What do setting mean? GeForce 8600 GT

[Aratae]

I read lots of reviews before I ordered the card (XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX) and went by them when ordering (It's due to arrive via UPS today), but I still dont know what it means when I read something like this:

"my pc's a amd live HP64+2 dual core 4400+ 2048mb 2 gigs,400gb 7200 rpm sata harddrive with win vista premium .Onbord graphics is 6150 geforce which wasn't kickin it for me.Play Battlefield2&2142(Lt.brently)would only get low settings on 1280 res.,poped the card in and now able to get high settings on 1280 res."

Do you do something with the card to get low/high settings? Or are you doing something with your monitor's resolution?

Is is all automatically taken care of by the card or you have to go into something and adjust things?

Thx for any help.

[FZ1]

What the quoted portion of your post means that the person was running a motherboard with built-in "on board" graphics which are generally very poor for modern games. He installed the 8600 and improved his performance.

If you have on board video and you move to a "discrete" GPU card, you need to do the following.

>Make sure the video cable is plugged into the new card and not the motherboard video port
>usually you need to enter the BIOS and disable the on board video. I don't think this is mandatory all the time but leaving it on may hinder your performance.

[vicaphit]

Also, you will want to change your games' video settings to higher resolution and graphics settings to see the enhanced performance. The game will not automatically change the settings because of the new card, you have to go into the options in the game to do that.

[Aratae]

Cool! Thanks guys for the info