Last night, my squad decided to have our mission in the AH2 arena to see what more than a 1v1 fight did to FPS. We had about a dozen guys show up, which meant for fights with up to about 8 guys all fairly close together. We had 2 adjacent fields and just kept flying to the middle to keep the fight going, tweaking our settings between hops.
Multiple planes definitely is a MUCH bigger FPS hit than 1v1. Settings that worked tolerably well 1v1 were just unplayable in this environment. And even with rock bottom settings, my FPS was only just barely acceptable for part of the time, alternating with a slide show when things got interesting. I was very disappointed.
With mip mapping off and both sliders all the way to the right, I could get 50-60 FPS during my takeoff and climb, when I was basically by myself. But once I got in the fight, my FPS dropped into the low 20s when all the planes got into con range, and it continued to get lower as I got closer to them. By the time I was close enough to shoot or be shot at, FPS was below 10, and when I fired with tracer on, things totally froze for as long as I had the trigger down.
This is the best I can do with my current hardware, unless HTC ever does something to fix the FPS problem. It would be nice of HTC to at least say whether or not they're working on this issue or not.
System:
P4/1.7
512MB RAM
ATI 128MB Radeon 9600 Pro
WinME
DirectX 9.0
Besides FPS, there's also the issue of loading plane textures. I'm just talking about the default skins, not custom skins. Basically, whenever you get close to a type of plane you haven't met before since you've been online, the game loads its texture off your HD. But each plane has a total of 2+ megs of textures at the unlimited setting. And it seems like nobody has a computer that can suddenly load that amount of texture seemlessly at the speeds at which airplanes travel.
There's always some amount of freezing when you get close to a new plane. With texture size unlimited, the freeze lasts several seconds, resulting in what appear to be MAJOR warps. With texture size set to 128k, it's just a brief hesitation. But it's still quite noticeable and annoying. And of course, when you reduce a 1meg texture down to 128k, it looks like total crap. While this is hard to see on the nme plane several hundred yards away, your own wing in the foreground looks like babypuke.
