Ati 4850

[Feuerfalke]

Frames Per Second does not equal image quality, Baxter.

Of course new cards can usually show more effects, as they are more powerful. For IL2 those cards are overkill, though. Remember, this game is 9 years old and even with the upgraded graphics, it touches the limits of your CPU much faster than those of your GPU.

The image quality shows in different aspects, though. For example: With the 8800 I have flickering textures in IL2, flickering smoke, with perfect mode and effects=2 the flak-clouds turn pink and the groundtexture moves around slightly, even when standing still on some map and mission combinations.

For LockOn, you see shimering beaches, even through the fog and the self-shadowing is crippled.


These things have nothing to do with visual effects of the game, that older graphics cards cannot show. It has rather something to do with image-quality-factors, that were accepted to push up the overall performance and frames per second.
From the marketing point of view, the masses of top-notch-brand-new-graphics-card-uses are not the few people who play IL2 or LockOn. Not even BF2 any longer, so there is no need for nVidia to fix these issues either.