"Hierarchy" of graphics options?

[konstantine]

If this question is better suited for the tech forum, I'll post it there, but since this isn't a glitch or bug I thought it might help more people than just myself.

In the manual it suggests to enable terrain VBO, shaders, shadows, and high definition rendering. For a couple of basic hardware related reasons having all of these settings enabled causes lag on my computer (older, but well within the minimum spec requirements).

For those of us without top of the line systems, what is the recommended "hierarchy" of graphics settings (maybe listed from "essential" to "just makes flowers look prettier")? Or is it all or nothing?

[poesel]

I have a 5 year old computer and I play with all sounds on (no music). From the graphics options I have only particles on (you need that to know if you have penetrated the armor).

I sometimes have 'flying' vehicles but thats not disturbing me much.

I can recommend to turn of texture caching - it takes forever and the missing textures are loaded during the game (only short stuttering at the beginning). Gives you plenty of time during deployment

[Junglist]

So that is why some people always seem to have much longer deployment time than I do!

[Taras]

You definitely do *not* want high definition rendering on an older computer. You might be able to get away with shaders and VBO, you might not. Experiment with those two. BTW, just in case you have it on, foliage is totally out of the question. Antialiasing is on by default, I'd reccomend turning it off.

I think (but I'm not sure) that the "steering" slider adjusts how close or far does the system substitute less detailed models to improve speed.