Hi all,

Just picked up IL-2 on impulse because the price had dropped. I'd avoided it until now because from what I've read, I didn't think my computer could do it justice.

Anyways, been fooling with it for a day now and surfing the IL-2 sites. Maybe someone could give me some advice about appropriate setup and in-game settings for my machine? Most of what I've found so far seems to apply to newer graphics cards on faster computers. Or maybe just point me to a place that would explain some of the video settings that the manual doesn't really elaborate on? After some diddling, I can get frame rates in the low 20s (1024x768x16) with pretty good detail but I'd love to bump that up without losing a lot of the eye candy if possible.

BTW, I'm still using the box version; learned from this forum not to update until I've made time to see all the training missions. Will there be any improvement in my frame rate with version 1.1 or 1.2?

My machine:

PIII 866 256MB
GeForce2 64MB, 23.11 drivers
SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
DX 8.1

I've avoided updating my video drivers because they work so well with my other games but would give it a try if any of you experts think it's adviseable. They seem pretty optimal for a GeForce2 with DX 8 though.

I'll be most appreciative if anyone can give me some advice! I think I'm gonna love IL-2 if I can speed it up just a bit!

PGT

First I would get 256 megs of more ram then maybe think about getting a geforce3 or 4 card to get better icandy or better.

You should really run IL-2 at 32 bit color to. The ground do's not look much better but the clouds do.

Your getting about the proformance you could expect with your rig.

make sure you close all programs running in the back ground you can get away with, to have more memory to run it better.

try turning off any screen saver u have running when playing. Don't for get to turn them back on later.

I based my advice so you can save the most money

added O and update to the latest version will help with frame rate on some *puters

Hiya Navigator,

Thanks for the reply. It's good to know that I'm getting about what I should expect. I took your advice about 32 bit and it didn't seem to lower the frame rate so that's good news.

I had some weirdness with OpenGL when I was running the box version but after I installed 1.2, it works fine and it also improved things. So at 1024x768x32 I'm pretty much getting low to mid 20s with wide cockpit flying toward the horizon, it dips down to the mid-teens when strafing in urban or industrial area, and hits the 30s in the sky when nothing much is going on. This is with the video settings (Simple) on High, though I sometimes turn Cloud Detail to Medium for some improvement. Funny, this sim seems smoother at a given FPS than others I use.

Thanks again,
PGT

Oh, forgot to say that I appreciate your suggestions about RAM and upgrading graphics cards but I'm about 6 months from a new computer so I don't want to put any more money into hardware for this one. Should've said that in my original post.

Thanks again.
PGT

Navigator,
Great response and congrats on giving this bloke with a low end machine a hand up.
That's nice and good of you to hang in and make the effort
Eljenon.

Navigator, Ignore him (Eljenon=Siggi). Don't feed the troll. Just let it be, because he hasn't got anything good to say about anyone.

Dude your system is completely fine to run IL-2. I dont know how large your monitor is but my friend has a 21 inch and it looks fine at 800*600 resolution, try it youll be surprised. Be sure to do the simple things like disk-defrag and closing all unecessary background programs. Also put ground detail on high and clouds on medium.

I have:
PIII 550@650, 192MB, GF2mx32MB,
much worse then you have.
I can tell you what to do to have much more fps but it will decreese eye candy.
It will depend on you what you will choose.
first go to Setup.exe in il2 folder. On my machine OpenGL works better then DirectX so you should try both on the same adjustments.
Take Video tab, i have adjustment like this:
Custom,
Texture quality: Original
Texture mipmap: bilinear
TExture Compression: S3TC
Use Dither: v
Use Clamped Sprites: v
Draw Land by Triangles: v
Use Vertex Arrays: v
Extensions:
Vertex Array Extension: v
Texture Compress ARB: v
In these settings, on my cpu i have in 800x600, 20 to 30fps. (1.2v),
visibility: max
plane detail: normal
Lightning landscape: flat
Lightning objects: max
Ground detail: very low
Clouds: medium
I play only online so clouds and sun are always on. It not looks like candy but for me most important is playability and good recognize of plane in full real. In FB i have almost the same settings but 1024x786 and 20 to 30 fps online.
Hope it will helps you at least a little.