aTuner

Even though a state of the art video card can run anything smoothly, even old cards can be tweaked fo a little more performance. aTuner is a tweak tool for Nvidia and ATI video cards, allowing you to change some of the key settings for better video performance.

The application boasts a wide array of settings, which means that beginners may have a pretty hard time trying to figure out how to use the program. The help file is minimal and includes only basic information on its features, so searching the Internet remains the only good choice.

The main window of the app enables you to adjust anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and Vsync, with a dedicated profile manager for creating personalized profiles with various settings.

The application sports a system information tool focused on graphic cards, providing a quick overview over your system and its hardware components.

aTuner supports two monitors on the same Nvidia card and includes a dedicated OpenGL Extra options panel for configuring some additional settings. This way, you can adjust OpenGL MIP-map LOD bias, OpenGL pending frames limit, GeForce FX trilinear quality, triple buffering, texture compression and filter quality and intellisample settings.

Last but not least, a separate screen facilitates access to gamma correction, with easy to use sliders for the best possible calibration.

Of course, aTuner works flawlessly on all Windows versions, but you may encounter some problems on newer versions of Windows. Even the main window fails to detect a Windows 7 machine, claiming the system is running Windows Vista.

Overall, aTuner can come in handy for many users out there, but a comprehensive help manual and a more user friendly interface are the two areas that need improvements in the future. It's mostly helpful for older systems and its advisable to have a solid knowledge before managing given options to prevent any damage.