Game is Unplayable

[335th_GRAthos]

Well, I dislike the title of this thread and did not want to post here but, I see the discussion is going on.

There has been a big misunderstanding: This was never meant to be a game, this is a very hard core simulation.

You need to have been flying a few yeas IL2FB at full real levels and knowing the IL2FB conf.ini by heart in order to dare to load this "game" on your hard disk.

So how did such a hard core simulation become something which anybody can buy of the self and offload his frustration later, I do not understand.
Apparently, the original IL2 and subsequent versions sold approx 650.000 units in Russia and another 600.000 in the rest of the world
(numbers are not equal to users, I have 8 of the IL2FB and two of CoD but it still gives a good idea of the community).
This is a big community of hard core sim players and a market big enough to create a specialised "game" for.
Some 15years ago, I was looking at a Silicon Graphics Workstation demonstrating a flight simulator and had promised myself to buy one of these things one day.
Of course I didn't the price tag was USD$ 500.000 those days. So, I am happy I can pay 30-40-50 USD and have this game on my PC.

Somebody was kind enough (thanks!) to post a video of the complexity of getting an airplane off the ground in real settings.
This is what I am concened about and not how much is the impact on my fps when the windmills are turning in high resolutions or if many chimneys pop up smoke:

(I have problems to shoe the Youtube link, look at Sven's post in the thread below)
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=20466

As far as eye candy is concerned, there is a lot and everybody's hardware has extreme limitations.
You need to use GPU-Z to see how much the RAM of your GPUis used and you will know your limits (at least befor the next patch arrives).

To answer the title "This game is unplayable" yes, I believe you are right if you do not know how to open the conf.ini or do not know how to tune your graphics cards and PC
or have not being flying flight simulations in full real settings for a couple of years then, this game is not what you should be buying.
I do not want to step on anybody's toes here, it just that we need to be objective, this is not an easy game to load on your PC and play with it!
There have been a lot of games which had excellent graphics and were easy to setup and play (I recall my excellent experience with one of these Call of Duty 4 or 5 etc).
THIS ONE IS NOT

If on the other side, you know how to open the conf.ini, know how to tune your graphics cards and PC and have being flying flight simulations in full real settings
for a couple of years then, this game rocks and here is the proof below:

Finaly after three days of hard work testing the new setup under Win7 I noticed following interesting things
probably worthwhile sharing.

Yes, it is playable but your GPU must have lot's of memory!
Back in Christmas when I was buying my new GTX-570 with 1280Mb RAM I though the Nvidia guys had gone crazy.
I am happy now I kept that thought to myself.

Win7-64bit is a must, otherwise in WinXP you will be stuck to run the game at 640x480 kai 800x600 resolution (maybe also 1024x768 )

Sorry the photos are big because my desktop has 3840x1024 resolution (three monitors) and the game runs in the middle window at 1280x1024.
At the far right are the interesting stats on CPU and GPU workload:

#1 The game appears to be using nicely many CPUs, I have Process Affinity=6 (using cores 1+2 out of the four 0,1,2,3)
the system runs very smoothly and total CPU usage is 30% (whereas WinXP had only 13%).
So, thanks to Win7-64 the CPU doubled, this is good news!
It is a bit surprising though as it conflicts with the statement that the game poorly support multiple-cores.
You will see that the CPU usage is very evenly spread around the four cores, I am also surprised myself.

#2 The less good news is the consumption of GPU memory. The freeware GPU-Z is an excellent way to monitor this in real time.
Here GPU-Z shows the results of the first GTX-570 (the second being idle).
The most important is in the middle of the GPU-Z window, the Memory Used
Above the sea, 1280x1024 Memory Used is 959Mb RAM :excl:
Above land, 1128Mb RAM :excl: :excl:
MY GPU has 1280Gb RAM so it can still run smoothly but if the GPU has less then problems will start and you will have
to lower the resolution or the quality (grass, roads, shadows, etc, etc).

Mission 1, bombers intercept with 12 airplanes in the air


Quick mission over land with 6 airplanes



I must underline that I am more interesting in flying dogfight than enjoying eye-candy;
The new game has endless capabilities in graphics and it is definitively very heavy for most graphics cards available today
(at least until the next patch arrives) but I do not care that much; if I wanted nice graphics I could have been flying MS FSX four years earlier...
What I find very annoying on the other side though is the unconfirmed information that AI can see through thick clouds
(they had promised us they would fix this in the IL2FB days, it will be a major issue if they did not) -
I can not confirm as I have not tested it yet myself - too busy trimming my rig.

Using GPU-Z you can easily check whether you reached the limits of your system, watching Memory Used and Memory Controller load.
I hope this helps somebody, especialy those who start frustrated "my resolution is 1600x... the game is unplayable" types of threads

~S~

resolution: 1280x1024
anti aliasing: 0x (I get very bad errors when I try to raise AA)
Epilepsy: Off
Model: high
building: very low
land:medium
forest: off
effects:high
damage decals:high
buildings:low
land shading: low
grass: on
shadows: on
roads: on
__________________________________________________ ___________
Look also at my post at
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthr...t=19777&page=3
for the performance on 800x and 1024x under WinXP.

Also look at Skinny's post http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showthread.php?t=20438



Sorry for being too long but, we should get a bit more mature dealing with this and all new buyers
who did not know where they were stepping into the hard core simulation field have my full sympathy!


~S~