Poor performance after retail patch? Re-installing will solve it!

[Orpheus]

Ho chaps o/

Here's a little story. As most of you know by now, after each patch, it is best to delete the contents of your 1C Softclub folder (found in My Documents) to ensure that the patch overwrites the older files to ensure you don't get any conflicts between the old and the new. I think it was Blackdog that figured this out (thanks mate!), and although from memory we later found out that Steam should do this by itself anyway, it was still a 'good thing to do' to ensure best performance.

After the last retail patch, my game performance went through the floor. I went from High Textures down to Medium, dropped my building level/detail - everything - and still performance wasn't half of what it was. In frustration earlier, I wiped CloD from my hard drive, intending to wait a few months to see how things progressed.

Half an hour later I decided to reinstall the game, figuring 'what the hell'. I put my old controls back in and started the game up for a quick flight, switching off only the Epilepsy Filter in the video settings in what I thought would be a futile attempt to see if anything was different.

I nearly fell off my chair! I'm now running with Original textures (something that has been utterly impossible for me since release), mostly medium everything else. Performance improved massively - there is still a fair bit of stutter when loading new ground areas, but once it's loaded things seem to be ok - definately playable with a stable 25-30 fps, even at heights of about 30 feet! I clipped the treetops in stable, clean flight for the first time since buying the game! Not only that, but the images for both the Adler Angriff and Cliffs of Dover campaigns are different too - so something isn't being changed by the Steam patch alone.

So the lesson here is: delete the entire game, including the 1C softclub folder in My Documents (remember to save your control/ammo configs so you don't have to set them up again). Then reinstall the game from scratch. This should make your game fully compatible with the latest retail patch and noticeably improve performance.

I have no idea why this works, or why just downloading the patch and overwriting the existing files seems to cause conflicts that reduce performance. The only downside I've noticed is that AA no longer works having done the above, to the extent that even the flavour images for each campaign mission are jaggy as hell (no idea why, assumed they were just images, not renders?), and Crossfire, while better still seems to increase the stutter when compared to a single card.

Hope this is a help to those with poor performance after each patch! I know it's a sod downloading the entire game again, but the boost should be well worth it! With any luck this will be a help to Luthier and co as well, as I'm pretty sure they didn't intend for us to have to re-download the whole game every time there's a patch!

Good luck and happy flying! o/