Truform is a Legacy feature that is not used on the current
R300 cards. Its primary use was on an older Radeon card, forget about it.
Smartshader is a bit of a gimmic but it is important as it is a step towards the future of user programmable shaders.
Vertical sync is an option to sync softwares maximum frames per second to your monitor refresh rate.
The reasion for this is that if you do not have Vertical sync then you monitor is running at its refresh rate (85hz as an example) and you software in running as fast as it can (between 30 and 300 FPS+) as the screen is drawn the frames are out of syncronisation above 85 hz you see "Tearing lines" when looking about or moving.
You benchmark with VSYNC = OFF to get a proper unlimited benchmark result.
You play games with VSYNC = ON so you get proper evenly drawn screens.
Antialiasing elimitates crawlies, jaggies and twinklies. These are side effects of drawing lines and objects on a pixel raster device.
Anistropic filtering is quite complex, I do not really want to write the full essay about texture filtering types e.g. Nearest, Bi-linear, Tri-linear, Bri-linear and Anistropic.
Anistropic filtering is basicly more texture samples done in a clever way so you can use various texture stanges in a game engine and make it so that textures are can be clear right into the distance.
Antialiasing and Anistropic filterter are set to application preferance because developers can (if they wish) to write AA/AF support into their game/application.
The extra settings are for older software, us as users can try and force full AA/AF, it does not always work some game engines use features that you can't Antialias.
AGP speed is the speed in which data can be fed acorss the AGP bus to the graphics card, there is not much difference in performance between AGPx4 and AGPx8.
Fast Writes improves writes from the CPU to the graphics chip.
Fast Writes enables the CPU to send data directly to the graphics bus without going through the system memory. This benefits overall system performance in two ways:
*Removes the bottleneck previously that exists in systems without Fast Writes.
* Frees up system memory bus to perform other functions and increase system efficiency.
To use fast writes you require a motherboard and graphics card which supports Fastwires and you require the AGP fastwrite option to be enabled in the BIOS.
All our computers here use fastwrites with no problems, some poeple however do have problems enabling fast writes.
