What do the graphics presets control?

[RedKestrel]

I've been searching through the forums off an on for a while for a definitive answer on this, but there seems to be disagreement. Some say it just controls the distance at which  trees, buildings, etc render, others say it controls texture quality. It obviously doesn't control shadows, clouds, etc.

When I turn from balanced to high I notice that the forests and buildings render farther away. As far as texture quality goes I'm not sure I notice a difference. 

Anyone have any confirmed info on this?

[Guest deleted@134347]

the 'circle' around your plane, the bubble so-to-speak is one of those things that's controlled by low/balanced/high/ultra. Although, I personally haven't noticed a big difference between high and balanced.

 

What I did notice, however, is that on Low the quality of cockpit looks horrid. And Balanced/high cockpit seems to show no difference..

[RedKestrel]

2 minutes ago, Count_de_Money said:

the 'circle' around your plane, the bubble so-to-speak is one of those things that's controlled by low/balanced/high/ultra. Although, I personally haven't noticed a big difference between high and balanced.

 

What I did notice, however, is that on Low the quality of cockpit looks horrid. And Balanced/high cockpit seems to show no difference..

I haven't tried to play the game on low, only High and Balanced, and noticed the same as you as far as the cockpit goes, I didn't see any difference at all which is why I asked. I would have thought it would have changed something about the cockpit goes, but I guess they only reduce the quality on Low. Or maybe we just don't notice it at our resolutoin.

Edited March 3, 2020 by RedKestrel

[Guest deleted@134347]

1 minute ago, RedKestrel said:

I haven't tried to play the game on low, only High and Balanced, and noticed the same as you as far as the cockpit goes.

 

before the latest cache memory shader fix I couldn't play on High in VR, it was slow as molasses. Only could play on Balanced.. so there was something in the High preset that was dragging it down. After the fix I switched to High and continue to fly on High. It "seemed" to be more vivid and rich, but it's more of a seat-of-the-pants feeling rather than anything specific...

[rowdyb00t]

@RedKestrel

 

download this and you can adjust any preset to your liking. 
https://www.mediafire.com/file/isu7649zz6o1ml9/Graphic_Presets_(2).zip/file

preset 0 = low

preset 1 = balanced

preset 2 =high

preset 3 = ultra 

 

open the cfg with notepad, adjust and save

[RedKestrel]

16 minutes ago, Count_de_Money said:

 

before the latest cache memory shader fix I couldn't play on High in VR, it was slow as molasses. Only could play on Balanced.. so there was something in the High preset that was dragging it down. After the fix I switched to High and continue to fly on High. It "seemed" to be more vivid and rich, but it's more of a seat-of-the-pants feeling rather than anything specific...

I have been flying mostly on Balanced since Bodenplatte came out. The stuttering issues that came about have been improved by the memory fix by the devs substantially but on my machine I still get stutters during MP, sometimes bad, and I've noticed my video card memory and RAM are nearly always maxed out on the bodenplatte map (my video card only has 3GB VRAM). So I just need an upgrade, but in the meantime I am still trying to tweak my settings to eliminate the worst of the stutters without making the game look bad. I get the same feeling as you going from High to Balanced. 

[Guest deleted@134347]

1 minute ago, RedKestrel said:

I have been flying mostly on Balanced since Bodenplatte came out. The stuttering issues that came about have been improved by the memory fix by the devs substantially but on my machine I still get stutters during MP, sometimes bad, and I've noticed my video card memory and RAM are nearly always maxed out on the bodenplatte map (my video card only has 3GB VRAM). So I just need an upgrade, but in the meantime I am still trying to tweak my settings to eliminate the worst of the stutters without making the game look bad. I get the same feeling as you going from High to Balanced. 

 

yeah, I hear ya. I don't fly Rhein map at all, it performs very poorly on my rig as well on High and on Balanced. But all other maps, including Kuban are very nice..

