Well, I gave it a try.
The guts of the system- Dell XPS T600 circa 1997 with Intel SE440BX-3 motherboard and a 250W Foxcon power supply.
- Intel Pentium III Tualitin 1.2 Ghz Celeron processor (upgrade from the original PIII 600 Mhz) in a Slot 1 slocket adapter with a 100 Mhz front side bus and a 256 Kb L2 cache.
- 768 Mb PC100 SDRAM (3 dimms) @ 2 cas latency.
- eVGA Geforce MX-440 GTS 64 Mb AGP 2x video card.
- Soundblaster Live! Value sound card
- Dual boot Win98SE/XP Pro (AHII resides on the XP Pro partition)
Preparing for AHII 2.14- First I went to blackviper.com and printed out the services list so that I could double check my current services. I've done this before but every once in a while when Windows updates it will re-enable a service on me so I want to be sure I've got the most obvious things turned off. I stick mostly with the "safe" list as I've got this machine relegated to file server duties to my other two machines for the most part so I haven't cut even close to the bone. Sure enough I find one or two more processes I can turn off.
- Next I take a moment to update both Windows and my security suite as long as I'm doing system maintenence then I shut my entire security suite down. I'm behind a router so I'm still firewalled.
- Now I go and download the game and install it. I want to do this before cleaning up my machine so that if anything gets left behind in the temp folder I'll take care of that during clean-up.
- After the game is installed (but hasn't yet been launched), I run disc cleanup on all of my hard drives and partitions (I have a total of 5 partitions on 3 hard drives in this machine).
- Disc clean-up done it's time to defragment. I haven't done this in several months on this machine (normally I do it about every two months) as I've been moving a lot of files on a consistant basis and been hoping I'd be done soon. Oh well, no time like now so I defrag all my drives and partitions which takes several hours.
- Next it's a check of the video card settings. I open the Nvidia control panal and immediately turn everything to minimum. I can always turn stuff back up later if I need/want to (which I will as you will see).
The moment of truth- The moment of truth has arrived. It's time to go test video settings off-line. After several times jumping in and out of the game tweaking my video card settings, the games video settings and the games graphic settings this is what I end up with as the best balance between playability and graphics:
My video card settings:
My game settings:
The only thing turned on in the advanced settings below is bump mapping. It was my only selectable option. I also later selected disable other players skins.
*Note: I'm not too worried about low frame rates off-line as they seem to always report about 1/2 what they run on-line. They do this on both my machines.
So, I'm testing off line. Not great but playable. I'm not allowed to select detailed terrain so this is the best I get (remember... double the frame rates in this series of pics to equate to on-line):
Off-line world view:
Off-line explosion:
Off-line world from tank:
But now comes the moment of truth. How will it play on-line?
On-line world view:
On-line furball:
My frame rates on-line ran anywhere from 15 in the biggest furballs (see the open map) on the deck to 75+ in open air. 25-40 were the most typical frame rates I was getting. Setting ground vis range to 1 1/2 miles adds about 10 fps.
I was getting some slight stuttering and noticed that it happened as I had to load new textures. Furthermore, textures (i.e. trees from alt) that had already been loaded would appear occasionally as white blobs and cause a stutter as they re-loaded.
While not anything like playing on my other machine the game was playable. I was actually having a harder time adapting back to my old (sloppy) MS Sidewinder 3D Pro than I was adapting to the game graphics and minor stuttering.
The game without detailed terrain reminded me a lot of playing Air Warrior. If this was the best machine I had I certainly wouldn't let this stop me from playing. It is all about the fight after all isn't it?
All that said I'm disappointed that HT won't alow you to turn on detailed terrain and turn other things down to compensate. I'd be willing to drop my antialiasing and anistopic filtering settings for detailed terrain. Running 40-75 frames on-line I'd be willing to give up 25 fps but I'm not allowed that option. I also think pre-loaded textures need to return. I know for a fact that's what was causing my minor stuttering because I could literally see the textures re-loading each time it did so.
In conclusion if this ancient machine can play the game I think just about anything can.
