what about the visual quality slider?

[allthumbs 0]

I had to replace my gfx card and am re setting the game graphics settings. I always had the "visual slider" set to max, which is 11.23. Today I dropped it all the way down to 1, or whatever the lowest setting is. I gained 8-10fps. I didn't really notice any visual degradation, either. Now I am still trying out different things in the first mission, which is "Flashpoint", at Malden. It's early morning, so a little dark and I maybe am not noticing some of the changes made? Does anyone have any idea exactly what the "visual quality" slider actually does?

[allthumbs 0]

OK, I did a little testing. When I got near enough to the town of Morton and its buildings, I opened up the options and moved it to the very bottom of my screen. That way I could move the slider back and forth and see first hand what the changes were. I saw that the roof peaks on some othe buildings changed slightly when I raised the slider, but not to any improvement. I saw the extremely distant trees seem to thin out and individualize a little and again, I like it better on the low setting. The only other thing I saw was that the trees in town seemed to darken slightly when the slider was lowered. All in all, at least for the first mission, the visual slider did not actually improve anything that I saw - it only made some slight changes.

[Pulverizer 1]

The higher it is, the more detailed models you see. Each model have multiple "level of detail" or LOD that are used in relation to distance and frame rate, to save perfomance by not rendering details that are too far to see and to keep up fps if there's too many objects to render at full detail.

If you run at like 100 fps, it won't make much of a difference because highest LOD are used anyway.

[allthumbs 0]

I was surprised at the fps impact that it had. It only seems to affect distant objects, and is very un noticeable (word?) I still can't get this game to run as well as I'd like, though. (frame rates 30 or more consistently) But it's wierd. Even though in some areas my framerate drops, it doesn't appear to run choppy. I guess turn off FRAPs, shrug, and play it like it is.