Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Open Beta Test => Topic started by: Easyscor on January 17, 2016, 06:25:58 AM
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This is to help you transition from AH2 to AH3 (Beta patch 1)
The current minimum requirement to play AH3 includes a dedicated video card with a minimum of one gigabyte of DDR5 memory. You will NOT be able to play AH3 without such a card, and if your video card isn't less then two or three years old, then you probably won't be able to turn on all the graphic bells and whistles. Check the Video card discussions about bandwidth, shaders and throughput.
Assuming you have anything close to that video card in your machine, here are the things to know that will make the new game engine feel like you're playing the old familiar game.
The first splash screen you see is were you set the Field of View and the size of the textures your system will use. Both affect frame rates and the game chooses some defaults for you.
Open Video Settings at the first splash screen.
Field of View
In AH2, the FoV is 106 degrees but the default FoV in AH3 is 80 degrees. The smaller FoV is said to equal a bit better frame rate and match most other games in the market, however, it's not what we're used to so we can click Set Custom Field of View and change it back to 106 degrees.
Max Texture Size
Leave this at its current setting until you see how the game plays but don't forget about it. You may decide to reduce the texture size to 2048 or 1024. If you think you must go below that, you should consider upgrading your PC.
Font Size
The most important thing this affects is the radio text input buffer and the text size in the list of people on your radio channel.
This will also affect the size of the Loading dialog box when the game loads a terrain and the size of the hints displayed when you pass your mouse cursor over items on the clipboard.
Now for in-game options before tackling head positions and controllers.
Options > Graphic Details
(Before I continue, you should know that I have my three range slider set to Max at the beginning of this discussion. My middle of the road video card is an XFX AMD HD 6850 with 1 GB of DDR5. However, the DxDiag says that it's really a 6739 chip.)
Disable Post Lighting
If Disable Post Lighting is checked, then the game has decided your card isn't fast enough for those effects, no worries.
If Disable Post Lighting is UNchecked, then you have a second page to the clipboard with four additional options. Thanks to Chilli, I can tell you to use outside view, and F8 to look at the Sun. Then try checking and unchecking the four options to see how it affects the Sun.
My personal preference is to leave Disable Post Lighting unchecked and then uncheck all 4 of the options on the second page, but this is beta, and I think most of the effects are turned off at this writing. This increases my frame rate +2. The Hints suggest these affect water but I can see no difference on my frontend at this patch.
The Environmental Slider - All, 2, 1, None
Hitech described it this way:
Number of faces of the environment cube to update per frame. None will only update the cube when you change view types I.E. tower to plane external to internal.
In-game, in the Tower, with the clipboard up on avafinru, my frame rates run 27 at None, 23 at 1 and 18 at All. Your results may vary. I leave it at 1, which is the default chosen by the game with my hardware. To see the difference in the look, set the slider to None, click OK and Alt Tab to the desktop. Then re-enter the game and change the slider. On my frontend, I see a marked difference when moving the slider from None to 1.
Range Sliders
The same situation; avafinru at v21, in the tower with the clipboard up and seeing the normal CBM map, and offline with the four drones overhead.
If I move all three range sliders, Object Detail, Ground Detail Range, and Tree Detail to their minimum limits, then my frame rates are 26 to 27 fps. This is with the graphics options closed and seeing the normal CBM.
When moving these three slider to their maximum limits, the frame rates drop to 22 to 23 fps. That gives you an idea of how powerful these video cards really are.
Twenty three frames per second in the tower, launch a P51D and the frame rate jumps to 27. Clear the trees and the frame rate jumps again to 38 and smooth, 31 to 32 back at treetop level. I don't know how my hardware will do in a furball.
Checkboxes
This is where you can, if you must, pick up substantial frames per second. If I set all the check boxes EXCEPT Disable Post Lighting, by that I mean I'm disabling everything else, then in the tower with the clipboard up and seeing the normal CBM map, I see 42 fps, up from ~23 with everything enabled.
