Settings for Gaming

Hello, this is my first time posting on major geeks. I know from previous experience troubleshooting various technical issues with my father, that major geeks is a extremely reliable resource. Can anyone help me determine the best settings to get optimal performance from my PC.
Thanks in advance!
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Compaq Presario SR1630NX Desktop PC
Operating System – MS Windows XP Home Edition
Base processor – Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz
Graphics card – VisionTek Radeon X1300
Motherboard name – A8AE-LE
Manufacturer – ASUS
Hard drive – 200 GB
7200 rpm
Memory – 2558 MB RAM

 

Presuming you're talking about in-game video/graphic settings.
98% of games in the last 6 years will automatically set the settings to optimal performance for your hardware although this is often slightly off.

The best way to find it is to play with the settings a little until you find a nice balance of looks and fuidity of movement in-game (FPS Frames Per Second)

You can generally turn things like "Textures" and "Shadows" up a little, these enhance your looks but are not super heavy on requirements.

while things like AA (or Anti-Alisiasing) which smooth the lines/edges but are extremely heavy. This is probably the most power hungry effect and actually doesn't make a huge difference unless you go from "Off - X8"
It basically blurs the edges of lines (softens colours of pixels leading to and from the diagonal lines) in such a way it makes the human eye beleive they are straight, basically it's an optical illusion. The best option with this one unless you have a good gaming PC is to leave it switched "Off"

Anisotropic Filtering (Or Filter) need to go lower as well, this creates more clarity in detail in things like brickwork and grass. Again pretty heavy.
Settings for this one often confuse people, these are usually as follows:
Bilinear = Lowest
Trilinear = an extra filter layer can sometimes make a difference in looks
2x/4x/8x/16x = Once past trilinear it goes simply into levels of filter but multiplication, the higher the better it will look but the slower it will run.

The resolution is usually set to 800 x 600, this can be turned upto 1024 x 768 (or widescreen equivelant) before it starts stressing your hardware, any higher than that and you will notice the drop in performance.

Physics is another heavy-ish one, rarely an option but will drop performance if turned on.

Any particle effect is pretty much the most power consuming, things like smoke, dust and fog all look wonderful and most assume they are simple when in actual fact they are some of the things that run the heaviest, so if the option is there for Particle's then switching it off will greatly increase performance.

Like I said, either let the game find settings for you, either done when you start the game or "Auto Detect" in options or play with the settings.

You want to aim for smooth gameplay, the higher the FPS the better experience you will have and the less stress on your hardware there is.

Playing games at low FPS (looks like watching a movie on "frame-by-frame slow mo") is not only incredibly annoying but it's not good for your PC either, if it's running badly it means your PC is under more stresst than it's designed for, I reccommend you turn everything to "Low" in this case and work your way up

That pretty much lightly covers the basics, if you would like me to elaborate on anything please ask