A good video review

[Blackdog_kt]

I had a post ready to go and then the forum temporarily became unavailable so i lost it

Repeating what i was about to say, thanks for taking the time to upload this. I agree the sound mixing could benefit from some tweaking, but i'm not going to complain when this is the first truly high resolution user-made video we've seen and with clear in-game sounds on top of that.

Off the top of my head, some observations:

• It seems the effects are present despite the filter (propellers from various angles, tracers, exhaust flames, etc)...maybe it would be better to run with the filter on once it's optimized for FPS, instead of running an un-filtered version with reduced effects.

• Sounds are better than IL2. In-cockpit sounds are muffled as they should, external sounds are better than in other videos but maybe there's a bit of room for improvement. Overall, in-cockpit sounds are better than external ones.

• It runs well apart from stutters which the developers said they know the cause of and will be patched away soon.

• Apparently we can not only fly with empty guns, but take out the guns completely.
  Not a big deal now, but if we get something like a mosquito in the future this "pallet loading" type of interface for each weapon station would be useful: for anti-shipping, load the 57mm cannon in the nose and rockets on the wings, for ground attack load the 4x303 and 4x20mm in the nose and bomb racks on the wings, for photo recon load a glass nose and cameras in the bomb bay,etc.
  Much more modular and it takes away the need to have multiple models of the same type for different external hardpoint configurations (so late FW190s will be possible without a bomb rack as well ), as well as making it easier to modify existing models by editing/adding hardpoints instead of making new 3d models or preset weapon loadouts. With the CoD system it's entirely possible to select asymmetric loadouts, eg, a bomb on one wing and a drop-tank on the other, since each hardpoint is treated individually.

• Engines cough, sputter, backfire and emit smoke according to power settings. Very cool, visible during the Blenheim flight.

• I get a suicidal urge to fly Blehneims, the bomb aimer's position is terrific and oh look, is that a wind-drift meter on the right hand console? Lots of tiny details like these all over the place that actually have a use in flying and operating the aircraft instead of being mere decorative textures

• Lots of other stuff i had noted down in my previous post but now forgot.

There's also noticeable building pop-up but it doesn't bother me for a very simple reason: it seems to be a by-product of a combination of user selectable options. The overall landscape and sky draw distance is much higher than the building one, it's just that setting buildings to lower detail will cause them to render at a closer range.
This is very different to what pop-up was in IL2, where it existed even when there was no option to modify draw distances (ie, it occurred even when the draw distances were the same for both landscape and 3d objects) and it's still there today regardless of having options for increased landscape draw distance.

Personally, i'd rather have a 20km visibility range to spot aircraft along with the ability to have the building render range at 10km to maintain some FPS, instead of having to fly with a common setting for both which means choosing between either overall reducing draw distance and crippling my situational awareness/landmark identification/navigation or having to use settings that my PC can't handle. In such a case of using long-range landscape rendering with short-range building rendering pop-up is inevitable, but it is still useful to have separate options for those who like to balance looks with functionality, especially when flying full switch online.


Most of all, this review gives us a good indication of relative performance and the ability to make an educated guess on how it will run on our systems.

Currently, it seems that higher clock speeds and VRAM matter the most. I hope that after a few patches and optimizations we'll be able to better spread the processing load over multiple cores, putting the OS on core1, main game engine on core2 and whatever else it can use on the remaining two. Maybe we can already and it's just a matter of editing the conf.ini to set process affinity, since there is such an option just like it was in IL2, but we'll have to wait for more feedback on this.

I do have an i7 920 at stock speed (2.7 GHz) but i don't really want to overclock it since it's the earlier C0 revision that doesn't go that high anyway. Most of all, my PC is on almost 24/7 and i don't want to up my power bills by increasing my system's idle wattage

My weak spot might be my 3GB of RAM, but apparently the game doesn't use more than 2GB yet. Maybe i'll get an extra 3GB once we have a 64-bit .exe to make use of it.

What i would really like to know is how my Ati 4890 1GB stacks up against some of the current low-end to middle-range DX11 GPUs when both are running DX10.
I know for a fact that late generation DX10 GPUs were faster than early DX11 ones when they were both running DX9/10, but i don't know if and how much difference current gen DX11 cards make when running in DX10 mode.

In any case, i'm optimistic that since the uploader could maintain 30-40FPS at tree-top level with Fraps running on high settings, i might be able to maintain 30FPS overall on medium detail after the first couple of patches arrive. What do you guys think?

P.S.

We know the stutters are in for a short-term fix and it seems that a lot of the slow-downs are caused by some kind of faulty loading routine.

Many people report missions running better if they quit and refly, or pause and cycle the external cameras once, which seems to be an indication that the game is not loading/pre-caching everything it should before the mission, causing it to access the hard-drive during gameplay more often and slowing down the FPS.

I'm not an expert, but it seems possible to fix and coupled with the better looking videos we see each day even from the current version that does have its issues, i'm going to maintain my optimism.