If you still don't have decent frame rates, go back to the original splash screen and change the Max Texture size and reduce the Field of View back to 80 degrees.
MY VIEWS ARE PORKED
Now that you have the best graphics you can get at an acceptable frame rate, it's time to recover your head positions, views and joystick settings that you have become accustom to.
Note: that the path to the AH3 settings folder will undoubtedly change when the new version goes into production.
Head Positions - file extension .hps
The old head positions folder:
C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High\settings\planes
The new head position folder:
C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High Alpha Game\settings\planes
Copy the entire plane folder from the old settings folder and paste it into the new settings folder.
Joystick and Keyboard Map files - file extensions .jsm and .kmp
Find all the old keyboard and joystick files in the settings folder:
C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High\settings
There are the six keyboard files
CHUTE.kmp
global.kmp
GUNNER.kmp
PLANE.kmp
VEHICLE.kmp
view.kmp
Copy and Paste a copy of these into the new game settings folder:
C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High Alpha Game\settings
Find all the .jsm files in the old settings folder for your particular joystick, throttle and rudder pedals. Copy them and paste them into the new game's settings folder.
From C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High\settings
To C:\Hitech Creations\Aces High Alpha Game\settings
Skins are not supported at this writing.
On-Line Arena Tabs
For now there are 4 tabs, Mission, Melee, Events and Player
Entering the old Main style arena isn't one of the choices, for now.
The Mission tab lists a number of arena with missions running.
The Melee tab lists an MA style arena
The Events tab lists the Allied vs Axis (AvA) arena and the Special Events Arena
The Player tab is for Player spawned custom arena
Lastly, at this writing, AH3 is still in Beta. It's not the final product. Read the sticky posts by Hitech, Skuzzy and Waffle.
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TY! :airplane:
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Thank you for putting this together. A lot of this stuff is not intuitive.
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Super! :aok
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Disable Post Lighting
If Disable Post Lighting is checked, then the game has decided your card isn't fast enough for those effects, no worries.
If Disable Post Lighting is UNchecked, then you have a second page to the clipboard with four additional options. Thanks to Chilli, I can tell you to use outside view, and F8 to look at the Sun. Then try checking and unchecking the four options to see how it affects the Sun.
My personal preference is to leave Disable Post Lighting unchecked and then uncheck all 4 of the options on the second page, but this is beta, and I think most of the effects are turned off at this writing. This increases my frame rate +2. The Hints suggest these affect water but I can see no difference on my frontend at this patch.
I would like to bring 1 item to light here. 1 of the 4 items mentioned here is "Enable Anti Alias". This setting is not a post lighting effect, this setting is actually a form of post processed AA called FXAA (fast approximate anti aliasing) which is applied to a finished GPU rendered graphics frame using the vid card shaders to smooth out the jaggies on edges but because it is a post process application as are the other 3 post processed lighting effects settings this is where it was chosen to locate this setting & if you will note in the Beta Video Settings the AA slider (which was for GPU applied AA) doesn't exist anymore....
If you uncheck the "Enable Anti Alias" checkbox (or when you check the checkbox "Disable Post Lighting Effects") you will disable FXAA in the Beta & the Beta will not be applying any AA at all in-game. Yes, you will pick up some FPS but you will also get the jaggies on your graphics..............
If you are fully aware of this & you choose this then more power to you. Just making sure that you are aware of what is really happening if you do so.
But if you want to turn off the post lighting effects but keep the FXAA enabled in the Beta then leave the checkbox unchecked to "Disable Post Lighting Effects" then in the popup to left uncheck all except the "Enable Anti Alias" checkbox.
Otherwise you will need to set up AA in your vid card drivers to reapply AA in the Beta. Good thing here is that post process AA can still be applied.......in Nvidia drivers you can apply the same FXAA that the Beta uses & in the AMD drivers you can apply Morphological Filtering (AMD vers of post process AA) if desired, or you can set up the GPU applied MSAA-FSAA if desired.
All else mentioned is good.
