^ Yes, you are mainly right.
Its been said quite a few times by the dev team that the single biggest factor in performance with the SAGE engine is processor speed. However, that only really covers the 'basic skeleton' of running the game based on this engine at a decent rate.
When you start to throw in all the bells and whistles such as the elaborate particle system and lighting effects (and BFME goes quite a far way with these) then GPU specs obviously come into play.
Ive done a bit of digging and this is what I came up with;-
- DX8 is fully supported, but the game does well on DX9. If you dont have DX9 and/or your card does not support all the DX9 features then you will see a difference even with all the graphics settings notched right up - this isnt a game problem, its your GPU not supporting what the game can do. Driver versions for your GPU also come into play - the recommendation is to have the latest drivers.
- Specifically, the game scales detail up or down depending on the support offered by your GPU (and its drivers) based on the availability and functionality (driver version) of these;-
Hardware T&L
ModAlphaClr
Gamma
NPatch
Dot3
Anisotropic filtering
Vertex shader (version)
Texture compression support (version)
Bumpmap luminance
Additionally;-
- N-Patch and DXT1 are disabled on NVidia cards
- ModAlphaAddClr is not supported on Matrox G400 and G550 cards and also on the ATI Rage 128
- Anisotropic filtering is disabled on the Radeon VE
- multitexturing and render-to-texture is not supported on ATI Rage Pro cards or the ATI 128 Pro, the Voodoo2/Voodoo3/Banshee series, the S3 Savage 2000 and PowerVR Kyro - also the max screen res is limited to 1280 x 1024 on these cards
Finally, taking all of that into account, the game scales further if your system specs do not offer enough total processing power and RAM to the game - youve only got a decent chance of getting the best possible audio/visual experience if you have all of that detailed above and you have at least a P4 2500/GF4 or AMD 2200/GF4 config.
Hope that helps!
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