Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover: Patch 1.0.13954

[Pudenfuhrer]

First post to say how impressed I am with this game now

With this new patch I'm getting great performance with graphics set to high. This is easily the best looking game I've ever seen and the fps I'm getting for how good it looks is really impressive. The ability to look and move about the cockpit with the mouse is really immerse compared to il2 1946. I found myself taking a hurricane up to high altitude with the engine starting to labour and cut with the advanced engine modelling. After spending a while setting keys and operating pitch and mix with ctrl + throttle and shift + throttle, I was looking at the exhaust colour and trying to get the best mix - so immerse.

I burnt damaged the exhaust a bit after messing up coming back down Landed slightly hairily and watched the trees and grass blowing in the wind.

A combat engagement near the cost with about 10 planes ran the same - really well.
Over London I get slightly lower frames at low altitude - but still felt like a fightable fps. I'm not getting the big variation and jumps at all.

I'm getting at least 30-40 fps and often more. Stuttering is mild

My specs
8 gig RAM 1333Mhz
Phenom II 965 X4 clocked to 3700Ghz
SLI GTX470 - running in single GPU mode clocked to 710 core, 3450mhz mem
WD caviar black

Just awesome - I'd recommend right now to anyone with a powerful single card setup. It's probably gotta be a GTX280 or 470 or better - but man it's worth it! Can't wait for SLI and further fixes. To anyone that doesn't know, these guys will give us years of updates and new planes - just wait and see.

[fruitbat]

Originally Posted by Pudenfuhrer

It's gotta be a GTX280 or 470 or better

nope, 280 isn't good enough, speaking form personal experience.

got to be 4 series or better.

[Pudenfuhrer]

Originally Posted by fruitbat

nope, 280 isn't good enough, speaking form personal experience.

got to be 4 series or better.

Interesting - that (edit) may be an indicator that DX11 shader performance is important. I know that things like tesselation etc are much more optimised on the fermi cards. I believe that in most DX9 games a GTX470 and GTX280 are equivalent

[jibo]

in fact it's gotta be 470gtx 1.2Gb minimum to be more precise

[Pudenfuhrer]

Originally Posted by jibo

in fact it's gotta be 470gtx 1.2Gb minimum to be more precise

I think the use of "got to" should be avoided - but you may be right. To clarify - I just mean that we are guessing at where the bottlenecks in systems may be

p

[flyingblind]

I am starting to find this all getting a little irritating. Nothing seems consistant at the moment. I am not even sure if the patch has downloaded and installed. I can see no version number on any of my screens. Something downloaded and my axis controls were suddenly changed around so I can only assume it has.
The frame rate dropped drastically and the more I reduced the video settings the worse it got until eventually flying the quick mission over Dover with just the Hurrican and everything set on minimum I was down to 10fps. So I just wacked everything up to maximum and the fps immediately jumped to 40! Until I got close to the ground when the fps evaporated again.
The things that gave me better fps on the deck were turning off grass, setting buidings amount to high and buildings detail to very low. Even with forest on very high I am getting 30fps down low but the biggest factor was turning AA down to 2x. And the landscape looks pretty good.
When I checked the performance I found the CPU Usage was only about 14% until I changed the affinity mask to 15 when the usage doubled to 30%.
I still don't think things are as good when multiple aircraft are around with even more stuttering than pre patch. I think it's just a case of experiementing and waiting for more patches.
One thing that did make me smile is that if you look at the heads of some of the bolts, the ones on the seat back of the Hurrican are good, you will see they have a word I can't quite make out and Maddox Games embossed on them.

Asus M4N98TD EVO NF 980a SLI AM3 Motherboard
Phenome II 965 Quad Core
Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
4gb DDR3

[Pudenfuhrer]

Originally Posted by flyingblind

Asus M4N98TD EVO NF 980a SLI AM3 Motherboard
Phenome II 965 Quad Core
Asus Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
4gb DDR3

Interesting - I just picked high for most options as very high seemed overkill and it says in the manual that lower settings are not recommended as they won't necessarily bring much improvement. Your and my systems are similar, same processor and mobo - I'll post exactly what my settings are later as well as my conf.ini

You are running on a decent 64bit OS right? - Windows 7 64bit pro and better offers about as much physical memory addressing as anyone can use and that's what I'm using.

For once I think this is a game that tests your entire system - not just the GPU. Only problem just now is it's not using all our cores and multi GPUs..