:salute
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Thanks Pudgie. My old eyes didn't catch that. The funny thing is, for trees I prefer if off. It makes it look like I have such good eyesight that I can see the individual leaves. I haven't compared while looking at the planes and GVs.
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Here is a rule of thumb about video cards and how they will relate to the new game. First though, if you have a killer system but only 2G of system ram, a powerful video card will under perform. You will probably need a minimum of 4G system ram(8 is best which needs a 64bit OS) for your video card to perform. Also a power supply starting at about 550 watts.
The four hardware specifications repeated in the list below are what is important to how your card will process the graphics in the new game. DDR3 and GDDR3 ram are very slow. PCI-X 3.0 video cards can be run in PCI-X 2.0 slots like I'm doing with my new GTX 760. Slow ram is slow ram and you see below Nvidia's solution to that with the 9800, was to widen the data path which gets a reasonable low end Gbyte\sec for this game in 512 and lower resolutions.
Easycor's 6850 with a 256bit path, fast ram and 128Gbyte\sec band width as a result is pushing the results from 960 shaders well enough to run 2048 mode like my 6770 ran 1024 mode. You can see the progression in hardware specs. And then my 760 with 2G fast ram, a wide data path, higher band width, can push the results of a higher number of shaders which allows me to play at the defaults in 4096 mode. My trees don't flicker and my shadows act like shadows.
Unless told other wise before the release of AH3, this is the minimum video card.
NVIDIA GTX 9800
GDDR3 - 512M
Data Paths - 256
Band Width - 70.4 Gbyte\sec
SHADERS - 128
Easycor's reference video card:
AMD HD 6850
GDDR5 - 1G
Data Paths - 256bit
Band Width - 128 Gbyte\sec
SHADERS - 960
My video card I tested the alpha with for the last 18 months, my best performance was in 1024 mode. I had to turn of "post lighting" to fight against 60 bombers and escorts with FPS 32 - 60:
AMD HD 6770 SC
GDDR5 - 1G
Data Paths - 128bit
Band Width - 80 Gbyte\sec
SHADERS - 800
My new video card which runs the defaults in 4096 mode depending on the terrain and other factors, 45-60.
NVIDIA GTX 760
GDDR5 - 2G
Data Paths - 256
Band Width 192 Gbyte\sec
SHADERS - 1152
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Otherwise you will need to set up AA in your vid card drivers to reapply AA in the Beta. Good thing here is that post process AA can still be applied.......in Nvidia drivers you can apply the same FXAA that the Beta uses & in the AMD drivers you can apply Morphological Filtering (AMD vers of post process AA) if desired, or you can set up the GPU applied MSAA-FSAA if desired.
On my system AH's Disable Post Lighting checkbox must be checked for any graphics card driver AA to work, even with the driver set to "Override Application". I suspect that's what you were saying too, but I wasn't entirely sure. The attached image shows this: the graphics card AA was set to override yet it had no effect unless Post Lighting was disabled in AH. (The image also shows why I like to use the graphics card AA and not the AH AA, despite considerable frame rate loss. In the image AMSAA is adaptive MSAA and SSAA is Super Sampled AA, which drops fps so much on my system as to be unplayable, so I use AMSAA.)
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On my system AH's Disable Post Lighting checkbox must be checked for any graphics card driver AA to work, even with the driver set to "Override Application". I suspect that's what you were saying too, but I wasn't entirely sure. The attached image shows this: the graphics card AA was set to override yet it had no effect unless Post Lighting was disabled in AH. (The image also shows why I like to use the graphics card AA and not the AH AA, despite considerable frame rate loss. In the image AMSAA is adaptive MSAA and SSAA is Super Sampled AA, which drops fps so much on my system as to be unplayable, so I use AMSAA.)
Hi 715,
With the part of my posting that you have quoted I was essentially implying that a user would need to use the vid card's AA settings IF they were to disable the Beta in-game FXAA, either by unchecking the setting "Enable Anti Alias" itself in the left dialog box w\ the Post Lighting Effects checkbox unchecked OR by checking the "Disable Post Lighting Effects" checkbox (which disables all 4 settings under it....including the Beta's FXAA). That also implied that the user doesn't want to use the Beta's in-game FXAA as well as any\all of the post lighting effects......
