Russian version review

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by Devastat

Yep I am positive now, the anti-epilepsy filter is definitely gone from my IL-2 the performance is so good. Now there is still a lot of tweaking needed to be done for sure, but now I am starting to believing in this project, the experience of playing this game is totally unique. I just saw blue fumes flaming out of my engine and it looked beautiful at 5am in the morning, and I was in top of london and still getting a playable framerate, but offcourse not as good as over the water.. (all graphics details on HIGH except shadows disabled).

I don't know if I could get such a good framerate from the international version tho, as we don't know if it is possible to disable this filter from that version..?? Well nobody knows at this stage. But it runs so well now that I wont install the international version at this stage..

I have to say that not has any game ever given such an feeling of "being there" as this game. It does feel totally immersive, as if you were really flying the plane.
If someone could help me to find binding key for changing the seat, I cannot get into any other seats in my planes as the keybinding C (which is supposed to be default) doesn't work for some reason, so I cannot test any other seats except pilot seats..

Anyway time to go to sleep now, long day behind..

I think i've read somewhere that there's a massive difference in FPS if you restart your PC after installation. Most of the people who installed and started flying right away had terrible FPS, then the next day they report their FPS being higher as if by magic, just like the situation you describe.

Also, a lot of people report that much of the stuttering could be due to inefficient loading of textures and various other stuff. Some say that they get higher FPS if the re-fly the mission, or if they pause and cycle through the external cameras. Also, there is a blurry texture effect when a lot of things are going on in the screen (i noticed it on some youtube videos) that is very similar to what happens sometimes in FSX: it's like the game can't load everything fast enough, so it substitutes lower detail and low-res textures on the aircraft skins until it has time to render it properly.

All of this probably points to an inefficient loading routine, or maybe a need to optimize what loads before the mission and from how far away the land textures will be pre-cached. If for example my view distance is 30km and the game loads ground textures in 15km segments, it's obvious that i'll be getting a lot of texture pop-up.

Finally, i think that apart from the bugs that need to be fixed, there's probably a whole lot of undocumented tweaks that people currently have to discover for themselves, at least until the developers can provide an updated readme in a following patch to walk us through it all.

Overall, i remain optimistic. Some guy in the Russian forum posted a guide and said he can now get a consistent 60 FPS at acceptable detail levels with a more or less mid-range PC (i think). I don't exactly remember his specs but i think he had an AMD Phenom quad, an Ati 5xxx or 6xxx series card and 8Gb of RAM?

If he can get 60 FPS by tweaking stuff all by himself, i'm sure i'll be able to manage 30 FPS on my i7 920/Ati 4890 after a couple of patches and a small RAM upgrade (i'm thinking of going from 3GB to 6GB, purely because my win7 64 needs between 700mb and 1GB at idle). By the way, does anyone know how a 4890 1Gb compares to the DX11 cards if they both render in DX10 mode? Are the DX11 cards so much faster or can i expect just slightly slower performance since the sim runs in DX10 mode?

EDIT: Apparently, what the guy in the Russian forum did was open conf.ini and disable dynamic lights, among other things. That's the one thing i definitely remember about his optimizations.

[Speedingbullets]

With the filter removed, do you now have SLI/Xfire support ?

[Bryan21cag]

played the first mission of the GB campaign like 3 times in a row on various settings was playable on max with 1x anti-aliasing although heavy shudder when it hit

played again on medium settings (default) still with 1x anti and again was playable slightly better fps and a pretty heavy shudder but hit less often.

then again on everything low setting except for debris and aircraft model slightly better fps and far fewer shudders but still big when they hit some were lasting like 6-10 seconds.

todays testing was was geared on finding out (still guessing really but an educated one at least ) weather or not my rig will be able to run this game at full max settings after its tweaked and i believe this is a solid yes.

i even followed the river rite through the middle of london with max settings and the fps was probably 10-15 (full on slide show) plus the 10 second long shudders but i was still able to follow the river through town.

If this is the performance using 32 bits, 1 core, 1 or 2GB ram and not even all of one of my video cards to run then i am a very happy camper at this moment

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by Bryan21cag

played the first mission of the GB campaign like 3 times in a row on various settings was playable on max with 1x anti-aliasing although heavy shudder when it hit

played again on medium settings (default) still with 1x anti and again was playable slightly better fps and a pretty heavy shudder but hit less often.

then again on everything low setting except for debris and aircraft model slightly better fps and far fewer shudders but still big when they hit some were lasting like 6-10 seconds.

todays testing was was geared on finding out (still guessing really but an educated one at least ) weather or not my rig will be able to run this game at full max settings after its tweaked and i believe this is a solid yes.

i even followed the river rite through the middle of london with max settings and the fps was probably 10-15 (full on slide show) plus the 10 second long shudders but i was still able to follow the river through town.

If this is the performance using 32 bits, 1 core, 1 or 2GB ram and not even all of one of my video cards to run then i am a very happy camper at this moment

What resolution were you playing and what other resolutions can you run. try going lower to somewhere like 1200X700 with 1X AA and report back!!

[Oldschool61]

Can someone try running at a more realistic resolution to see how the fps is say like 1600x900 or 1024 x 768. Lower res may give big boost to fps.

[Devastat]

@oldschool61 the resolution doesn't make any change in this case when you are running on a high end machine. Like I have stated before, the problem is not the hardware, it is the code in the game. Run it on the fastest processor on the market, with best video card and it would probably still stutter badly in close combat. No joke.

[jimbop]

Originally Posted by Devastat

@oldschool61 the resolution doesn't make any change in this case when you are running on a high end machine. Like I have stated before, the problem is not the hardware, it is the code in the game. Run it on the fastest processor on the market, with best video card and it would probably still stutter badly in close combat. No joke.

Yes, I agree that this is not necessarily a bad thing if true. It's a whole lot easier to optimise code than to ask for the entire community to upgrade their machines.

[Bryan21cag]

Originally Posted by Speedingbullets

With the filter removed, do you now have SLI/Xfire support ?

i don't think so because it was running with my crossfire still enabled before i removed the filter just with worse fps.

removing the filter did give a very noticeable jump in fps which led to my posting above. I am now as sure as i can be that i bought enough rig to max this game out once it is properly utilizing all of my available hardware properly.

[Devastat]

@bryan i have i920 12ram and radeon5850.
I have come to conclusion that in my case there is not much difference wheter i play on high or low settings. The game runs great when flying solo, problems occur in near distance dogfights.

So i guess that at least in my case the problems are not in the hardware but within the game itself. There is some optimisation that needs to be done.

[Bryan21cag]

Originally Posted by Devastat

@bryan i have i920 12ram and radeon5850.
I have come to conclusion that in my case there is not much difference wheter i play on high or low settings. The game runs great when flying solo, problems occur in near distance dogfights.

So i guess that at least in my case the problems are not in the hardware but within the game itself. There is some optimisation that needs to be done.

Agreed this was my conclusion as well I am starting to feel like in the end most of us are going to find out that we have plenty of system to run this game from low end all the way up to high end