I post this here because I think I found an easyway to identify when the limit of your current rig is reached, with GPU-Z:
Finaly after three days of hard work testing the new setup under Win7 I noticed following interesting things
probably worthwhile sharing.
Yes, it is playable but your GPU must have lot's of memory!
Back in Christmas when I was buying my new GTX-570 with 1280Mb RAM I though the Nvidia guys had gone crazy.
I am happy now I kept that thought to myself.
Win7-64bit is a must, otherwise in WinXP you will be stuck to run the game at 640x480 kai 800x600 resolution (maybe also 1024x76
Sorry the photos are big because my desktop has 3840x1024 resolution (three monitors) and the game runs in the middle window at 1280x1024.
At the far right are the interesting stats on CPU and GPU workload:
#1 The game appears to be using nicely many CPUs, I have Process Affinity=6 (using cores 1+2 out of the four 0,1,2,3)
the system runs very smoothly and total CPU usage is 30% (whereas WinXP had only 13%).
So, thanks to Win7-64 the CPU doubled, this is good news!
It is a bit surprising though as it conflicts with the statement that the game poorly support multiple-cores.
You will see that the CPU usage is very evenly spread around the four cores, I am also surprised myself.
#2 The less good news is the consumption of GPU memory. The freeware GPU-Z is an excellent way to monitor this in real time.
Here GPU-Z shows the results of the first GTX-570 (the second being idle).
The most important is in the middle of the GPU-Z window, the
Memory Used
Above the sea, 1280x1024 Memory Used is 959Mb RAM :excl:
Above land, 1128Mb RAM :excl: :excl:
MY GPU has 1280Gb RAM so it can still run smoothly but if the GPU has less then problems will start and you will have
to lower the resolution or the quality (grass, roads, shadows, etc, etc).
Mission 1, bombers intercept with 12 airplanes in the air
Quick mission over land with 6 airplanes
resolution: 1280x1024
anti aliasing: 0x (I get very bad errors when I try to raise AA)
Epilepsy: Off
Model: high
building: very low
land:medium
forest: off
effects:high
damage decals:high
buildings:low
land shading: low
grass: on
shadows: on
roads: on
I must underline that I am more interesting in flying dogfight than enjoying eye-candy;
The new game has endless capabilities in graphics and it is definitively very heavy for most graphics cards available today (at least until the next patch arrives)
but I do not care that much; if I wanted nice graphics I could have been flying MS FSX four years earlier...
What I find very annoying on the other side though is the
unconfirmed information that AI can see through thick clouds
(they had promised us they would fix this in the IL2FB days, it will be a major issue if they did not) -
I can not confirm as I have not tested it yet myself - too busy trimming my rig.
Using GPU-Z you can easily check whether you reached the limits of your system, watching Memory Used and Memory Controller load.
I hope this helps somebody, especialy those who start frustrated "my resolution is 1600x... the game is unplayable" types of threads
~S~