BoB lighting capabilities. OpenGL and Direct X question. HDR/Caustics supported?

[Codex]

The current engine in IL-2 1946 only bump-maps water AKAIK. There are no height maps used for the aircraft skins so no bump-mapping there, as for the terrain a lot of review sites have stated bump-mapping is used on the terrain but I fail to see it.

As for OpenGL, it runs fine under Vista its just not supported natively, meaning when you installed NT to XP, DX and OpenGL was installed with it, with Vista only DX is installed. Under Vista the OpenGL API has to be installed as an ICD and this is done with your video card drivers. The disadvantage of OpenGL v DX under Vista is that OpenGL doesn't have access to the memory optimisations that DX has, so to get the same optimisations the programmer needs to code more in an OpenGL game rather than have the OS do it for it aka more work for the programmer.

Almost all of the graphical techniques used in DX10 can be done in OpenGL2.1, it just needs a little more work/coding to do it.