Now what you have posted concerning trying to override the still active Beta in-game AA setting by using the vid card driver's AA application override function to essentially "disable" the still active Beta in-game AA setting & use the vid card driver's AA settings.........
Sorry but this was not what I was saying.
I do know that AMD vid card drivers will auto default to use the application AA settings regardless of whether the AMD driver's AA application override setting is enabled as long as the application's AA settings are still active. If you're using an AMD vid card then what you've posted makes sense and is a good thing IMHO that AMD has their drivers coded to do this.
I don't know if Nvidia vid card drivers will do the same or not (I've always used the Nvidia vid card driver's AA, AF & TF when I was using a Nvidia card since the Kepler series...600 & up...as the AHII in-game AA settings were not stringent enough--even set to Most--to get the GPU to clock up above the base GPU clocks setting in BIOS using GPU Boost 1.0 or 2.0 which caused stuttering due to underpowered GPU....I even posted about this on this BBS some time back, but I also had the AHII AA slider set to None--turned off--in Video Settings so I can't say if Nvidia drivers will react the same as the AMD drivers will & I had the Nvidia drivers set in default settings which looked for the 3D application's AA settings as a tester in the Beta while it was in Alpha phase as requested by HTC) so someone else will have to answer for Nvidia drivers in this regard.
As a rule of thumb I don't recommend trying to use the vid card drivers override function settings to "disable" the same active in-game settings as this is a good way to cause code collusion & issues......
Much easier IMHO to just disable the in-game setting before enabling the same setting in the vid card drivers and vise-versa.
But your images that you've provided did stir up my interest.............
:salute
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Post lighting turned off is still a universe better than AH2 everything turned up full.
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Hi 715,
With the part of my posting that you have quoted I was essentially implying that a user would need to use the vid card's AA settings IF they were to disable the Beta in-game FXAA, either by unchecking the setting "Enable Anti Alias" itself in the left dialog box w\ the Post Lighting Effects checkbox unchecked OR by checking the "Disable Post Lighting Effects" checkbox (which disables all 4 settings under it....including the Beta's FXAA). That also implied that the user doesn't want to use the Beta's in-game FXAA as well as any\all of the post lighting effects......
Now what you have posted concerning trying to override the still active Beta in-game AA setting by using the vid card driver's AA application override function to essentially "disable" the still active Beta in-game AA setting & use the vid card driver's AA settings.........
Sorry but this was not what I was saying.
I do know that AMD vid card drivers will auto default to use the application AA settings regardless of whether the AMD driver's AA application override setting is enabled as long as the application's AA settings are still active. If you're using an AMD vid card then what you've posted makes sense and is a good thing IMHO that AMD has their drivers coded to do this.
Yeah I left out critical information: I'm using an AMD HD7870 card. I was trying to show that with AMD drivers just clicking disable AA in AH beta while having Disable Post Lighting box still not checked is not enough for the AMD AA to take over. You have to Disable Post Lighting to get the AMD AA to show up. Look at the first image (on the left of the image I posted). It has Post Lighting enabled, AH beta AA disabled and AMD AA enabled, yet the image shows no AA at all. Only when Post Lighting is disabled does the AMD AA show up (in the two images on the right).
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My GTX 760 in default Nvidia 3D settings is smoothing out the jaggies so well I had to really hunt around my cockpit to see any kind of jagging. If you have cards with lower performance and have to introduce AA or other effects, you may well get visual results but, pay for it in your FPS. Higher end cards AMD or NVidia should make everything smooth in the Beta because of the increased hardware resources.
I OC'd my 6770 and got the band width up from 80Gbyte\sec to 85Gbyte\sec. All that accomplished was to over heat my card. It could not widen the data paths or increase the number of Shaders. And it did nothing to smooth the jaggies. When I did introduce AMD AA control, it ate my FPS and caused an over heat shut down.
