IL-2 Sturmovich, Directx 7, Directx 8 confusion

[gtawwb8]

I recently recommended the Asus V7700 TI (based on a Geforce2 TI) chip to a friend who was looking for a decent, low cost card. Everything worked great and he was very happy with the performance. Recently, he stumbled onto this game he is raving about: IL-2 Sturmovich. I am a techie but not a gamer and he is turning into a gamer but is not a techie.

Anyway, to make a long story short, he started having problems (ie momentary freezes) in the game and asked a knowledgable IL-2 gamer what the problem might be. He was told that the 7700 TI only supports Directx 7 to which I replied, that can't be. Well guess what, when I checked out Nvidia's site, lo and behold, they indicate in the technical .pdf doc that the Geforce2 supports Directx 7 and below.

Now I know the Geforce can RUN with Directx 8.1 (that's what he's running), but I am now wondering what "SUPPORTS" Directx 7 and below means? I presume there are some new features in DirectX 8 that aren't supported? Will upadting the drivers? BIOS? provide Directx 8 support?

Sorry for making this so long, I'm just trying to explaing the problem clearly. Anyone have any comments? He now wants to buy a new card which I think is ridiculous? What, if anything, can/should be done?

TIA for any comments/suggestions

 

[Rand]

The GeForce2 Ti supports all DirectX7 and below features in hardware. It can run DirectX8, but there are some new features in DX8 that it cannot run in hardware and hence it has to rely upon software emulation for those features.

IL2 Sturmovik most definitely can run on a DX7 board, or for that matter even a DX5/6 board. Being able to support DX8's new fearures in hardware would be nice, but it is by no means necessary in order to run IL2 Sturmovik.
As a matter of fact, despite the fact that IL2-Sturmovik runs under DX8 it is still at heart a DX7 game and does not utilize any of DX8's new features so a DX7 card can do everything a DX8 card could, though not necessarily as fast.

I most definitely would not recommend he upgrade his graphics card just for IL2 Sturmovik, said game is heavily processor limited and is mainly dependent upon processor performance not graphics card performance. One can easily get alone with a slower graphics card in IL2 Sturmovik then a GF2 Ti.

I just checked the website for the game, and it specifically mentions a recommendation for a GF2 based graphics card or better for best performance that alone should clear any possible doubts that the GF2 is fully supported by the game.

I notice there are a few patches available for the game, if you havent already I would suggest installing those. Perhaps that may clear up the issues he is experiencing.

 

[gtawwb8]

Rand,

Thanks for the reply. I too noticed that the game reco's GF2 and higher (should have mentioned that). He has also installed the latest patches (I know because I've checked out the system). I have also noticed other people complaining about freezes so maybe their next patch will address it......

Thanks as well for clearing up the DX7/DX8 stuff. I thought the DX8 stuff was supported somehow, otherwise people would be tossing out cards constantly. That it runs slower in s/w is understandable.

I will pass the info along........

BTW...It's a 1GHZ Tbird with 256 MB of RAM. As far as I'm concerned, that should be plenty of juice. Thoughts?

 

[43st]

I'm deeply involved in the IL-2 community. I've created a Radeon 8500 tweak page and I've been active for over a year in following the development of the game.

First off... IL-2 runs the best in OpenGL mode. Only very high end P4 seem to like running in DirectX mode.

There are two issues which your friend may be speaking about. Both are known issues with the game on certain systems. The first issues is a skip. Skips create a log in the console with a "time overflow error ###" The number represents the point at which the error occured. The skips are related to texture preloading I believe. If you use a Geforce tweak utility try disabling texture precache. This has helped in most situations. Also consider removing hardware acceleration for sound, just set it to basic.

The second issue is an actual stutter when flying over forests with several airplanes in view. This issue seems to happen on high end systems for some reason. A lot of people still complain about it so I'm sure there's a single recommended fix. I'd suggest opening your conf.ini file and lowering the number on your forest detail, i.e. set it to "1" or "0".

The 1.4 patch, due out next week, will include a 20+ meg download to deal with the stutter/skips. The above mentioned stuff may help. If not you can search the top community web forums... Official tech forum, SimHQ IL-2 forum, Ilyushin2.net forum

Hope this helps.