The new rendering engine is capable of some really nice performance, but with the settings included, the graphics utility, appearance, performance, and smoothness is unsatisfactory. Each dimension can be twiddled, but I am unable to get when I consider good baseline performance with the current controls and setup. Getting close requires settings that provide lower image quality than AH1.
I consider baseline performance to be uncompromising on the following:
1) Complete simulation utility. I want to be able to see everything that matters to my situation. I don't care if ground targets are represented with a big "X" on the ground, as long as I can see that the target is there and whether it is destroyed. Also don't care how detailed aircraft are except to recognize what its orientation is in the sky, and potentially the variant (if recognizable variants is part of the game).
2) Performance. There are understandable performance limitations, but given a relatively static situation, the frequency of discernible performance drops should become very small.
IMHO, only after the baseline is satisfied, does eye candy matter.
That being said, I think much of the problem lies in the tuning and not in the engine itself. Some different settings could help:
1) Texture resolution setting improved. Just a maximum value isn't very effective, as different textures are more important than others. For example, as a pilot, I care most about my aircraft texture (as it fills most of my screen). Other aircraft can be low res, and vehicles and building can be flat-shaded for all I care. So while I would like a dozen sliders that I can customize, it would probably make more sense to have a setting, "Max, High, Medium, Low, Very Low". Make some scaling, and make the priorities differ for land and ground vehicles.
2) User settable skins optional. A little napkin math says that this could easily double (or worse) the aircraft texture count of a decent furball, not to mention constant grabs for new textures as people join the battle. Without a lot of RAM, both on the mainboard and on the video card, it's unsupportable. I'd like a setting to turn skins off, or perhaps a setting to make non-standard skins a much lower res than standard ones.
3) I find the current controls that set how far away I can see buildings very hard to set satisfactorily. Basically, I want to see building as far away as possible, but to be able to turn ground clutter to very short range. I also don't care how bad the buildings and ground clutter look until I can see important features at the farthest possible range.
P.S.
System is:
Athlon XP3000
Nforce2 Ultra 400
512MB RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
