Smoother game play, no stutters, even if the frames don't go up?

Wow! I didn't even think that was possible, but I'm not complaining.
Over a year and a half owning this game, and a year and a fourth, owning my newest NVIDIA card computer, and I just discovered the "NVIDIA Control Panel-- 'Manage 3D Settings' " app in my Start menu!
I didn't know any of that stuff could be changed-- independent from the game settings.

All last week I was racking my brain, trying to figure out why all my road lines were blurry in the game, even though I had anisotropic filtering maxed out in the game settings. Even in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 the runway, taxiway, and apron lines leading to the gates were blurry. Just couldn't wrap my brain around it.

Then I watch some guy's YT video, and he told of AMD/NVIDIA control panels/dashboards. I knew not of those, other than the GeForce panel-- which isn't a control panel for the GPU, so much as a "game by game optimizer".

NVIDIA app from the MS Store, is very hard to open-- and it's primarily a 1-star app from the tons of people who ranted on it. But when finally opened I get to see all this:


Upon further investigation and watching of the guy's video, he brought attention to the following settings, which I made sure I had set to his suggestions:


[Restore] I'd imagine resets all the parameters to default, including the dozen or so out of this picture that you can't see below. Those I never checked, I didn't think they were probably that important to alter, so I just trusted that the default will suffice.

However, the ones in red (especially Anisotropic. Filtering), were crucial to my noted improvements.
The key walkaway in this is making sure that these two, and many others, are application (local) controlled, and not GPU video card (global) control. I just never stopped to think there was a difference between those.

As soon as I restored to default and then made sure the items in the red boxes were selected as you see above, my high anisotropic setting in BeamNG drive, actually made a difference without it driving down my frames. Lines were immediately crisper again, and as a side note, I will add, that the same was true of MSFS 2020.

What's more I'm getting smoother, more buttery camera pan, without jitters, even if my frame rates are only at around 60 fps. Sounds strange, but at 60, I would get sort of a jittery, strobe effect whenever I panned or tilted the camera. I would have to have over 90 fps, for that not to happen, which seemed really odd to me.

And in areas where my frames have increased, higher settings in the game, don't seem to affect frames as badly as it used to. My computer's performance was never horrible, but I have to say that I'm amazed how much better it is after these changes I've made.

Or... it could be three other things that have coincidentally happened as well:

1. BeamNG has optimized v.0.20 as it's moved into v.20.0.2

2. NVIDIA had a new driver update available 17 Aug 2020, to support the anticipated release of the new MS Flight Simulator, which runs everything better-- as I've noticed that lines in that game are clearer now as well.

3. MSFS 2020 had their own update, which may have also lent to some frame rate increase, camera pan image smoothness, and anisotropic filter improvements; in its own right.

Hard to say for sure. Just I notice something.

Two other points in this thread: (and I'll save the stuff I have to say about 144 fps refresh rate and full screen, for my follow-up thread in just a bit)

1. I used to have issues with low frames due to shadows, and my suggestion to others was always to sacrifice shadow texture size by lowering it from 1024 down to 512, at the expense of blurry shadow edges. I didn't like it, but it worked.
Now I dare say, I believe in most situations I'm able to keep the textures at 1024, and not as much fps loss is experienced. And if it is-- the important thing is I don't have the jittering and stuttering I had before.

2. Very frame rate intensive mods, (like 'Crash Hard' 's 8 x 8 truck), on the big figure 8 at Derby Arena; runs much better than it used to. The only 20's and stutters is on the truck with full pipes, engine cover, and tarp on the back. The others, much better.


3. I'm able to log into "Generic City", on average 40 to 60 seconds after hitting spawn. That's not to say that sometimes this map doesn't hang indefinitely til I give up and close it myself, or crashes the game on its own, but those instances are much further and fewer between.

In conclusion, I have no concrete proof that this is what's causing my good fortune, I'm enjoying it while I can, because I don't know what changes v0.21.x.x will bring to my table.