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A recent post in the World War II Online forums talks about an upcoming 1.67 patch and what it means for users. In the two-post thread, producer Chris "Mo" Sherland explains why the requirements on the user's video card will increase with the update. It seems they've been working hard to offload much of the work of the CPU onto video cards that support hardware T&L (texturing and lighting).

They have also upped the quality of the textures across the board, so the game should look even better now. Users with video cards having 32MB of VRAM or less will likely have to run the game in "reduced textures" mode, but they assure players even this will be an improvement over the current situation:

Video cards with 32MB or less of memory will need to run WWIIOL with “texture reduction” routines enabled within the setup app to be able to render some of the new larger textures. This means that the new textures will be reduced and not look as pretty as they do on the higher memory cards. Keep in mind that they will still look a lot better than the old textures even when reduced, and give the same fields of cover as they would not reduced.

Also, cards that do not support Hardware Transform and Lighting (“Hardware TnL”) will probably see performance drop as the rendering routines that are now designed to push data to the video card are still being run on the CPU. We took advantage of hardware TnL and added or enhanced some graphic features, there’s simply more to see. This means that non-TnL cards will simply be working harder than they do now and so will the CPU.

DX 8.1, WWIIOL, and your video card

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