Slightly OT, but I was wondering if anyone could enlighten me if other drivers/IHV provide similar to the following:
With the Parhelia, the drivers allow you to set individual settings linked to any particular .exe you run (and you can scan for a load of common games/apps, and load up "recommended" settings which you are free to change). This applies to texture filtering, AA, and some other bits and bobs.
Separately they provide an app (the "Apptemizer"
) which scans for games and provides recommended .ini or registry settings (whatever the game uses) - this is more specifically targetted towards surround gaming though, which can occasionally be tricky to set up otherwise.
Both these routes are totally open and tell you exactly what they are doing to your games, and you have the choice to use them or not. This works really well for me.
What I am saying is that I am all in favour of application-specific settings. But only if I can see
exactly what is going on, and have control over each aspect of it.
If Nvidia allowed you to see what it was detecting and optimising for, and also allowed you provide your own tweaks, and turn their "optimisations" off if you really wanted, then this would be an absolutely GREAT feature. But they don't allow you control and are not open about what they are doing, so it's not a great feature. It means that as a potential buyer with knowledge of all the recent shenanigans, I have no clue as to what the relative performance of the cards available would be in "Random Game X" would be at my preferred game settings (res, AA, AF).
Just my 2p's worth
Gnep