descriptive nor helpful. What is Vertical Sync and how does it affect the performance or visuals?
"Buffer flipping mode...Turns on page flipping for fullscreen OpenGL applications which may improve their performance." What is page flipping? Do I really need to know about this? :?
What graphics cards and settings are others using? Is there a link to a good site or description of what all the settings mean and do?
How about a tutorial on how to optimise the settings for the average user?

[CADTutor]

The difficulty here is that not all graphics cards are made the same. Different GPU (Graphics Processor Unit) developers like ATI, Nvidia, Matrox etc. all work in different ways and find different solutions to speed up their cards. Even where solutions are similar, the words used to describe them are often different. I agree that optimising graphics cards for your particular usage is very confusing, especially since most consumer cards are designed specifically for games. It's one of the reasons I've always tended to favour Matrox. Their cards often come with AutoCAD specific drivers and utilities - just like in the old days :wink:

[archvizwiz]

admin has good infomation. you should also check out on your cards configuration information. if it is supported by autodesk you may have a setting by the factory to use for autocad. granted what they set up doesn't always work best for your application. what they do is predefine settings like:
antialiasing settings
anisotropic filtering
image settings
color settings
color profiles
vertical sync
force mipmaps
conformant texture clamp
extension limit
hardware acceleration
trilienar optimization, etc. these settings came from NVIDIA on my GFORCE FX 5200, predefined setting for autocad usage.

[Cad64]

As I was getting ready to move this thread to the Hardware forum, I noticed the date of the original post was May of 2005. :huh: