S!
Did some testing last night with Catalyst 10.1 Hotfix drivers and different DLL-files of IL-2 floating around. To see which ones would give best image quality and performance. Quite surprising results as average framerates were within 1-2fps between ALL of them with same settings applied to the graphics card. The most recent dll-files caused terrain to flicker and corrupt, but setting Catalyst AI ON solved that. Catalyst AI just has a negative impact on FPS, it drops and noticeable in heavier scenes of The Black Death. But average FPS was with ALL 53-54FPS at 1920x1200 32-bit, Perfect etc. Will post my test setup later today for reference.
A few pointers though. If using AntiAliasing EdgeDetect with 4X and AA Mode at Performance, there is only a very small hit on FPS, maybe 1-4fps. So a very well implemented thing. With Adaptive or SuperSampling almost the same, maybe slight stutter. But need to run more tests to verify this. Anisotropic filtering, if application controlled, gives worse image quality than overriding it with CCC. IL-2 seems to use 2x Anisotropic only. I ran tests with 16x and there was a difference in the water shimmering.
Catalyst AI is a bit complicated issue. Some DLL's required it to be at Standard at least to get normal graphics(terrain only). Some dll's worked normally and faster without it. Catalyst AI at Advanced caused water to look like it was "pixelated" or covered with small squares. So I settled with a set of dll's that gave best image and performance without Cat AI.
The variation of error messages in console with different dll's was wide. Some gave a lot of them, most only the clamped error now and then. So a set of new dll's for IL-2 would clearly help users to get more out of IL-2, but that is up to TD/MG to decide
Test results with settings and conf.ini later today..still at work..meh!
Coastie, can you keep us posted on ATI Team's responses on the driver issue? Would be great to see these issues rectified.