Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 6

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Night Flights

We were a little disappointed in the night flights, not in comparison with the F4:AF stock terrain but in comparison with certain previous builds of F4 that had HiTiles installed. Is that fair? Well, no, probably not, just an expectation we had. We were hoping to see a brightly lit up Seoul ala FS9 quality, but there was barely a candle in the window. Over Seoul, the airfield and the stadiums shown brightly, but otherwise it was a blackout. Given the fact that war has broken out, maybe this is realistic? As 20mm found out in his SimHQ interview with Tom, the terrain texture night lights have been disabled in Falcon 4.0: Allied Force. Apparently, it’s because of the new graphics effects such as terrain shading and cloud shadows. In the old Falcon engine, 4 out of 256 colors per texture could be switched on to add “lights”, pixels that changed into bright “light” colors once night fell. We can hope that Tom is able to work out the technical issues in an upcoming version. The images below show why you’d better have your NV working well if you plan a ground strike at night on anything but an enemy airfield.

Airfields and the Seoul stadiums are clearly lit.

Seoul is “down there”, but once the NV is off…

Technical Notes and System Specs

A note about the video cards used in this review. We intentionally used multiple cards on multiple systems to show the difference in quality and settings. We tried using the anisotropic setting of 8x, but it resulted in unacceptable shimmering of the more complicated areas such as Seoul. However, the ATI cards were much better at all anisotropic settings than the NVIDIA 6800 GT. We were surprised at how poorly the NVIDIA 6800 GT handled the textures with anisotropic filtering. It clearly displayed worse than the aged ATI 9700 PRO regarding shimmering. At 16x AF, the 9700 PRO barely showed shimmering around the edges of town. While the 6800 GT naturally fared better with 16x than with 8x, it was still annoyingly distracting when passing near a city. This is not a comment about Tom’s HiTilesAF. It is a statement on the video cards themselves — and user expectations. The 6800 GT was superior in showing details and certainly does run faster, but image quality with respect to shimmering was another matter. We detected no stuttering with either ATI card, but did get stutters with the NVIDIA 6800 GT. Keep in mind when judging Tom’s HiTiles that this add-on cannot “create” quality if the video card isn’t up to the challenge, and image quality is more than the fastest chipset with the most RAM.

20mm’s Balkans and NOE Missions

Operating System: WindowsXP Home
CPU: Pentium 4 – 2.8GHz
Motherboard: Asus
HDD: 160GB Seagate HD SATA
Optical Drives: Plextor, Lite On 16 X DVD
Video: ATI Radeon 9800 PRO (Catalyst 5.10 drivers)
DX: DirectX9.0c
Monitor: Dell 2001FP
Resolution: 1600x1200x32@65Hz
Audio: Audigy2 PCI sound card
RAM: 1GB Corsair DDRAM RAM
Controller: CH Products HOTAS: Fighterstick USB, Pro Throttle, Pro Pedals

guod’s Balkans Mission

Operating System: Windows 2000 Pro SP 4
CPU: AMD Athlon 2700+
Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Deluxe (nForce2)
HDD: 120GB Western Digital SATA – 8MB cache
Optical Drive: Asus 52x CD-ROM
Video: ATI Radeon 9700 PRO (Catalyst 5.10 drivers)
Settings: 4x FSAA, 16x Anisotropic, High Quality
DX: DirectX9.0c
Monitor: Viewsonic G771
Resolution: 1024x768x32@75Hz
Audio: onboard
RAM: Corsair 512MB 3200 DDR
NIC: onboard w/ broadband cable
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Controller: Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS with CH Products Pedals

guod’s Korea Mission

Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP 2
CPU: AMD A64 3800
Motherboard: Asus A8V
HDD: 40GB Western Digital – 8MB cache
Optical Drive: Sony CRX225-E CD-RW
Video: PNY Verto GeForce 6800GT 256 MB (Forceware 78.01)
Settings: 4x FSAA, 16x Anisotropic, High Quality
DX: DirectX9.0c
MAG 19″ LCD
Resolution: 1280x1024x32bit @ 72Hz
Audio: Realtek AC97 onboard
RAM: Corsair 1024MB 3200LL DDR
NIC: onboard w/ broadband cable
Power Supply: Antec TruePower 550W
Controller: Thrustmaster Cougar HOTAS with CH Products Pedals

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Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4 Page 2 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 2 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 3 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 4 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 5 Tom’s HiTiles for Falcon 4: Allied Force Page 7