The Following Settings were changed in the nVidia 'Additional Properties window under Direct 3D: Trilinear Filtering Direct X 5 Compatibility Mode Automatically Generate 0 mipmap Levels Enable Anti-Aliasing in Hardware PCI texture size at 18mb Test Conditions: AMD K6-200mhz  66mhz bus  96mb fpm ram  Diamond Viper V550 PCI   Fic PA-2007  Maxtor 2gig & 8.4gig  AOpen 36x CD-ROM   Desktop at 800x600x16bit  Windows 98 Not Overclocked  Best 'Gaming Environment' Settings Used Each setting was changed individually with all other settings at default 3D Mark 99 3D Mark scores show no major change in Video Card performance. But taking a closer look reveals... WOW! Look at that DX 5 Compatibility mode setting! While all the other settings had no effect in my system, the DX 5 turned in stunning numbers. Let's look closer at why this setting affects the Rasterizer score... These numbers illustrate my point exactly. By using the second texture unit in the Game 1 - Race, the DX 5 setting turned in a score that was nearly 10% faster than the competition. The Race uses Single Pass Rendering, Direct X 6 has Multi-texture support so it saves the second texture unit for multi-texturing games. By turning off that feature in nVidia's control panel the Viper uses both texturing units all the time. If your still following me, good. If not, here's the lowdown: DX 5 mode makes games that DO NOT USE multi-texturing FASTER. Games that DO USE MULTI-TEXTURING (DX6) are SLOWER. Game 2 - First Person uses Multi-texturing. All scores are higher than DX 5 mode because DX5 doesn't have the right support for Multi-texturing. But even then, the scores are not that much higher. The Fill Rate tests show the pure power of the Viper V550. They are not inhibited by the CPU. All TNT cards (that have the same clock speed) have about the same Fill Rate (+/- 5%). I am surprised that each setting didn't effect this score... oh well. As we have seen before, the DX 5 setting has once again turned in much higher numbers than all the other settings. The Texture Rendering test must not use multi-texturing or else the other settings would have been higher. So does the DX 5 setting translate into faster game play when used with non-Multi-texturing games? I haven't found that to be the case. Direct 3D test showed no improvement. But I must say, I don't have many good tests of direct 3D other than 3D Mark. If anyone has found results that say differently, by all means, send them to me and I'll be sure to post them. In Conclusion Changing the Advanced Options under the nVidia control panel does not make a major difference in game play ON MY SYSTEM. Once more games use these advanced settings, playing with these settings will most surely effect performance. To Break it Down Trilinear Filtering will generally slow down performance on video cards that don't have enough power. The Viper V550 has more than enough power to do this easily when paired with my K6-200. Leave it on Bilinear Filtering. It looks good enough Automatically generating 0 mipmaps will increase performance only if the game being played uses a lot of mipmaps. Most do NOT. In the future this setting will effect more games. Keep it at Default Enabling Anti-Aliasing in Hardware will decrease performance in games that use full screen anti-aliasing. Again, 95% do not. Leave it on default, unless noticible speed decrease is seen Setting the PCI texture size at 18mb should increase performance in games that use LOTS of textures, over 12mb. The only game that comes close to using this amount is "The Need For Speed III". For now, leave it at default Setting Direct X 5 Compatibility Mode increases performance in many DirectX 5 games. Turn it on if you use mostly DX5 games, or off if you use cutting edge games (not 100% sure)