Ignoring the historical chicanery, now that public ridicule has more or less nuked the practice, the easiest thing you can do is make sure you've got the latest drivers for your card. Code optimizations and the occasional setting-adjustment toy make this one a no-brainer. For folks who don't want to be bothered, a simple slider on the driver interface that ratchets between "Fast" and "Pretty" in a handful of discrete increments does the trick. For the rest of us, both AMD/ATI and nVidia allow more granular control over many of the specific settings.

Eye Candy Comes In Many Flavors

Resolution: This controls both how finely-grained your display will be on the screen and how much information can be displayed. Higher resolutions look better, because the individual pixels are smaller; the flip side of this is that ratcheting up the resolution requires your system to be able to paint that larger canvas fast enough. While it may not sound like a tremendous difference, just going from 1024x768 to 1280x1024 increases the pixel count by 66%. Yeah, it looks a lot better, but it's going to take a lot more processing chutzpah to deliver it.

With the proliferation of LCD displays on many of our desks, the resolution question is becoming we ask ourselves less often. Because these monitors look and work best at their native resolution (1280x1024, 1920x1200, etc), we're probably just going to stick with that and juggle other stuff to achieve the best balance of image quality and performance.

Anti-Aliasing: Any line that isn't perfectly vertical or horizontal is going to break across pixels, and this jagged edge is said to be "aliased." Anti-Aliasing (AA) is how graphics creators and the hardware that renders it cope with that effect to trick our eyes into seeing a smooth line. Naturally, nVidia and ATI have their own names for how they do it (utilizing different types of sampling algorithm and/or sampling densities) and while their approaches differ slightly, the nuts and bolts of AA boil down to "more samples give a smoother line." In a nutshell, a square looks more like a circle than a triangle does, and an octagon looks more like a circle than a square does. The way this is achieved is via supersampling. The downside is that for each step up in AA quality (2x, 4x, 8x, and so on), the entire scene needs to be rendered behind the scenes by your video card, and this multiple rendering puts a lot of demand on your video card's memory (both in terms of size and bandwidth).