Originally posted by: xtknight
You have an LCD (with a native resolution of 1280x1024), so resolutions other than 1280x1024 will look pixelated/interpolated. Make sure your game is set to 1280x1024. The desktop setting won't impact your games.
You'll mostly be looking at the OpenGL and DirectX tabs. OpenGL and DirectX are two technologies that games use to draw their graphics. The most important options:
Antialiasing and anisotropic filtering: you'll want to leave these to application preference and set them in your game instead. For both of these, the higher the better.
Antialiasing makes edges look smoother. By nature, the monitor can not draw a perfect diagonal line, so the graphics card sends pixels that are approximates and the result being the circle looks jagged/toothed. Antialiasing decreases this bad effect.
Anisotropic filtering: The best example of this helping is when looking at a floor (in game). With it off, the floor will get blurrier farther down to save processing time. Anisotropic will instead sharpen the texture, and it makes it look a lot more realistic.
Texture quality (aka. image quality/mipmap quality): Textures are "blurred" to save processing time. The higher this goes, the sharper textures look.
Vertical sync: Hard to explain, but you'll want to turn this to app preference and turn it on in-game unless your performance goes way down as a result. Basically it makes your game look better when it's in motion, and makes everything move at once since some objects "draw" later than others.
