The ATI drivers allow you a lot of control over your games, however their primary downside is they do not support profiles so you cannot force unqiue settings for each game.
First of all make sure you have the latest ATI graphics drivers, they can be downloaded here.
Once you’ve installed your newest drivers you can access the driver control panel by right clicking a blank space on your desktop and selecting “Catalyst™ Control Center” from the menu.
Click the Graphics menu and select “3D” from the drop down, this brings you to the area where you can change effects applied to your games.
From here you can select “AA” to control the level of Anti-Aliasing you want to apply to your games and what type of filter you want to use, each of these options provides you with different quality AA and each comes with its own performance penalty, experiment with what you think looks best.
When the “Use application settings” box is ticked, the driver software will simply let the game use it’s own settings from the menu, in our case we may want to force our own level of AA since it’s not supported from the game menu, simply untick this box and select how many samples you want. The more samples you select the better the image will look, but the slower your frame rate will get, it helps to balance these until you have a good middle ground.
You can also set a filter type, these are just various methods of applying AA, each have their own benefits.
Next is Anisotropic Filtering, if you click the “AF” menu further along this will open up the AF controls. Here you can enable or disable “Use application settings” again, by un-ticking this box you force the drivers to take control of your AF preference.
Now you can set the ”per pixel” slider to any value you like, the higher the number of samples the better your games will look, but each higher value comes with its own performance penalty so test a range of settings and find what is best for you.
The last standard to be covered in the drivers is Vsync, to find this option select the “All” menu at the far right, you will have to scroll down a bit to find it.
There are several options here, the far left position in the slider will always disable Vsync and ignore in game options for Vsync, the far right will do the opposite and always force Vsync on, the 2 middle options allow for a degree of application preference.
This is the end of the ATI driver guide, there are many more options you can tweak from the driver control panel but the ones covered by PCGamingStandards are only those which are listed in our standards database, to learn more about each of these follow the links to the Standards page.
Sometimes the drivers may not do a good job of forcing AA/AF or Vsync and you will need a more powerful tool, one alternative for ATI video cards is an application called ATI Tray Tools, you can download it from the ATI Tray tools forum hosted by guru3d.com here.
Download and install the latest version, once it’s running check your system tray and you will see the ATI Tray Tools Icon, if you right click it you will get the menu, from here you can select the “3D” menu, now you can set your AA and AF values from the sub menus.
Once they are set how you like them, you can save “Save as profile”, select a name which is easy to remember. Now you have saved some settings, go back to the menu and select “Game Profiles” and then “Manage Profiles”.
Now you can create a profile for each game, you have to give the profile a name, point to the game executable then you simply tick the “Set 3d to” tick box which allows you to pick from your settings profile you saved previously. When the game next launches these new settings will be applied, as long as ATI Tray tools is running.
To get access to Vsync you need to switch over to the “Direct 3D Tweaks” tab at the end, here there is an option for “Force Vsync”
As with the driver control panel, there is a lot more options for you to configure, but these 3 settings cover the standards in our database specifically, for a much more in depth guide for ATI Tray Tools visit Tweakguides.com.