What 3DfxTweaker offers:
- Adjustment of screen refresh rate
To optimize the cards display for your specific monitor, and to provide flicker-free video output.
The screen refresh rates that a 3Dfx card can generate are: 60Hz, 70Hz, 72Hz, 75Hz, 80Hz, 85Hz, 90Hz, 100Hz and 120Hz.
If your monitor doesn't support the selected refresh rate, the card will revert to 60Hz.
This setting does not affect the heat of the graphics chips on the card.
- Adjustment of graphics clock rate
To let the graphics processor on the card run faster and achieve higher frame rates, but with the drawback of possible texture errors and the fear of overheating the card.
Normally a 3Dfx card is clocked at 50MHz, but most cards can run a lot faster. 57MHz is a common speed that almost all cards can handle, 60MHz is the recommended limit, and some cards can even go faster. The maximum speed for your card depends on a number of parameters, mostly the speed of the RAM chips on the card, and the temperature of the graphics processor. It is therefore recommended to install a heat sink or a fan on an overclocked card.
- Adjustment of swapbuffer interval
To minimize the time between two consecutive frames, in order to gain a higher framerate. This does not affect the heat of the graphics chips on the card.
- Other parameters may follow in later versions.
What 3DfxTweaker can't do:
No matter how nice you ask, 3DfxTweaker will never be able to help you regain lost resolutions caused by an Apple Multiscan monitor and a low-quality pass-through cable. To remedy this problem you should download the Multi-Resolutions control strip module from http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/cgi-bin/NewSearch?key=multi-resolutions, which will give you those resolutions back, or obtain a special pass-through cable for Multiscan monitors from Techworks.
How 3DfxTweaker works:
The GLIDE library which is used by applications to access the 3Dfx card, is nearly the same for MacOS, Windows, DOS and Linux. But since the MacOS doesn't have an environment variable scheme like the other three operationg systems, the GLIDE library for MacOS doesn't offer the parameter adjustment available for these other operating systems. 3DfxTweaker tries to offer the same environment variables that are available for Windows, DOS and Linux in an easy-to-use application. It does this by altering parts of the GLIDE library in main memory (It does NOT alter the GLIDE library on the harddisk !).
What the main benefit of 3DfxTweaker is:
SPEED, for the fps-hungry among us.
This table shows some frame rates in Quake 3Dfx, measured with a Diamond Monster3D card on a PowerMac 7300/166/80:
(Before you send e-mail and ask, YES, I'm using a Diamond Monster3D. It's a stock card for the PC, and it works fine in a Mac, if you use the drivers for the Techworks Power3D. I can not encourage you to buy such a card, because the Techworks Power3D is a fine card, and it's not more expensive either. I had to buy a Diamond Monster3D because Techworks cards are very hard to get over here in Europe.)
TIMEDEMO DEMO1 TIMEDEMO DEMO2
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
| No 3DfxTweaker | 24.9fps | 21.7fps |
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
| 3DfxTweaker | | |
| Clock rate = 57MHz | 26.3fps | 23.1fps |
| Swapbuffer interval = 1 | | |
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
| 3DfxTweaker | | |
| Clock rate = 57MHz | 32.6fps | 27.8fps |
| Swapbuffer interval = 0 | | |
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
| 3DfxTweaker | | |
| Clock rate = 60MHz | 33.4fps | 28.6fps |
| Swapbuffer interval = 0 | | |
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
| 3DfxTweaker | | |
| Clock rate = 63MHz | 34.1fps | 29.2fps |
| Swapbuffer interval = 0 | | |
|-------------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
Why you might not see any improvement:
There are several reasons why 3DfxTweaker might not show any improvement.
The best possible case is a game, which requires very little CPU power (i.e. it plays fine even on slow machines), so the game is spending most of its time waiting for the 3D card to finish its rendering job. In this case, tweaking the cards performance with 3DfxTweaker will show very good results.
But there are other games, which are not limited by the performance of the 3D card, but rather by the speed of the CPU. So no matter how much you tweak the card, the framerate of the game won't get any higher.
Another reason why you don't see any improvement with 3DfxTweaker might be that the game already does some of the tweaks internally. For example, the Swapbuffer interval is application defined. Some games use the recommended value of 1, so tweaking it with 3DfxTweaker to 0 will show a big improvement. However some games might already use 0 internally, so there's no possibility for improvement.
Therefore I can not guarantee any kind of performance improvement for your favourite game. Either your CPU is too slow (which is the case if you have a 7200/75 or a 7200/90), or the game just isn't tweakable.
How to use 3DfxTweaker:
Start it up and adjust the settings. The settings will NOT be preserved after a restart of your computer. If you want your settings to be applied after each restart, you need to save them to a settings file. To do this click on 'Save Settings file...' and choose a filename and location. Your settings will be stored in the file, which you can then put in your Startup Items folder.
You can also make several different settings files, for each of your games. Double-clicking such a file is all you need to do to start 3DfxTweaker and have those settings applied.
Varga, Andreas. (1999). 3DfxTweaker Readme. Electronic Document.
Andreas Varga
System
out of 10 (0 vote)
6 / 
2021-11-24 / 
cdea942cd50b97b720a3bef0968cc3bec0f04c82 / 
/ 
3dfxtweaker-10.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
