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The Tools:
The first tool is one I cannot recommend highly enough. Your full attention! These settings and procedures must be followed in their entirety and nope I'm not responsible for anything that happens to you, your computer or descendents and I'm also loath to answer email support questions. You can post a question to the www.simhq.com iL2 forums or comp.sys.ibm.games.flight-sims group on Usenet and if I have an answer I will share it with everyone. Answering individual questions on a one to one basis takes away from flying and taking care of business. Be warned I really truly don't like people who cannot read directions or who need to be held by the hand every step of the way. Alrighty now that the disclaimers are out of the way. We need several things before we start and both of them are really almost as cheap as your attention. The first one is run don't walk to the www.metabyte.com and click on thru to www.wicked3d.com buy the Wicked GL drivers. Its the best 7.95 you will ever spend. Lets just say that some people would spend hundreds to get the increase in framerates you are gonna see in iL-2 with them. And if you even quibble for a moment on the cost then ask yourself how much does hardware cost that would get you from 33 frames a second to 47 frames a second..?? $8.00 sounds purty damn cheap to me...maybe I will ask Wicked to increase the cost and donate something to my CPU fund. Tell them I sent you...give me a reason to continue to bail you suckers out...<G> Btw it also works great in Medal Of Honor...I don't get squares in my gun smoke or any other bad things mentioned in their readme. Next up is a wonderful utility put out by a guy with a sense of humor and a terrific ability to give back to the hobby he loves. Go to www.fraps.com and tell them I sent you. Get fraps, read the documentation and learn how to use it properly. No, flying over some vague mission then reporting back to your buddies that you get x frames a second is NOT the way its done. Only knuckleheads do that...and I know that no one around here is a knucklehead. The FIRST absolute goal of any benchmark must be to have consistency. It absolutely must report the same average framerate each time its run if nothing has changed in your hardware or game settings. The benchmark I use for example for iL-2 comes within a frame or less each time its run....when you run my benchmark mission it will report 48.45 48.95 and such...if your benchmark reports back all sorts of different numbers then you got it wrong. Solutions:
Install the Wicked GL.exe then after its registered navigate to the folder and find ogl_hires.dll. Copy it to a temp folder and rename it to opengl32.dll. DO NOT PUT THIS INTO YOUR WINDOWS/SYSTEM FOLDER! Instead of doing something dumb, put the file into your iL-2 Folder. OpenGl has a wonderful way of working, it looks first in the apps folder for the tools needed to operate then it looks outside the folder. This way you can indeed have separate OpenGL32.dll drivers for different apps. I haven't found anything that the Wicked Mini GL driver will not work great with but that doesn't mean its impossible. So far I have it in iL-2, Medal of Honor, Q3, Castle Wolf, Serious Sam and a few others that slip my mind. Open the Wicked Control
Panel and use these settings. Revised
Next open up your Video Card properties and here are my suggestions for you. I run at 16bit color depth because with these settings all my Alpha Textures look wonderful and cleaning those up would be the only reason to turn 32bit on. 1. 3D Filter Quality=High (very important setting that eliminates banding, has the biggest detrimental affect on Framerate outside of FSAA setting and color depth) 2. Alpha-Blending=Sharper 3. Legacy Texture Compression=Enabled 4. Force 16bit Textures=disable (For iL-2 you need this off since if its on the prop gets really ugly) 5. Mip Map Dithering=disable These are all the settings that should have any affect on your setup. The others are preferential that don't have an affect on iL-2. I tend to fly at x2 FSAA in iL-2 since x4 FSAA is too slow right now. Now we need to adjust iL-2 to meet your satisfaction. PAY ATTENTION THERE'S a quiz at the end. Navigate to your iL-2 Folder and open up iL2setup.exe. This is what you will see...set it to this. Don't use Multitexture as either the sim or the driver has a bug in it that causes major ugly stuff to occur. CUSTOM iL-2 SETUP REFERRED TO BELOW
These settings have been the ones that have proved to work best with iL-2 with both the 3dfx's Full ICD OpenGL driver and the Wicked OpenGl Mini GL driver. They add both speed and beauty to the mix. Set texture compression to S3TC so that the P-39 Gunsite will be rendered properly as well as solving other graphic problems. Use Vertex Arrays adds significantly to the speed as you will see in the benchmarks as does combine, I assume that "Use Palette" is the form of texture compression and it also helps speed things up. Anyways here is the benchmark mission I came up with to benchmark iL-2. As usual I am releasing this to you so that you can learn how to benchmark and to aid the hobby. iL-2 Benchmark And here are some scores to mull over. Here is another benchmark that will help you setup for heavy missions. This will stress the entire system since. PDHeavyLoad.trk To run put it into your records folder and use the same procedures that are used for the first benchmark.
RESULTS! Benchmark showing framerates
for both
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Iwill KK-266 Motherboard Athlon Thunderbird 1.46ghz (11x133) |
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3dfx Using Default iL=2
Settings in iL-2 Setup |
3dfx Using Custom Setup as documented above. |
Wicked GL version 4.99 Retail Set up with Custom
Options as listed above |
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1024x768 16bit x0 FSAA Excellent Options |
33 average |
38 average |
48 average |
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1024x768 16bit x0 FSAA Very Low graphic Options |
45 average |
54 average |
65 average |
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1024x768 16bit x2 FSAA Excellent Options |
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16average |
28 average |
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1024x768 16bit x2 FSAA Very Low graphic Options |
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19 average |
34 average |
There you have it. All I know about how to make iL-2 Faster. The problem of
stutter seems to be related to two things. The first is peoples
natural desire to turn up the graphic options which causes plain slow framerate. This is interpreted as stutters. Not so.
Just choppy framerates due to overloading the
system. But there is something called stutter in iL-2 that's noticeable
even when its getting 65 frames a second average framerate. Its helped alot by
moving around sound settings having to do with Direct Sound. This requires
a bunch more research and is outside the scope of this modest article. Hope
this helped you and if it did do me a favor and pass it along to the
companies and people listed in the tools section. I don't ask for money but
I do ask for a bit of your time to help me by referring my site to friends
and other news sites. Thanks for any help. My main charge for this is
seeing that alot of people know about this
article...use it then pass it along. plegrand at cox dot net
This site is Much Much Cooler and Intended to be viewed by someone using Uncle Bill's Favorite Browser Internet Explorer 4.0
Webmaster <VBG> Pierre PAPA DOC Legrand send complaints to plegrand at cox dot net
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A bandit on your six is better ......than no bandit at all. Course those guns work better if he is in front....<VBG> |
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