[RedKestrel]

7 minutes ago, Count_de_Money said:

 

yeah, I hear ya. I don't fly Rhein map at all, it performs very poorly on my rig as well on High and on Balanced. But all other maps, including Kuban are very nice..

I think the bodenplatte map has higher quality textures for the cities and buildings, since those areas seem the worst for stuttering, and my video card memory gets overwhelmed with storing the bigger textures, then overflows to the RAM which loads more slowly , and then when that gets overloaded it goes to my hard drive, so I see stutters and frametime spikes when the game has to use the slower memory.
 

18 minutes ago, rowdyb00t said:

@RedKestrel

 

download this and you can adjust any preset to your liking. 
https://www.mediafire.com/file/isu7649zz6o1ml9/Graphic_Presets_(2).zip/file

preset 0 = low

preset 1 = balanced

preset 2 =high

preset 3 = ultra 

 

open the cfg with notepad, adjust and save

Thanks for this. Are these the default graphics presets pulled from the config file, or have these been tweaked?


 

[Bilbo_Baggins]

29 minutes ago, Count_de_Money said:

 

yeah, I hear ya. I don't fly Rhein map at all, it performs very poorly on my rig as well on High and on Balanced. But all other maps, including Kuban are very nice..

 

Rheinland map performs very poorly on my machine too. GTX1660 6GB upgrade and it's the same pauses and stuttering. All other maps are fine. 

 

How much RAM do you have? Have a feeling this map takes up a tremendous amount of RAM.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[Guest deleted@134347]

1 minute ago, Bilbo_Baggins said:

 

Rheinland map performs very poorly on my machine too. GTX1660 upgrade and it's the same pauses and stuttering. All other maps are fine. How much RAM do you have?

11gb, it's  2080ti as well.. oc'ed with custom watercooling..

[rowdyb00t]

@RedKestrel

 

 these are default except I changed the cloud samples back to 128 ( which was before the update that gave us ultra clouds ) if you want in bone stock change the samples back to 64

[Bilbo_Baggins]

10 minutes ago, Count_de_Money said:

11gb, it's  2080ti as well.. oc'ed with custom watercooling..

 

Well, that's an insane card and you've still got problems with Rheinland map. I don't get it. Do you get crashes on it too?

Edited March 3, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[Guest deleted@134347]

1 minute ago, Bilbo_Baggins said:

 

Well, that's an insane card and you've still got problems with Rheinland map. I don't get it. Do you get crashes on it too?

 

nope, no crashes. It's just a slideshow when dog-fighting on Rheinland map. If it's for simple flying it's not too bad, the motion smoothing keeps it at 45fps. But in a skirmish with 2-3 players everything looks a mess..

[RedKestrel]

1 minute ago, Count_de_Money said:

 

nope, no crashes. It's just a slideshow when dog-fighting on Rheinland map. If it's for simple flying it's not too bad, the motion smoothing keeps it at 45fps. But in a skirmish with 2-3 players everything looks a mess..

For me I don't have FPS drops much, just the stutters...in between the stutters I get full 60 FPS, even on High. High just makes the stutters more frequent.

[Guest deleted@134347]

Just now, Bilbo_Baggins said:

 

Same here. Simple flying no probs but fighting on COMBATBOX is a mess. Other maps are no problem. Interested to hear from folks who can run this map with heavy combat without super hardware.

 

you can. Go to Balanced, remove shadows, drop horizon to 70km, remove AA, HDR, grass to 0.  In this config it'll be playable .. but not exactly enjoyable.

[RedKestrel]

I just did a quick and dirty spreadsheed with @rowdyb00t's CFG file he sent me, arranging the different settings side-by-side so we can see how they change from pre-set to preset.

Object distance, for example, is set to 0.5 on Low, and then to 1.0 for every other setting. other settings, like grass quality, are the same for low and balanced and then the same for High and Ultra.

Worth a look, some of these settings we can customize in the GUI so those settings are kind of irrelevant, but it gives a peak as to what stuff is baked into the presets (at least, until we tweak the CFG file ourselves).