GDDR5 ram
Data Path
Band Width
Shaders
The above specs are what really counts for your game play outcomes. 1G GDDR5, 128bit, 80 Gbyte\sec and 800 shaders will just make 1024 mode run acceptably with post processing turned off in an air space with lots of cons. Double all of those and you are in fat city. Or things get a bit better with increased band width and shaders. Or 1G with a 256bit data path and band width 90 up to 128. It's about how much gets through that pipe every second. That is your band width. The more getting through the better your game looks.
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So I guess I qualify as the AH3 beta newb with lowest end system.
DXDiag in sig.
I'd like FR's at about 30 when in mixed company...so I would like to max eye candy at FR =30
My Nvidia settings are below (in application AH3 uses the global settings)
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/Nvidia%20for%20AH3.jpg)
My Video settings are as below
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/Video%20settings%20for%20AH3.jpg)
My in game graphics and general view (showing an FR rate)...
are these........ (this screen shot resolution has not been changed)
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/Graphics%20off%20line%20AH3.jpg)
So given my miserable system spec will not be changed for another 6 months or so.........would anyone care to comment on what tweaks I might be advised to try.
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TILT!!!!!
Turn environmental map to NONE!!!!!! So what if your reflection is of the runway when you are 15k in the air. Reflections don't help you shoot down bad guys. Just my 2 cents. Next, move top sliders to the left. Tree detail should go first. I forget which of the other 2 help you to see field guns faster, so whichever object or ground detail that doesn't effect field guns should go next. To be honest, I have all my sliders set to least detail and works for me.
Thank you for your screenshots, that is a good point for me to make comparison. If what I am seeing is correct, the system is only recognizing ~500 mb of your 1 GB of video memory :headscratch: Or you are getting awesome framerates for a system that is not even supposed to be able to run AH3 and others with better GPUs are faltering. This is looking pretty promising for a good portion of the AH2 community. :aok
Edited after Tilt's memory explanation: Okay, so beta can run on less than 1 GB dedicated video memory, I had erroneously assumed that 1 GB was the least allowed !!
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Thanks Chilli will try that.......
re display memory
Display Memory: 1776 MB
Dedicated Memory: 497 MB
Shared Memory: 1279 MB
I guess its just not sharing..........
EDIT
anyway got the desired FR gain...
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/Graphics%20off%20line%20AH3 2.jpg)
Your right about the gguns....... I guess the price for top end potential is a bottom end loss...........
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Turn the tree detail down :mad: are you some kind of tree lover :angry: Just messing with you, I would mostly be degrading myself with such comments anyway, being such a country boy and admirer of nature's beauty.
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(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/Graphics%20off%20line%20AH3%203.jpg)
................... and now we see the gguns.....at about 2k
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Welcome to the Beta, Tilt!
If you're offline, you can still flip the switches to see the new graphics. Just remember to set it all back again.
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Tilt,
For others with your card, can you turn of post lighting to see what your frame rates will be? You may find in large furballs you will have to turn post lighting off.
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Tilt,
For others with your card, can you turn of post lighting to see what your frame rates will be? You may find in large furballs you will have to turn post lighting off.
He did that already. It's in the jpg
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Still looks better than AH2 all sliders on....... :O
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Still looks better than AH2 all sliders on....... :O
Actually it does not.... fields are basically blurred with these settings in AH3.... See below
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/graphics ah2.jpg)
Note the ground detail is sharper I can see gguns very clearly and my FR is pretty decent. AH3 just has more stuff..........but I can see that with a higher end system the quality would be a quantum leap beyond what I have now in AH2.
Thanks for the help guys..............
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Potatoes Potatas..... Tilt, actually the AH2 screenshot is quite a bit closer to the fields, just judging by the size of the hangars. Sorry, that it does seem a bit blurry, which makes me wonder if you are forcing Antialiasing on with your video card? So many posts, it is hard to follow who has done what. Judging from the smoothness of the cockpit frame, I would have to say, that either you have a very hi screen resolution, or some antialiasing (only a guess).
