40 votes
Accepted

What is ray tracing?

In normal rendering, you have light sources, solid surfaces that are being lit, and ambient light. The brightness of a surface is calculated depending on distance and angle relative to the light ...
SF.'s user avatar
  • 17.7k
30 votes

What is ray tracing?

Traditionally, home computer games have employed a technique called rasterization. In rasterization, objects are described as meshes, composed of polygons which are either quads (4 vertices) or tris (...
Polygnome's user avatar
  • 1,775
16 votes
Accepted

Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 graphics card rejected by latest WoW update - suggestions please?

Blizzard is aware that some older DirectX 11 cards without Shader Model 5 support are no longer compatible after the updates. They are working on a fix that will allow players to continue to play on ...
Nzall's user avatar
  • 19.2k
12 votes
Accepted

What is hardware video decoding, and should I enable it?

This option will allow your GPU (graphics processing unit) to process certain video data, instead of your CPU doing it. This is a good thing if your GPU will do a better job than your CPU - it will ...
MC ΔT's user avatar
  • 2,529
8 votes
Accepted

Are low profile GPUs better than laptop GPUs or are they same thing?

Low profile GPUs are not the same as mobile/laptop GPUs. Low profile GPUs generally are designed around reducing the physical size of the GPU, and not necessarily efficiency (though that ends up being ...
Dylan Critz's user avatar
7 votes
Accepted

Extremely low FPS in all the games

Issue resolved. The problem was with the charger, it was not giving the rated output. Learning If drivers and a hard reset do not fix the problem, temperatures are normal, clock speed is not ...
Triceratops's user avatar
7 votes

What is ray tracing?

The current predominant method for rendering 3D graphics is called rasterisation. It's a relatively imprecise way of rendering 3D, but it's extremely fast compared to all other methods of 3D rendering....
Ian Kemp's user avatar
  • 239
6 votes

Seeing Red/White checkerboard pattern in Civ V

I eventually found out that the game was "missing assets", meaning textures and images it needed because not all the necessary files were downloaded. By "verifying" my steam installation, it updated ...
Tyler Durden's user avatar
  • 3,012
6 votes
Accepted

What games did NVIDIA come through on regarding RTX and DLSS?

Games that currently support: Deep Learning Super-Sampling AND RTX ray tracing: Metro Exodus 1 Battlefield V 1. Shadow of the Tomb Raider 3 Wolfenstein: Youngblood 4 Control 8 DLSS only: Anthem 5 ...
Joachim's user avatar
  • 17.9k
6 votes

Nvidia Quadro FX 1700 graphics card rejected by latest WoW update - suggestions please?

I went to a shop looking to buy a newer card, but they told me that most likely my old computer's motherboard would not support the current generation of graphics cards. That's a half-truth and ...
MonkeyZeus's user avatar
  • 1,523
5 votes
Accepted

Higher graphics card on a laptop with a lower one

Your question seems a bit absurd. You can't download a graphic card. Maybe what you actually mean is download a driver for a graphic card which is better than the one you have installed. If you have ...
Philipp's user avatar
  • 29.6k
5 votes

How to turn off this graphic effect on The Outer Worlds?

None of the posted images look off when compared to any and all released footage of the gameplay in online videos (both official trailers and let's plays). I'm discounting the first image as the ...
Flater's user avatar
  • 5,322
5 votes

How do I check if my GPU supports Raytracing?

Generally, all Nvidia cards, which have RTX in their name fully support raytracing. For AMD all cards of the new 6000 series support raytracing. Since your gpu is a year or two old, you can ignore AMD ...
Dulkan's user avatar
  • 17.3k
4 votes
Accepted

How to make games in low resolutions scale to full-screen on Nvidia GT 640M?

Yes, it is possible, though it's horrendously unintuitive and weird to configure. I've tried to find it out many times, but wasn't able, so I stayed with this small window for years. But I've finally ...
akavel's user avatar
  • 193
4 votes

What are the differences between the different anti-aliasing / multisampling settings?