Runs as well for me as, say Fallout New Vegas - or Shogun 2 (and still no DX11 there )
Well - that's enough from me for tonight - I must sound like a fanboy - but this is the most modern and exciting game engine - and it's only going to expand and grow - good times ahead and keep the faith!

All the best with everyone persevering with this -
p

[BadAim]

There has got to be a common thread somewhere in all of this, but I just don't see it. I have a GTX 470 with over 1.2 gig of ram and I'm still getting micro freezes (I hesitate to call them stutters because they last so long). I'm getting better framerates though so I think were going in the right direction. If I didn't have an uncanny ability to see the forest in spite of the trees, I might be getting frustrated here, but I kinda think it's fun. (I suppose in a masochistic sort of way)

[Killerwatt]

The patch has fixed the problem of the green sea. While using forest low, I can now have trees and a normal sea. Flying over London pre patch would eventually result in a launcher crash with the "Launcher has encountered a problem" error message. This problem is still present post patch. I dont seem to get this problem over water. I havent tried over country yet. I think this problem is related to memory. Possibly a memory leak as it takes time to manifest itself.
Overall the perfomance seems more fluid but there are still issues with massive slowdowns when coming in to land. Also the option for AA only has one entry in the drop down box - Off. All my testing was done with a resolution off 1200x800 under DX9.
My specs are :
Antec Nine Hundred Two Case,
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 Vapor-X 2GB,
Akasa PowerMax 850W Power supply,
Asus P6T Motherboard LGA1 366 Intel X58 ATX RAID SA,
Intel Core i7-920 D0 Step Processor (8M Cache),
Corsair XMS3 3GB (3x1024M B) DDR3 Memory 1600MHz,
Noctua NH-U12P CPU Cooler SE1366,
LG GH22NP20 22x DVDRW/ RAM,
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Disk Drive 72 (Two),
Windows XP Home Edition. updated to SP3
No overclocking done and everything running at stock speeds

[Rattlehead]

Here is my report:

System:

Intel dual core E6850 (stock speed)
Ati Radeon 5870 (Catalyst 11.3 drivers)
4 gb Ram
Windows 7 32-bit

Resolution: 1920x1080
Antialiasing: x2

test 1A: Free flight over England

Model detail: High
building detail: Low
land detail: low
forest: Low
visual effects: High
damage decals: High
buildings amount: Low
land shading: low
Grass, roads, shadows all on

FPS: on average 40+
Microstuttering: very low (but still a little bit)

Verdict:

Performance increase is negligable in test 1A from pre-patch.

Test 1B: Free flight over England

Model detail: High
building detail: medium
land detail: medium
forest: medium
visual effects: High
damage decals: High
buildings amount: medium
land shading: medium
Grass, roads, shadows all on

FPS: between 28 and 34 fps.
Microstuttering: high

Verdict:

An increase in performance over pre-patch, but the microstuttering makes it difficult to play. Without microstutter, the game would be generally smooth at these settings.


Test 2A: Custom test with 12 Spitfires attacking 9 Heinkels He-111 at 2500m over land

(Settings as Test 1A)

FPS: high 30's on average
Microstuttering: very little, but still some

Verdict:

A big increase in performance when attacking bombers over pre-patch. Before, the game would crawl when close to bombers, but now the frame rate dips only a little. Much improved.


Test 2B: Custom test with 12 Spitfires attacking 9 Heinkels He-111 at 2500m over land

(Settings as Test 1B)

FPS: high 30's on average
Microstuttering: very little, but still some

Verdict:

An increase in performance over pre-patch, but stutter when attacking bombers at these settings is considerably worse than in test 2A)

The biggest performance increase came when flying over London. (settings as in test 1A)
Pre-patch, it was completely unplayable, but now for the first time I was seeing sometimes more than 30 fps. This is a huge improvement. Sadly, there is still a fair amount of stutter.

Overall verdict:

In general, there is an increase in performance over pre-patched game. Microstutter once trees and buildings is set to 'medium' is considerable, but with trees and buildings set to 'low' it is almost gone.

The game would be smooth at respectable detail levels but for the stutter, which is still high.

The visual artifacts and glitches I was seeing before are all gone now, which is much improved from the game pre-patch.

There is still pixellating of the Spitfire's rear view mirror.

The Heinkels seem very easy to shoot down now...much easier than in pre-patch game. I shot down 3 on a single pass.


Thanks team for the patch. I feel in general things have been improved, but there might still be some work to do regarding the stutter.
But overall I am pleased with the results.