Big honking dots!

[zarkov]

Hi,

I recently replaced my old laptop and just recently installed AH on my new one.  When playing, I noticed that planes that are far away showed up as fairly big dots/squares.  Is this just a limitation of my laptop and its graphics card (ASUS U30Jc-b1 running with a NVidia G310M 512 MB @ 1366 x 768 resolution) or is there something I can do about this by fiddling with the graphics settings?  The dots are pretty big like the ones in the original IL-2 Sturmovik when planes from far away are first resolved.  I think it's related to how the game is rendering the plane models at certain distances but this seemed a bit extreme.

Thanks in advance!

Z

[ebfd11]

A dxdiag would be a good place to start, but it sounds like the vid card cant handle the extreme graphics.

[ImADot]

What resolution did you used to have on your old system?  I hear many people saying they intentionally run at less than max resolution of their system so the planes show a big dots at distance, thinking it gives them an advantage at "seeing" the enemy first.

[Skuzzy]

Are you sure you are running the game at the native resolution of the LCD panel?  Not doing so could cause that effect.

[zarkov]

Are you sure you are running the game at the native resolution of the LCD panel?  Not doing so could cause that effect.

The native resolution is 1366 x 768 and I'm pretty sure that's what I'm running at.  The dots are actually "squares".  The stars show up as these squares, too (they're just white as opposed to the planes which show up as black).

My video card not being able to handle the graphics is a possibility but everything up close looks okay and FPS seems fine (around 60'ish).

[Krusty]

When you start AH, before you go offline or online, go into the video settings.

What resolution is that set to?

[ImADot]

1366x768 is kind of an odd resolution.  I did a quick search and perhaps this article or this article might help.  Perhaps you need to tweak a setting or two to sharpen up the pixels...

[Tigger29]

What brand/model is your new laptop?
Do  you happen to know what video chip it has?

I recall someone else running into this exact issue on a laptop a while back.  I have a feeling it's video incompatibilities.  An updated driver might fix it.

[DaCoon]

I had the same problem when I bought my desktop, i5 with integrated gpx. Turns out(on Skuzzy's advice) I had to get a gpx card to handle what the integ chip couldn't. But the problem did clear up immediately.   

[Skuzzy]

Intel video chips will definitely have quirky graphics issues.  It is the nature of the beast.  They are not designed for real-time 3D graphics.  They are a cheap solution (read $2.00) to allow standard (read NOT DirectX/OpenGL) Windows programs to work.

[zarkov]

I've got an NVidia in my ASUS and settings are such that the laptop uses the NVidia when running AH.