pc upgraders which trak

[Flyby]

well, my current system is in parts now (has been for quite a while now), but iirc my average fps for the Kamikaze trak was in the low 30s with water set to 3. in usual game play I didn't have many issues, but I noted that I needed to tone down the flak from ships and such. I made a lot of at-sea type mission and learned that ship flak, if not set properly would bog my sytem down. I also remember a mission I made where the object was to down some Ju-52s before they could drop their paratroops. Well the first time the interception failed, and when those troops dropped, my system REALLY slowed up! It was an online coop mission and the opfor won the day. I had to reduce the nimber of troop transports to get it to run acceptably.
At any rate, the new seroes of intel processors should see me clear. I need to see how the x38 chipset/mobo prices look too. I'm not going for an extreme system, so maybe the p35 chipset will have to do, and DDR2 if the price of DDR3 doesn't drop enough by the time I'm ready to step up. Also I figure that since I own a BFG 6800 ultra, I might get lucky with their trade-in policy, and get that hot little 8800gt-oc they offer.
I hope the dollar bounces back by then. If not, 7fps is not a bad minimum rate at all!!
Flyby

[Bearcat]

Well it will be good to see yopu back in the air..

[Flyby]

Originally Posted by Bearcat

Well it will be good to see yopu back in the air..

I feel so discombobulated not flying online with the mighty 99th. The squad has gone far in my absence, and added many new and talented members. I'll be a flaming noob once I do return.
99th_Flyby out

[choctaw111]

I figured I would run a test to see how my system performed. Somehow Mazex seems to know how to squeeze that little bit of extra speed out of his rig.
All of my tests are running at 1920x1200 resolution, 16xAF, 16XQAA, water=4, forest=3 and 3dgunners=1. For the record I play using water=3. My rig just doesn't like water=4 but I did the tests with it anyway. Oh, and my driver is 158.22. I found that for now, it works best.

For the Black Death I got Min.29 Max.109 Avg.73.736
For Kamikaze I got Min.27 Max.239 Avg.71.884

I also used ProcessAffinityMask=2 which only uses the second core I believe. Even having a four core system, Il2 seems to run best using only Core#2 for some reason. If there is a way to somehow optimize this quad core system I am all ears.

My system specs:
QX6700 Quad Core @ 3.22GHz
Asus Striker Extreme Mobo
8800GTX SLi
X-Fi Xtreme Audio
280GB Raptor HD RAID0
370GB Storage
24" Widescreen

[mazex]

Originally Posted by choctaw111

I figured I would run a test to see how my system performed. Somehow Mazex seems to know how to squeeze that little bit of extra speed out of his rig.
All of my tests are running at 1920x1200 resolution, 16xAF, 16XQAA, water=4, forest=3 and 3dgunners=1. For the record I play using water=3. My rig just doesn't like water=4 but I did the tests with it anyway. Oh, and my driver is 158.22. I found that for now, it works best.

For the Black Death I got Min.29 Max.109 Avg.73.736
For Kamikaze I got Min.27 Max.239 Avg.71.884

I also used ProcessAffinityMask=2 which only uses the second core I believe. Even having a four core system, Il2 seems to run best using only Core#2 for some reason. If there is a way to somehow optimize this quad core system I am all ears.

My system specs:
QX6700 Quad Core @ 3.22GHz
Asus Striker Extreme Mobo
8800GTX SLi
X-Fi Xtreme Audio
280GB Raptor HD RAID0
370GB Storage
24" Widescreen

Well, our scores are very similar, but you are using 1920x1200 while I'm only running at 1280x1024 (got a 19'' monitor). If I would run it at 1920x1200 my scores whould drop quite a bit I guess. Rightfully so, as you are running your 8800GTX's in SLI. Considering IL2 only uses one core I guess your extra two cores makes no real difference - and the clock difference between 3.0 and 3.22 does not matter either as It´s not the CPU that's the bottleneck.

Regarding parameters you mention that I haven't: I'm using 3Dgunners=1 and ProcessAffinityMask=2 too - but forest=2 (not that it matters on Kamikaze )

Regarding tuning for using multiple cores: "It's tough to learn an old horse to sit" as we say here in Sweden. I guess a complete rewrite of the core logic in the renedering engine would be required for that.

Anyway, I guess that our experience is rather similar

EDIT - thinking of buying a new monitor as that's the only part of my system that feels a bit "out of scope". I haven't tried IL2 on a widescreen monitor - is it a lot better? Even though I'm using TrackIR 4 I'm feeling that it would be nice to have that widescreen view... What about that widescreen monitor when you play old games that only support 4:3 resolutions? Does it crop the image in the right and left end and keep it sharp or do some zoom/stretch thingy that makes the image blurry and distorted etc?

[Flyby]

It seems the thread has taken an interesting turn. I'd like to hear about monitors too.
Flyby
ps Nice numbers there, choctaw.

[choctaw111]

I haven't really tried any older games on this rig I would imagine that it would either crop the image as you say or just stretch it out to fit. On the newer games, if I choose a non wide screen resolution, it just stretches the image to fit the screen.

I forgot to mention that I only use 2 Gigs of RAM. XP doesn't recognize any more than 2.5 Gigs anyway.

[choctaw111]

As far as monitors are concerned, I use an Acer 24" widescreen that I have had since March of this year and I am VERY pleased with it. I paid a premium for it back then but they are very reasonably priced now. The picture and clarity are great and overall is a very good gaming display.

Just did a quick test running the numbers on the settings I normally use: Water=3, Effects=1, 16AF, and 4xAA and still 1920x1200.
For Kamikaze they are: Min.28, Max.298 and Avg.84.711
For the Black Death: Min.29, Max.183 and Avg.93.750

I found that 4xAA still looks ok compared to 16XQAA and I get a little bit of a performance gain, but not much. This change is most noticeable during engine startup and when a lot of smoke is present. I like to keep my frames pegged at 60 as often as possible when running V-Sync on (when not testing). I may do more testing at 16XQAA and see how often those frames drop below 60 during normal game play. The thing that really gets to me is flying over large cities! FIFTEEN (15) frames per second!! That kind of thing should not happen on a rig like this for a game as old as this one...but it does, and I don't know of anyone who has found a way to solve this problem.

[335th_GRAthos]

Nice postings here guys, thanks !
My two 8800GTX are ordered I am gathering information on appropriate NV drivers.

Choctaw, I thought you had a 3 monitor (Matrox TrippleHead2Go) setup?

Can anyone post some benchmarks at ultra high resolution ?
I run IL2FB on 3072x768



Thanks in advance

[DKoor]

Originally Posted by 335th_GRAthos

Nice postings here guys, thanks !
My two 8800GTX are ordered I am gathering information on appropriate NV drivers.

It would be nice to know whether these will be enough to play SoW or not...... I guess at this moment that is not possible to know