Hello back to you people,
I haven't been back here for a day or two. I thought that this thread would be more or less be over. But I see a couple more answers from, Daniel and Jan ...
When I talked about turning off the rotating radar, I meant the graphics load from the actual physical rotating bridge antenna. That did help a bit, about two frames per second which was a noticible help in the frames rate when leaving Surabaya.
Jan, I went into my documents, and made sure that the object density was 2, and the LOD size was 10. This alone did not produce any difference. Then I went into the ATI video card control panel. Removing my usual 2x anti-aliasing did not help. Changing the AF (which I usually set at 4 these days) did not help.
What did help, by an increase of about 5 frames per second, was lowering my mipmap setting, which I usually keep at "quality" and still, the picture quality seemed quite good!.... until I went into the conning tower internal view, and the close-up dials were all blurry. I have always thought that "mipmap level" referred to long distance sharpness!!!
So, I returned the mipmap back to Quality. I
must keep post-processing in the game "on" since it provides the deep colors that I like. Other settings in the game like Character Detail; 3D Ship Wakes; Ship Normal Maps; Caustic Efeffects, made no difference when I shut them off. It looks like I will have to live with this in Surabaya!
However I am getting 9-10 FPS again, instead of the 5-6 I was stuck with a few days ago .....
I still think that the Distance sliders in the game are not properly done for the person with a weaker computer. Surabaya has a "deep" set of scenery. My opinion is that the slider should turn off the bay and ship and line of trees behind the town immediately, along with half the buildings, but it does not.
But Silent Hunter 4 is still a great game. And again, thoughts of newer hardware start creeping into my mind!! Thanks all !!
Bob P.