Load
SOF II Single player, select Options then the Video Settings
tab.
Gamma.
This slider is used to adjust the level of RGB colour intensity. Moving
the slider to the right will increase the colour intensity,
which can reduce texture detail by brightening textures too much if moved
slid too far & vice versa.
Light
Flares. This
options sets the detail of the light coronas from light sources, such as
lamps, etc. The screenshots beneath illustrate the effect of each mode
available (Note – Images were saved in gif format which has caused some
minor artefacts in the coronas themselves which don’t exist in the game
itself).
As
you can see Occluded results in the nicest detail light corona,
though while be the most taxing on your CPU/Graphics card. Off is
recommended for those on very slow CPUs (600Mhz or less) or severely
fill rate limited Graphics cards (Light coronas are transparent, which
costs fill rate). As regards Simple I personally wouldn’t
recommend using this given the rendering errors associated with it.
Resolution.
Selecting a lower resolution can improve performance & maintain
a stabler, higher frame rate. Higher resolutions look better
(sharper & smaller jagged edges), they also tend to run slower. This
all depends on how slow/fast your system (Particularly Graphics card) is
of course.
Full
Screen. Set this
to your own preference, though preferably On of course for best
performance & largest viewing area.
Texture
Quality. This
setting controls the resolution of textures used in the game. Using a higher
option will enable the use of sharper, more detailed textures, though
performance will be lowered particularly on Graphics Cards with low Video
memory. Lower settings use more blurred level textures which
require less Video memory. If you intend to use the Very High
option be sure you have an AGP Aperture size of 32MB or more in the BIOS
& a Graphics Card with 128MB or more of Video memory, whereas with High
you should have 64MB of Video memory preferably, 32MB should be sufficient
for Medium & so on.
Detected
Video Card.
These 2 options in this section are merely for informational purposes,
though should you find that the Graphics card listed doesn’t match what
you’re using you might want to try installing newer Drivers.
Now
select the Advanced Options button.
Texture
Filter. Trilinear
texture filtering operates by taking 4 samples (texels) from 2
neighbouring Mipmaps, applies a bilinear filter to them & then
interpolates the results. This results in improved image quality, with
more seamless transitions between Mipmap levels & enhanced texture
detail compared to Bilinear
filtering. Most modern Graphics cards should be able to
use Trilinear with little performance problems, except for
those (still unfortunately) with 3dfx Graphics cards which should set this
to Bilinear for best performance (As they cannot simultaneously
perform Multi-texturing & Trilinear filtering).
Vertical
Sync. With this
option you can enable/disable Vsync in the Game. Vsync
effectively limits the frame rate to your current refresh rate at any
given resolution. Frame rate can be perceivably increased when set
to Off (disabled), as frames are rendered as fast as they
can be regardless of refresh rate, although you may experience image
tearing &/or controller lag as a result. With this set to On (enabled)
you won’t experience either image tearing nor controller lag, although
frame rate will be limited to your refresh rate. As such I’d recommend enabling
Vsync for best image quality & disabling it when you intend to
benchmark system/game performance.
Quincunx
Multisampling.
Setting this to Off will disable the use of Quincunx FSAA
(Available with GeForce 3 & newer Graphics cards) which will provide
improved frame rate & sharpest image. On will enable
Quincunx FSAA in the game, which provides improved jaggy smoothing over 2X
FSAA, reduces texture aliasing & performs better than 4X FSAA though
blurs the image more than 2X/4X or no FSAA would. Don’t bothering
setting this On if you’ve currently got a low frame rate & if
you can afford to enable FSAA you would, in my opinion, be best
served using 2X or 4X FSAA instead.
Anisotropic
Filtering Level.
This slider determines the anisotropic filtering level to be used in the
game. This provides greatly reduced texture aliasing & maintains
texture sharpness over greater distances as compared to regular texture
filtering methods. By default this is set to the maximum
level your Graphics card supports, i.e. fully to the right –
which can cause a great frame rate hit on the majority of Graphics cards.
I’d recommend you try setting this to the far left & get a
good idea of regular game performance before you consider enabling
this & for image quality reasons it would generally be preferable to
use this before considering FSAA.
UI
Texture Quality.
This option sets the resolution of the textures used for the UI (User
Interface) in the game, only on very Video memory limited Graphics
cards should you need to set this to Low. Leave it at High
on all other Graphics cards.
Colors.
Set this to Medium (16 Bit) for best performance, but with more
apparent color banding, while High (32 Bit) will provide best
visual quality – with less apparent colour banding & reduced
rendering errors as it uses a higher Z-Buffer precision for performing
depth calculations, although performance will be reduced – especially on
older Graphics cards. Setting this to Auto will use the regular
Windows desktop colour depth, just select an option instead. Given the use
of transparencies & fog in the game it is highly recommended you use High
(32 Bit) if your Graphics card support it.
