10.08.2009, 03:00
I pulled this from a post by "Covino" at UBI boards:
I've seen confusion and misunderstanding of some of the settings in IL-2 Setup so I thought I'd explain what each setting does. I know you all probably understand most of the settings but there are a few mysterious ones that you may have wondered about. Also, most of my recomendations are for better performance on low to mid range computers.
Driver Tab
Provider: OpenGL or DirextX. OpenGL will most often give the best performance, especially on Nvidia cards, but try both and see which one gives better performance.
"Full Screen" mode is the standard way to play the game and will often give the best performance/stability.
Video Mode: Choosing lower resolutions and color modes will greatly increase framerate and lower memory usage. 32-bit color is needed to enable "Perfect" mode graphics.
"Use Stencil Buffer" enables translucent shadows (instead of full black shadows) and is required to enable "Perfect" mode graphics. For a slight performance boost, turn this setting off.
Video Tab
Texture Mipmap Filter: Simply put, this setting affects how sharp a texture may look when viewed from large angles or distances. Anisotropic offers the best image quality at a usually heavy performance loss (only folks with good video cards should use this), and bilinear filtering offers the best performance at a still acceptable texture quality. Trilinear is a tiny bit better than bilinear (it smoothes the transitions between mipmap levels) and the performance hit is very minimal depending on your video card. I recommend bilinear but it is up to personal taste and your hardware.
Texture Compression: This setting can greatly reduce the memory load and increase framerate by compressing textures. S3TC gives the highest compression ratio and may cause some minor artifacts like little squares on water but it can greatly help or eliminate stuttering (16bit has a smaller compression ratio and less performance boost but also a bit less artifacts). I recommend S3TC compression for 128 Mb graphic cards.
"Use Dither" helps eliminate the ugly color "banding" when running the game in 16-bit color mode. Has no effect in 32-bit color mode. Recomended on in 16-bit color mode and can be turned off if running with 32-bit color.
"Use Vertex Arrays" gives faster performance without image quality loss because it allows vertices to be used in groups (arrays) instead of individually. Turn this on.
"Polygon Stipple" is a way of emulating or faking translucent shadows when the stencil buffer is turned off. It does this by creating a "dotted" effect that looks translucent (not unlike the stubble of incoming facial hair). Turn this off for a small performance boost. If stencil buffer and polygon stipple are both turned off, you'll get completely black shadows which isn't much of a drawback.
"Multitexture" affects all multitexturing used in the game, most notably, some water effects, and the very high clouds that are textured to appear more "chunky." Without multitexture, these clouds are smooth white instead of textured. Highly recommended to leave this on but turning off yields performance boost.
"Combine" allows more advanced multitexturing effects. For example, the murky water effect near edges of rivers to simulate shallow depth uses this extension. Turning off gives small performance boost but I recommend to leave it on.
Turning off "Secondary Color" creates graphic anomalies during fog. For example, nearby forests may not appear to be "fogged out" while everything else is. This may give a performance boost when turned off but I recommend it to be left on.
"Vertex Array Extension" allows the use of vertex arrays as explained above. Recommended on.
"Clip Hint" tells the driver that clip volume clipping for primitives is not necesary. Basically, it tells the driver not to worry about something the game doesn't do anyway. Minor performance increase when checked (about 1 fps). Recommended on.
"Use Palette" uses paletted textures instead of full color textures. This can save memory with little to no image quality loss. About 1 fps increase when checked. Recommended on.
"Texture Anisotropic Extension" should be checked if you selected anisotropic as your mipmap filter. Otherwise, uncheck it.
"Texture Compress ARB Extension" should be checked if you're using S3TC for texture compression. Otherwise, uncheck it.
I've seen confusion and misunderstanding of some of the settings in IL-2 Setup so I thought I'd explain what each setting does. I know you all probably understand most of the settings but there are a few mysterious ones that you may have wondered about. Also, most of my recomendations are for better performance on low to mid range computers.
Driver Tab
Provider: OpenGL or DirextX. OpenGL will most often give the best performance, especially on Nvidia cards, but try both and see which one gives better performance.
"Full Screen" mode is the standard way to play the game and will often give the best performance/stability.
Video Mode: Choosing lower resolutions and color modes will greatly increase framerate and lower memory usage. 32-bit color is needed to enable "Perfect" mode graphics.
"Use Stencil Buffer" enables translucent shadows (instead of full black shadows) and is required to enable "Perfect" mode graphics. For a slight performance boost, turn this setting off.
Video Tab
Texture Mipmap Filter: Simply put, this setting affects how sharp a texture may look when viewed from large angles or distances. Anisotropic offers the best image quality at a usually heavy performance loss (only folks with good video cards should use this), and bilinear filtering offers the best performance at a still acceptable texture quality. Trilinear is a tiny bit better than bilinear (it smoothes the transitions between mipmap levels) and the performance hit is very minimal depending on your video card. I recommend bilinear but it is up to personal taste and your hardware.
Texture Compression: This setting can greatly reduce the memory load and increase framerate by compressing textures. S3TC gives the highest compression ratio and may cause some minor artifacts like little squares on water but it can greatly help or eliminate stuttering (16bit has a smaller compression ratio and less performance boost but also a bit less artifacts). I recommend S3TC compression for 128 Mb graphic cards.
"Use Dither" helps eliminate the ugly color "banding" when running the game in 16-bit color mode. Has no effect in 32-bit color mode. Recomended on in 16-bit color mode and can be turned off if running with 32-bit color.
"Use Vertex Arrays" gives faster performance without image quality loss because it allows vertices to be used in groups (arrays) instead of individually. Turn this on.
"Polygon Stipple" is a way of emulating or faking translucent shadows when the stencil buffer is turned off. It does this by creating a "dotted" effect that looks translucent (not unlike the stubble of incoming facial hair). Turn this off for a small performance boost. If stencil buffer and polygon stipple are both turned off, you'll get completely black shadows which isn't much of a drawback.
"Multitexture" affects all multitexturing used in the game, most notably, some water effects, and the very high clouds that are textured to appear more "chunky." Without multitexture, these clouds are smooth white instead of textured. Highly recommended to leave this on but turning off yields performance boost.
"Combine" allows more advanced multitexturing effects. For example, the murky water effect near edges of rivers to simulate shallow depth uses this extension. Turning off gives small performance boost but I recommend to leave it on.
Turning off "Secondary Color" creates graphic anomalies during fog. For example, nearby forests may not appear to be "fogged out" while everything else is. This may give a performance boost when turned off but I recommend it to be left on.
"Vertex Array Extension" allows the use of vertex arrays as explained above. Recommended on.
"Clip Hint" tells the driver that clip volume clipping for primitives is not necesary. Basically, it tells the driver not to worry about something the game doesn't do anyway. Minor performance increase when checked (about 1 fps). Recommended on.
"Use Palette" uses paletted textures instead of full color textures. This can save memory with little to no image quality loss. About 1 fps increase when checked. Recommended on.
"Texture Anisotropic Extension" should be checked if you selected anisotropic as your mipmap filter. Otherwise, uncheck it.
"Texture Compress ARB Extension" should be checked if you're using S3TC for texture compression. Otherwise, uncheck it.