In addition to the excellent answers already here, I'd like to mention the relatively new SMAA, or "Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing", which is, like FXAA, a post-process antialiasing method. In ...
Joachim's user avatar
  • 17.9k
4 votes

Vampire: The Masquerade -- Redemption refuses to use dedicated GPU, relies on Intel HD Graphics instead

The nVidia 950M is dedicated yes, but also a budget card and subject to how the laptop was laid out. For your specific issues, remember you're talking about a game that was released in 2000, nearly 17 ...
Shawn Gordon's user avatar
  • 2,480
4 votes
Accepted

What was "LCD CGA" graphics mode?

It's actually very simple: back in the era of early DOS laptops (late eighties to early ninties) there were various implementations of CGA laptop screens, including small CRT monitors, plasma monitors ...
Barts's user avatar
  • 56
4 votes
Accepted

Texture issues, glitched screens, crashes in games

The solution turned out to be simpler than I expected: installing libtxc_dxtn.i686 (the 32-bit version, to be exact), a texture-related package, solved all issues in the 3 games: sudo dnf install ...
anol's user avatar
  • 215
4 votes
Accepted

Black Screen when alt-tab or exiting fullscreen games in Windows 10

You can fix this by running the game in full-screen windowed mode, instead of running it in full-screen. The difference here is that you might lose out a tiny bit on high graphic games. When a game ...
Lumin's user avatar
  • 156
4 votes

Gigabyte Gpu GTX 960 suddenly too slow for dx9 games

Ok, so after 3 weeks of going in circles, today I took out the motherboard battery and disconnected the power cable and made sure all charge has been discharged. After putting the battery back and ...
Mena's user avatar
  • 161
3 votes

Can my graphics card cause Steam games to crash?

Your 460 supports DX12 but not the full set of DX12 features. Any game that uses a feature that your 460 doesn't support will most likely crash. I am guessing this is what is happening here. More ...
SamJ's user avatar
  • 591
3 votes
Accepted

Blurry signs in minecraft

I figured out my monitor's response time was 25 ms, which sucked for gaming. I need to buy a new monitor with at most 7ms.
Evan's user avatar
  • 71
3 votes

Skyrim does not detect AMD Radeon graphics

This isn't a problem with the game. There should be a configuration on your computer that lets you set which adapter to use. I have a Dell with nVidia graphics card and some games are set to the ...
Nelson's user avatar
  • 14.5k
3 votes
Accepted

Fix LOD Texture Glitch in Oblivion

After investigating the issue further, I have found that the game sometimes incorrectly detects your graphics card and sets everything to absolute minimum. The core of the problem lies in the fact ...
Fenixp's user avatar
  • 291
3 votes

Determining if a game is CPU- or GPU-limited

If you're looking for a "quick and dirty" ballpark guess, here are two tests you can run: Use a system monitor or profiling tool to compare CPU to GPU usage and see if one is significantly ...
ErsatzStoat's user avatar
3 votes

1080p on 4K display

The DSR article is about a 1080 display benefitting from 4K rendering, which is the opposite of your use case. The image is a fair idea, except that 1080 is 1920x1080 and 4k is 4096x2160. 4096/2 is ...
Amy B's user avatar
  • 22.3k
3 votes
Accepted

Windows 10 Video Driver Out-dated

You must install driver for your GPU "Microsoft Basic Display Adapter (32-Bit)", otherwise it won't open, as OpenGL comes with drivers. As this is a generic GPU, you probably should install all ...
ave's user avatar
  • 18.9k
3 votes

Intel Graphics card unable to compile shaders

Use Direct3D instead of OpenGL. From the main menu, open the Graphics menu. There, under Basic, change the backend to "Direct3D 11". Click "Close" and start the game.
user650139's user avatar
3 votes

Black Screen when alt-tab or exiting fullscreen games in Windows 10

For Nvidia: Setting Scaling tab to No Scaling under Adjust Desktop Size and Position in Nvidia Control Panel fixed this behavior for me. It was set to Aspect Ratio previously
Nick's user avatar
  • 31
3 votes
Accepted

Why Euro Truck Simulator 2 not using my laptop's GPU?

I figured it out! Actually it was using NVIDIA graphics card (GPU 1). The reason it was not shown in task manager was because the game was minimized at that time. I minimized the game to check ...
Vikas's user avatar
  • 302

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