Dear Team D,
It's good to see that you do respond to members questions, and for that I have to give much Kudos. There is nothing more frustrating than question after question sitting unanswered and many people guessing at what an official answer could be.
So, here's my question.
There are currently a lot of people suffering with the ATi drivers for Radeon cards, I know that this is not your problem and ATi (I understand) are currently working on fixes.
What I would like to hear an update on, is work on dll files for IL2.
I think the last updates were in March 2008, and lets be honest, many things have moved on since that.
Here is a post from the ATi driver thread from Flanker 35 talking about the dll files;
"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!"
Now, there is a lot of testing going on there, and it seems that some dll's are still causing issues.
Currently while running a clean install of 4.09 and the latest 10.2 and having an older 9.1 atioglxx.dll file in the 1946 folder, I get the oddest effect when flying over summer or winter landscapes. It can happen at a random time, but the ground goes Deep Blue/Black in colour, all the objects stay correctly coloured, but after about 10-seconds the game CTD's.
I have to wonder if this is a dll or driver issue?
Either-way, would it be possible to have a look at updating the dll files to help out the faithful?
Cheers, MP.
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