S3 Savage Tweaker 3.x settings guide

Here are a guide over the settings in S3 Savage Tweaker 3.x.
Settings are sorted by tab name.

General

24 bit Z-buffer
Enables the usage of Z-buffering, gives more detail when used, but slows down a bit.

AGP Sidebanding
Enables a AGP texturing subchannel. Faster when enabled, but could cause instabilities. Only applies to AGP cards. 

Auto MipMap
Increases speed and gives better visual quality

Auto S3TC
Will compress all textures into S3TC format. Will slow down very much. This setting isn't recommended.

Auto Palette
Will reduce textures to an 8 bit palette. Not correctly supported in the current drivers.

Clear on Buffer
Will increase performance when using Z-buffer, but could cause screen corruptions.

Direct Draw Software
Usefull when using a TV Tuner card. Enable this if you have lockups in DirectDraw

Fast Draw
???

Flip Blt
This setting only applies to the Savage3D. It will increase performance at high resolutions, but decrease at lower resolutions.

MMX in DirectDraw
Enable MMX in DirectDraw is the recommended setting.

Oversample
When enabled, your card will render at a higher resolution and scale it back to the desired resolution. This only works in 640x480.

Top Scan Line
When having trouble with the top line on your screen, enable this setting.

Trilinear Filtering
Recommended setting is enabled. The Savage cards won't loose speed when doing trilinear filtering and it looks better.

Triple Buffering
Uses triple buffering to reduce screen artifacts when Vsync is disabled.

V-Sync
Lets your savage card render at a higher speed than the display can show. This is recommended for benchmarking, but in games it should be disabled. Gives some tearing.

VPE Support
Use DirectDraw for video playback. Gives a speed increase when doing video playback

Wait for Flip
Only applies to Metal. Will increase framerate when using Metal API.

Write Combining
Will combine several writes to your Savage card in one write, so the bus has to be locked once, resulting in a speed increase.

Z-Buffer Clear
Will use hardware Z-Buffer clearing. Gives some speed increase, but could give some screen corruption.

More General

Video Texture Only
Don't allow your Savage card to use system memory for textures. Applies to AGP Savage cards only.

Auto AGP Memory
Force your AGP Savage card to use system memory instead of videocard memory. Will increase speed on Savage4 cards.

AGP Aperture Size
Controls the maximum amount of system memory to use for textures. Set this to 1/2 or 1/3 of system memory. This value is limited by the AGP Aperture setting in BIOS.

Disable Fog
Don't use fog in Direct3D games

Ancient Fog
????

DirectX Fog
Render fog according to the Direct3D (otherwise 3DFX) standard. Most games will render this way.

Eye Fog
Render fog according to eyepoint. Fog gets thicker if it's further away.

Detail Bias
When setting to less detail, picture will be blurrier, but rendering speed will be faster.

OpenGL

3DNow
Enables OpenGL 3DNow! support for AMD processors

Auto Clear Z-Buffer
Will use hardware to clear the Z-buffer. Slightly faster, but can cause artifacts.

Hardware T&L
Only applies to Savage2000. will use Hardware Transformation and Lightning. Only recommended for slow systems, because software T&L is most times faster than hardware T&L.

KTX Extension
Allows OpenGL PowerICD to use KTX extension from SGI.

Page Flipping
Increases speed, but some games need it disabled.

SIMD
Allow OpenGL PICD to use the SIMD instrictions on the Pentium 3 and the Celeron 2.

Triple buffering
Allow OpenGL PICD to use Triple buffering to decrease artifacts when Vsync is disabled.

W-buffer
Same as Z-Buffer. Controls things like fog.

OpenGL fog
Enable or Disable fog in OpenGL.

OpenGL Color Depth
Force OpenGL to use a certain color depth.

MiniGL

32 bit color
Let MiniGL use 32bit color. Only applies when MiniGL is selected as OpenGL ICD.

Auto Mipmap
Do Automipmapping. This will increase visual quality.

Auto S3TC
Force MiniGL to use S3TC to compress textures. This setting is slow, so leave it disabled.

S3TC disk cache
Stores S3TC textures on disk if they don't fit into memory.

Texture Disk cache
Stores textures on disk if they don't fit in memory.

Other

Command DMA
Use a buffer to stack commands into. These commands are read and written using DMA, so processor won't be interrupted when doing so. Does not apply to Savage3D.

CPU Idle
Force Win9x do do CPU Idling when CPU time is left. This setting causes a performance decrease.

High CPU Priority
Gives your CPU highest priority in your system. Speeds up everything.

Fast DRAM
Lowers the latency windows accesses your system RAM. Enabled is faster.

Fast PCI
Enables PCI concurrency. Enabled is faster.

FifoQueueSize
Set the queuesize for transfer to your Savage card. Fiddle with this setting if windows boots up with a black screen and a hourglass.

AGP bus transfer
Forces your AGP speed to a certain value. It has no use forcing it to a setting your Savage card or mainboard doesn't support.

Guide written by Jan de Groot, formaly known as JGC (http://www.jgc.f2s.com)