 

Edited March 3, 2020 by RedKestrel
Added attachment

[Bilbo_Baggins]

Is there anyway without 'mods on' we can tweak settings to have the balanced preset but keep high/ultra clouds? Clouds are atrocious on balanced.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[RedKestrel]

Just now, Bilbo_Baggins said:

Is there anyway without mods we can tweak the .cfg file to have the balanced preset but keep high/ultra clouds? Clouds are atrocious on balanced.

I think that you can run on Balanced with clouds on Ultra if you want, right? Or does the preset lock you into a certain level of cloud or lower?

I think you can just tweak the cfg yourself without any mods anyway, just have to make it writable. But I could be wrong, I haven't tried.

[Bilbo_Baggins]

24 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

I think that you can run on Balanced with clouds on Ultra if you want, right? Or does the preset lock you into a certain level of cloud or lower?

I think you can just tweak the cfg yourself without any mods anyway, just have to make it writable. But I could be wrong, I haven't tried.

 

You can select 'extreme clouds' with the game GUI but even then there is a huge difference in the clouds between 'balanced' and 'high' general presets. Can't seem to find a setting to adjust this in startup.cfg.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[RedKestrel]

12 minutes ago, Bilbo_Baggins said:

 

You can select 'extreme clouds' with the game GUI but even then there is a huge difference in the clouds between 'balanced' and 'high' general presets. Can't seem to find a setting to adjust this in startup.cfg.

Maybe its the clouds_samples feature at the bottom, or a couple of the other texture settings, that get applied to the clouds? I set them all to 64 as per rowdyboots recommendation but I haven't seen what mine are set to.

[Bilbo_Baggins]

9 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

Maybe its the clouds_samples feature at the bottom, or a couple of the other texture settings, that get applied to the clouds? I set them all to 64 as per rowdyboots recommendation but I haven't seen what mine are set to.

 

The problem is that setting is not in startup.cfg. Where that setting is located?

Edited March 3, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[Guest deleted@134347]

28 minutes ago, Bilbo_Baggins said:

 

The problem is that setting is not in startup.cfg. Where that setting is located?

 

i believe it's in \Il2...\Graphic Presets\data\luascripts\gpresets.cfg 

[Goffik]

45 minutes ago, RedKestrel said:

I set them all to 64 as per rowdyboots recommendation but I haven't seen what mine are set to.

 

The default setting is 64 for all presets, but is set to 128 for all presets if you're using that part of Rowdyb00t's clouds mod.

[LizLemon]

HDR set to 1 or lower in gpresets gives an 8bit framebuffer, if it is 2 or higher then its 16bit. This should have a big impact on memory use but I'm not gonna test it myself.

[Bilbo_Baggins]

On 3/4/2020 at 7:20 AM, Count_de_Money said:

 

i believe it's in \Il2...\Graphic Presets\data\luascripts\gpresets.cfg 

 

Hey guys this sounds like silliness but I have searched and do not have this directory 'Graphic Presets\data\luascripts\gpresets.cfg'. Is this a mods only/SP thing? I do have a 'graphics' directory but no gpresets.cfg is in there. Can not locate this file. 

 

Basically - would like to have high/ultra clouds on 'balanced' preset without mods-on. No matter what I set the clouds to (extreme, high) once you take the general preset to 'balanced' all clouds turn into a dog's breakfast.

 

Cheers

Edited March 5, 2020 by Bilbo_Baggins

[ROTER_BART]

@Bilbo_Baggins - gpresets.cfg is in \IL-2...\data\LuaScripts\

 

However, you may not be able to see it there unless you have previously added a mod that includes that file.

So, if the file is not there Copy/Extract the gpresets.cfg file @rowdyb00t attached in his earlier post to \IL-2...\data\LuaScripts\gpresets.cfg and edit it directly there.

 

I'm not sure whether editing that file will work without Mods-On. Try it and see.