It is possible that a lower screen resolution (was my earlier experience with alpha), or moving all antialiasing controls in a beta profile made for your video card to none or application controlled, may help with your framerates.
Let me know if any luck there. :salute
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Actually it does not.... fields are basically blurred with these settings in AH3.... See below
(http://www.full-tilt.eu/AHbeta/graphics ah2.jpg)
Note the ground detail is sharper I can see gguns very clearly and my FR is pretty decent. AH3 just has more stuff..........but I can see that with a higher end system the quality would be a quantum leap beyond what I have now in AH2.
Thanks for the help guys..............
Uhh, that is an AH II screen shot.
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Spent a period of time during the closed alpha testing a massive BoB, then Euro continent bomber stream mission that had about 60 bombers, escorts and all the interceptor groups to go with it. Giant cloud fronts and much of the continent and England. I had to turn off post processing to get FPS above 14 to test the mission. Compared to AH2, each time I went into the AH2 MA, I hated the AH2 MA because of all the differences even without post processing. It looks better.
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Uhh, that is an AH II screen shot.
I believe that was his point, comparing it to the previous beta SS.
Tilt, I think you'll find overall the beta will look better the more you play/mess with it in once we start playing it all together more.
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Hi All,
1 more item I would like to add to this thread to help others out when considering running the Beta (or even the finished product) & especially concerning using any of the Beta's post processing settings:
The new AHIII, Alpha, Beta....take your pick, is coded to use the Shader 3.x rendering code. This type of coding is what most big box games are using to achieve the high res graphics that most have come to see & expect (most of these games are using Shader 4-5 modeling which is improved shader coding over 3.x and is better suited to use w/ Dx 10-11 API.....Beta is still written in Dx 9.x API so the Shader 3.x rendering code is the HTC preferred coding to use). This shader coding was developed to offload the GPU of some of the back end graphics rendering work that can be done using the shader cores (or Nvidia called Cuda Cores) instead of the GPU so that the GPU can be used to do other tasks and to be more efficient in those tasks. So along w/ the amount of vid card mem onboard, the size of the vid card mem pipe (bandwidth as Bustr points out) & mem frequency (mem speed) the amount of shader cores present on a vid card is another factor to consider when looking to run the Beta, especially if considering to use the post lighting effects & FXAA as all this back end graphics rendering work is passed to the shader cores to do (color work, texture fill work, anti-aliasing, lighting effects and possibly the reflection work which involves lighting....and may be doing even more work if HTC decides to code it to be done within the Shader 3.x modeling code if it can be done w\ the shaders instead of the GPU).
The general rule is, the higher the shader core count the better the vid card can handle the post lighting\AA work in the Beta as this work can be spread across more shader cores lessening the load on any single shader core and can have different aspects of this backend graphics work assigned to specific shader CU's (compute units) so all this work can be done in parallel increasing the vid card's efficiency while outputting very rich, deep & colorful graphics frames.
Now AHIII is still in Beta stage so a minimum number of shader cores needed to run the game w/ post lighting effects & FXAA enabled may change in the coming days, but you folks who have been testing this game for a while using older vid cards should have a better feel for what this number range most likely would be at this time.
I will offer a minimum number of at least 800 shader cores onboard to get "playable" FPS in the Beta w/ all post lighting effects\FXAA enabled as a "specification" for the time being........maybe Skuzzy can elaborate on this some as well to help out. If the shader core counts are less than this number you might consider turning all this post lighting effects and\or FXAA off in the Beta as a performance tip.
My 2 cents given.
:salute
The Beta post lighting effects & FXAA
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One very important additional thing.
DO NOT copy your entire settings folder to the AH3 Beta.
There are settings files in there that have changed from AH2 to AH3 and they will pork the Beta!
Since Skuzzy or Hitech haven't come in and called me out on the OP, SEE the original post for what you can transfer. I tried to put everything you need to know to get started in that one place.