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Autorun program "Options" section — parameters

Terrain quality

• Low — switching details gradation at distances of 55 m and 90 m accordingly; no waves. Visual quality is good
• Medium — switching details gradation at distances of 90 m and 120 m accordingly; no waves. Visual quality is very good
• High — switching details gradation at distances of 90 m and 120 m accordingly; waves. Visual quality is very good

FPS increase: High => Medium ~70%, Medium => Low ~20%. High and Medium value have practically no visual differences but fps decreases by ~1.5-2 times.

Lighting frequency

• Rare — once per minute. Low visual quality but takes practically no processor time
• Medium — once every 10 seconds. Better than Low but still leaves many artifacts visible
• Frequent — once per second. Best possible quality

FPS increase: Frequent => Normal ~20-30%, Normal => Low ~10-15%

Texture quality

• Low — very bad quality, minimum video memory usage
• Medium — medium texture quality, video memory usage is ~3-4 times lower. Suitable for video adapters with 8 Mb of RAM or more
• High — best possible texture quality, highest video memory usage. Recommended for video adapters with 16 Mb of RAM or more (preferably 32 Mb or more)

If texture quality value is set no higher than the recommended one, this setting practically doesn't affect the performance (app. 5% difference), because all textures fit into video memory anyway. However, if texture quality is set higher than the recommended value, performance decreases due to the fact that textures load through AGP bus from the range reserved for video adapter (app. 10% performance decrease), or load from the system memory (fps decreases by 4 times).

Filtering

• Point — poor picture quality
• Bilinear — good picture quality
• Trilinear — very good picture quality

In terms of fps differences between Point and Bilinear values is almost negligible; when changing from Bilinear to Trilinear values, fps may drop by ~30%.

Mipmapping

When switched off, allows to save about 25% of video memory, but decreases picture quality sig-nificantly and somewhat reduces general performance.

Dithering

Improves picture quality in 16-bit colour mode. No performance decrease has been detected.

Stretch video

With many video adapters this option causes movies to play jerkily... Best course of action is to try it on each individual machine. This parameter doesn't affect performance in other game screens.

Quick cursor

Reduces performance by app. 30%, but ensures that cursor is redrawn ~16 times per second, inde-pendently from fps. Recommended for less powerful machines.

Color depth

• 16 bit — good speed and acceptable quality
• 32 bit — with almost all video adapters (except ATI Rage 128) fps drops by app. 2 times, but picture quality improves significantly.

Game "Options" parameters affecting game speed

Shadows

We recommend leaving only shadows from characters, since shadows from objects and trees take a lot of video memory (and of processor time, depending on Lighting frequency).

Windows swap-file parameters

To ensure smooth running of the game, we do not recommend setting fixed size of Windows swap file, but let Windows manage it automatically. When the game starts, it checks the volume of free disk space needed for normal running; if you see a warning on the screen, you'll have to free the necessary amount of your hard disk. Minimum hard disk space required is app. 300 Mb, but we recommend freeing about 500 Ìb. Also, please check your disk defragmentation: optimizing this parameter can significantly increase game speed and the speed of loading game zones. We strongly recommend setting the game up on an uncompressed drive (or part of the drive).

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