Anyway, so in there is a set of settings for the Planet Textures, I could see LOW, MID, HIGH and ULTRA presets.
So I tweaked this. I think the default texture res is....
LOW 512
MID 1024
HIGH 1536
ULTRA 2048
(or something like that) Anyway, I changed these settings to
LOW 512 (to keep as a baseline)
MID 2048
HIGH 4096
ULTRA 8192
I then loaded the game, and I was testing using a Mac Pro, so the GFX cards have 6GB of vid mem.
Anyway, of most interest of course were the HIGH 4096 and ULTRA:8192 modes, bear in mind, when you switch modes, its NOT just the bitmap resolutions that change, other fx are disabled / enabled as well.
Here are the pics, showing my results
So the images are from left to right LOW, MID, HIGH and ULTRA
Things of note
LOW:
Cripes, really!! I pity the man that has to run at this setting. One pixel per country, clouds are total blur and no parallax mapping, no DSP effect on ground either. There ARE mountains below, but you cant tell really.
MID:
As this is the normal HIGH texture setting, it actually looks pretty decent. However, at this low altitude those mountains are very pixelated. Clouds ARE looking a lot better as well.
HIGH:
OK, so this is 2x normal ULTRA resolution at 4096. Now the mountains look pretty epic, and coasts have a LOT more detail.
ULTRA:
Now using 8192 for the texture, means even "zoomed" in at low altitude, it looks pretty sweet. The ground gets another finer level of bump, and coasts are REALLY detailed now.
So, thats a big WIN in terms of planet render quality. What about speed?
Well at the bottom of each Planet quality setting, was a mysterious setting, something about grids as I recall. Its never set very high, even on Ultra.
So I tweaked this as well, on Ultra from 128 (I think...) to 256, 512 and then 1024. I think it grids the planets diameter (think of it as a disc) and then updates the texture once a grid of that size has moved into view.
What does this mean, well at 128, quite a big grid square has to move into view before it is painted. This sucks as it leads to the texture having streaks at its edges.
With a setting of 256, it was already a lot better, much more frequent updates = less streaking.
512 I could only see a very small edge of streaking if I concentrated on it, and at 1024 not at all.
Im guessing the sweet spot here for me would be 512, decent performance no noticeable streaks.
