Maybe I'm just a dumbass. I don't know. What I do know is that I had a devil of a time figuring out how to make good use of the Rage3D Tweak Utility (R3DTU). To be more specific, I figured out how to apply the various individual tweaks relatively quickly, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to use any of the profile-management stuff. Ever since I bought an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, I've really wanted to turn on full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) on a selective basis. That is, I wanted certain FSAA, AF, and other settings enabled for certain games but disabled for others, typically because of compatibility problems with those advanced features. I've finally figured out how the tweaking utility works, so I thought I would take the time to write up my findings in order that others might benefit.
| NB: | Since writing this essay, I've discovered a great tweaking guide for the R3DTU utility, as well as another utility, RadLinker, which provides even more flexible application-specific tweaking features than R3DTU. Be sure to give them both a look! |
To be blunt: I think the utility has an interface that only a mother could love. That might be overly harsh, of course, as I have a pretty unusual way of thinking compared to most people. Perhaps the interface is clear and intuitive to most others, but my own experience leads me to doubt it. Suffice it to say, though, that the interface has one fundamental mechanism, which is pretty consistent across the application. Once you "get" that single mechanism, you should probably have a lot less trouble making use of the utility than I did.
To wit, every feature that R3DTU supplies works on a load/apply paradigm; i.e., the feature must be loaded into R3DTU, then applied to the video driver. For example, should you wish to apply the Unreal Tournament profile settings that come with the utility, you must left click the little icon for the "Unreal Tournament" profile to make it "light up". This indicates that those settings are now loaded into R3DTU. They are not actually applied to the video driver, however, until you click the "Apply" or "OK" buttons. This two-step mechanism seems consistent throughout R3DTU, even when dealing with functions for which it doesn't make much sense (e.g., deleting a profile), so it bears remembering.
In addition to this mechanism, it is worth discussing how the parameters of the individual tweaks may be set. For example, consider a user who has an Athlon CPU, which includes the 3D Now extensions—a set of instructions designed specifically to help accelerate 3D graphics. The OpenGL (OGL) driver typically does not make use of those extensions by default, presumably to avoid compatibility problems for users with Pentium processors. It is a relatively simple thing to expand the list of OGL tweaks and click the checkbox to enable the 3D Now extensions. When the checkbox is clicked, a check mark will appear within, and the border of the box will be highlighted in green to indicate that the setting has been altered. Again, though, this only loads that setting into R3DTU; the user must apply it to the video driver in order for it to take effect.
Many other settings do not feature a checkbox, but rather use a slider for data entry. In that case, simply grab the slider's "thumb" and drag it in either direction to select the desired value. With any of the settings, regardless of what data-entry method they use, you can always find out the current value of the setting without changing it by clicking on its name to the right of the little icon. In fact, you cannot alter any of the settings unless you deliberately click on the little icons, for they are what puts R3DTU in the editing, rather than display, mode.
Finally, if you do not understand what a particular setting is, you can simply right click it. In many cases, a very helpful description of the setting will appear in a small tooltip window. Some of the explanations aren't all that helpful, but more often than not the text is at least somewhat illuminating. If nothing else, you'll probably be armed with a better idea of how to discover what the setting really does by using Google or some other Internet searching tool.
Given what has been said already, it should be possible to make pretty good use of R3DTU. To make the best use of it, however, you'll need to understand how to work with the various profiles that it supports. Though the utility ships with profiles for several games, and various other applications, there are many games that it omits, and its supplied profiles may not be ideal for your hardware configuration anyway. Suffice it to say that you'll probably end up creating several user profiles in addition to adjusting the values for at least some of the profiles it supplies.
One of the most basic facts about any profile, user-created or otherwise, is that it contains tweaks for Direct3D (D3D), OGL, or both. This is important for two reasons, first and foremost of which is that you have to know which graphics system your game or application uses in order to make a profile for it. It won't do you much good, for example, to put together a beautiful D3D profile for Quake III Arena, given that the game uses OGL. Many contemporary games allow you to use either D3D or OGL, and in those cases you should use a profile that contains data for both. In any event, you should make sure that you know which graphics system your game is using before trying to create or modify a profile for it.
The second reason that basic fact is important is because it can help alleviate confusion with the R3DTU interface. Whenever you click the icon to the left of a profile's name, it "lights up". This indicates that all of the settings for that profile have been loaded into the utility and are ready to be applied to the video driver, not that they're already applied as one might initially take the "light" to mean. I told you the utility has an interface that only a mother could love. At any rate, what might not be immediately obvious is that more than one profile can be "lit up" at a time! Because D3D and OGL tweaks are maintained separately, you can actually have two different profiles loaded into the utility at the same time, as long as one is for D3D alone while the other is for OGL alone.
