I enjoyed the review of Strike Fighters 2: Israel and decided to repurchase most of the set (Europe, Vietnam, and Israel) so that I could use them on my new-ish Vista machine. Israel is great, as advertised, but I was surprised by the performance with the other two. Is Israel the only one of the three that has the new DX10 shaders? The others are great, of course, but boy are they ever slower (and this on a pretty decent machine--I7 950, 6 gigs memory, gforce 285, etc).

DX10 (advanced shaders) works in Israel, but not the others. To improve performance in the others...

Download HDR mod (which is just a DX9 DLL tweaked for the game)
http://forum.combatace.com/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=9519

and drop it into Vietnam or Europe or SF2 main folder, with the game exe. (or just main folder if they are all merged into one install)

Do not put that mod into Israel, it wont work. So if you have a merged install with Israel, you'll need seperate installs of Vietnam/Europe/SF2

You'll see a huge difference.

Thanks. I'll give it a go.

If you install all three games into one directory (merge them), starting with SF2V, then SF2E and SF2I at the end, you can play all games with DX10 as long as you start the game with the Israel shortcut.
Plus you have to install only the SF2I patches.

I did the reinstall and it seems to be sorted now. Thanks.

I installed Windows 7 this week, and I am experiencing some framerate "hiccups" that can probably be described as stutters. It does not happen all the time, but primarily in cockpit view, making my DX10 experience with SF2 Israel bot as great as with DX9 in XP. The visual quality is considerably better, but I'm not seeing these performance increases that everyone is talking about. Running a 3.33 Core 2 Duo with 4GB RAM and GeForce 295.

Even though DKM seems to have sorted his performance, I heartly endorse the HDR addon. I'm on Win7 since monday, and it gave me 3x the framerate in First Eagles and SF2E.

I'm noticing wierdness with Windows 7. Hope that's not a trend.

pfunk

What kind of problems? FE Gold and SF2E run perfectly nice for me on Seven.

Is there a way to get First Eagles to work in Vista? My understanding was that Thirdwire hadn't updated it to Vista yet. I have the XP version and would love to run it on my Vista 64 system but assumed it wouldn't work.

If you keep the installation folder out of either of the Program Files folders, it should work. You just need to make a new folder somewhere, call it "First Eagles" or something, and install it to that.

pfunk

Could this be one of the dual GPU on single card/two GPUs+two card SLI "problems" I recently heard about? That seals it for me. I'll be buying the 285 instead of the 295.

Thanks PFunk and Richardg and RSColonel_131st. I installed First Eagles and First Aces to a different location, updated using the November 2008 patch, and started the program using admin privileges. It ran just fine, though a little slow. Then I dropped in the HDR dx9 ddl, and it runs fast as well. For me, at least, the enbseries config file that came as part of the HDR download isn't necessary or particularly helpful. With it, using the unlimited defaults, I had frame rates in the 30s. Once I deleted the enbseries config file, the frame rates basically doubled.

The irony with the ENBseries mod is for me, it doesn't even run (it's not activated by shift-f12) so the ini file is completely unimportant, since it only governs what effects the mod does when it's running.

It seems just having that particular dx9 file there solves the performance problem, even if the special features of the mod aren't even active.

It's surprising how much of a difference the ddl file makes, isn't it? Usually modifications like that fall under the too-good-to-be-true category, but in this case, it really does work. And I'm very pleased to be able to run First Eagles under Vista. When Thirdwire comes out with a version that includes the new DX10 shaders, I'm sure I'll buy it. But till then, this setup works great.