Are we being sold the modern day version of snake-oil?

[directhex]

i'm happy with a 6800-and-15-inch-tft combo

[Nick]

You misunderstand the concept of response time. The figure quoted there is the time it takes for a single pixel to change from colour X to colour Y.

I use X and Y as its not equal, a lot of the recent TFT screens appear to be manipulating the rule for how they quote the TFT response times. From what i can understand the new 8ms screens may not be "true" 8 ms screens, but instead what they are doing is quoting the best change times.

The closer the colours are to each other the quicker the change, I believe from what i understand going from white to black is potentially very easy, but going from Orange to Blue for example might be quite tricky.

If you consider Half Life2, you will find that a lot of the screen isn't usually having to do a lot of work, its only the centre part of the screen that will be changing and with this the reponse time may only be changing the colour from light brown to dark brown for example. An easy and relatively quick change.

Its like Frames per second on a computer gets compared to how many frame per second the human eye can interpret. Again its the wrong sort of comparision to being making.

TiG

See? TOLD you someone more knowledgeable would come along and put me right!

[yamangman]

Lo-Mac does produce hideous framrates, however, as soon as you rid a map of all AI flights your framerate gets a boost of 10 FPS. Even on the lowest settings my system struggles over a large city, with a mission packed with friendly and enemy vehicles. That's wth a R9800Pro, but even people with x800's and 6800's struggle to produce framerates approaching slightly respectable levels, and with a piece of kit that costs that much you want to be running it 'on full'.

[Skii]

Aye - people who don't play flight sims don't know how easy they have it

[Zak33]

its not just processor power either. I have , in the past, been tempted to blame a lackof CPU oomph....but having run Il-2 FB AEP on a 1700XP with 1gig (ie I underclocked my PC) for a whole day, it was good as gold...same as before really. Its just the vid card that suffers

[exAndrzej]

...Do you ATI boys have any Il-2 pilots in the driver team?...

Checking for Ruskies now...

[Lee H]

Nice Quote there Andrzej

Just got a quicky really. On Anandtech they've had a look @ the nvidia vs ATi in relation to the new nvidia video hardware encoding. Does ATi plan to add features like this to their cards or improve the routines that are in the cards at the moment.

[exAndrzej]

OK - first Ruski-knowledgeable ATI-ite found and interogated on behalf of the Hexus Massive gave up the following beans©

Things that make a difference include:-
- Which version of the game (it seems IL-2 came out ages ago - but there are newer (more demanding ?) versions as well)
- How fast your card is
- How fast your system is
- Who actually built the PC

If you answer :- Most Recent, Top End, Very, Dutton... then you should have no problems at all

If you answer :- Earliest, Reasonable, Reasonable, A.N. Expert... then you will be OK in most cases

If you answer :- Most Recent, Good, Good, Rötten Crötch*... then you may have serious issues

I am polling for more/better opinions @ HQ right now and will come back to you if I get a reply before the holidays

Also, if anyone can send me a link to a demo of the game - then we will have one of the world's greatest living experts look at it as well for you


*The crotch reference is a neat little in joke for the benefit of Ross & Dutters... any resemblence to a Hexus poster is purely coincidental !

[exAndrzej]

...new nvidia video hardware encoding...

Do you mean the special feature that enables this ?...

http://img.hexus.net/v2/graphics_car...ages/video.png

[Zak33]

We ALL play the latest version....thats IL-2 Forgotten Battles WITH Aces Expansion Pack AND Pacific Fighters...latest patches always within hours!!!

Most people are on XP 2500 or above...ALL are 512mb DDR or above...all the people asking are Rad9800 Pro or XT or above.

All are self built, using this forum, and all are fully formatted regularly.

ANd Mr Dutton doesn't count!! He's lovely. But he doesnt count

I cant BELIEVE we have you here...it is SO nice to have input. Even if you cant help with it all. Its just simply ACE.

BUT if you DO have a few VVS pilots (thats Russian) in the team and you CAN get them to be part of the IL2 Forum here....I'd like to marry you TWICE

[exAndrzej]

...link to an IL-2 demo anyone ?

[TiG]

http://www.pacific-fighters.com/en/pacific.php

I hate to say it but i don't think Pacific Fighters actually has a demo.

TiG

[Lee H]

Do you mean the special feature that enables this ?...

http://img.hexus.net/v2/graphics_car...ages/video.png

Thats the beauty ... ouchies at the actual CPU usage on the chart.

[yamangman]

There is a demo of Lo-Mac however, ftp://ftp.ubisoft.com/games/lomac/demo/Lock_On_Demo.exe and has to be said the framerates are worse in this game.

The demo is rather different to the release and patched builds however.

[exAndrzej]

There is a demo...

Cool !

I have already forwarded it to my tech-spurt

[Mblaster]

I guage needing a new graphics card by whether my current card will run my latest game at 1024x768 with med-high settings. I don't upgrade to the next series just for the sake of it... I also like to see new technology in there, not just faster clocks.

That's the same reasons i take for upgrading, my last PC was an Athlon XP 1700 @ 2ghz, 512mb of RAM, GF4 Ti4200, and I upgraded that to an A64 3500, 1gb of RAM, and a GF 6800 GT, that was definatly a worth while upgrade.

The reason why the Amiga games got better through coding is that they were forced to, they didn't have the hardware manufacturers trying to outdo each other.