Once you understand that most basic fact, along with the interface mechanism discussed previously, working with profiles is pretty simple. To change the details of any profile, first adjust the D3D/OGL settings as desired and then apply them. Once the settings have been applied to the video driver, you can right click the icon for any profile, user-created or otherwise, and choose the "Set" option to save the current settings to that profile. To delete a profile, right click the icon, select "Delete", and press the "Apply" button—does anyone else find that more than a bit bizarre? Renaming those profiles that can be renamed works in a largely similar fashion. As you can probably imagine by now, R3DTU provides a great deal of power and flexibility insofar as a couple of clicks loads and applies a profile, which may contain dozens and dozens of tweaks.
But this is only the beginning. Being able to load and apply a complete profile in a couple of clicks is nice, but it still requires the user to open the R3DTU dialog box, find the profile, click its icon, and hit the apply button. Wouldn't it be much nicer if the utility somehow "knew" which game you started, so that it could apply all those tweaks for you automatically? And better still, what if the utility could also somehow "know" when you're done playing, so that it could restore all your regular defaults? This is exactly the sort of thing at which R3DTU excels, once you know how to make it work.
Getting the right profile to load automatically is a bit different, depending upon whether the profile is one of those that ships with the utility or whether you created it yourself. In the case of the former, it's almost embarrassingly simple. All you need to do is right click the icon next to the profile name and select the "AutoRun" option. This will change the profile's appearance in the interface in two ways. First, the icon's inner circle, which lights up when clicked, will now display an inner ring even when it's not selected. Further, right clicking the profile's icon again will show a check mark next to the "AutoRun" option. Both of these indicate that the profile is set to be loaded and applied automatically.
In the case of user-created profiles the process is somewhat different, for it requires an understanding of how R3DTU "knows" which game you're starting. In Windows, as in DOS before it, every program that you run ultimately has a file name. Back in the days of DOS games, that file name was often a *.com file or even a *.bat file. These days, just about any program you want R3DTU to detect will be some kind of *.exe file. The trick is to find out exactly what the proper file name is, because the game utility "knows" you've launched an application for which it has a profile by "watching" the file names of the programs that are run on your computer.
To find out the file name of the program for which you wish to load a profile automatically, right click on the icon or menu shortcut that you use to launch the program and choose "Properties". The "Target" field of the resulting dialog box should show you a potentially long file name. On my system, for example, when I examine the "Target" field of the icon I use to play Raven Shield (RS), it contains the following: "G:\Red Storm Entertainment\RavenShield\system\RavenShield.exe". What that means, in the final analysis, is that the file named "RavenShield.exe" is the file that is used to run the game, and that's the name that R3DTU needs to "know" in order to load the right profile automatically.
To tell R3DTU the proper file name, simply right click the icon of the user-created profile you wish to automate, and select the "Set AutoRun" option. You'll be given an edit control in which you can enter the file name of the program. Note well: you do not need to give the game utility the entire, long file name from the Target field, which typically includes the drive and directory path information. You need only specify the basic file name. To return to my previous example, if I wanted a profile to be loaded and applied automatically when I play RS, then I would need to give R3DTU the name "RavenShield.exe" (without the quotes). Once the proper file name is set, then you simply need to enable the "AutoRun" feature as described already.
There remains but one thing to be discussed in order for our lesson on automation to be complete. Once you're done using the application or playing the game, you probably want R3DTU to return the settings to their normal or default values. This requires that you do two things. First, you must find the profile named "Reset" and configure it with the settings that you want to be applied by default. This is no different than working with any other profile; i.e., you load and apply those settings, right click the icon for the "Reset" profile, and choose the "Set" option. Second, you need to configure the "Reset" profile to "AutoRun", as you've already learned how to do.
If you have the R3DTU sounds enabled by default, you'll know immediately whether your work has been successful. When you launch your application or game, you should first hear the game-detected sound followed by the applied-profile sound. Naturally, you can customize those sounds using the standard "Sounds and Audio Devices" applet in the Windows control panel. The sounds that ship with the utility are a little weird, but you can easily replace them with something else or even turn them off completely if desired. It's up to you.
Once you get the hang of it, you'll probably find yourself using R3DTU to manage profiles for several different applications and games to make the best possible use of your hardware. I certainly use its features to make sure that I've got the ideal trade off between frame rate and visual quality in many of the games I play. For those games that can't cope with FSAA or AF, I make sure those settings are disabled. For most games, however, I'm typically running FSAA at 2x or 4x sampling and AF at 4x or 8x. It makes a great deal of difference in the quality of the graphics, and that's important to me after coming up with the cash for a high end video card. Hopefully, this essay will help others make good use of R3DTU as well.
06/04/2003