World Detail Distance

There’s something very important you should understand about World in Conflict, which is that although the game is very much about using small squads to accomplish a mission, the levels are still very big and there is an awful lot going on on-screen at once.

Just because you’re having to concentrate on smaller battles doesn’t mean the game is any less epic and the developers have kept up an impressively intense atmosphere by giving the appearance of other battles going on around you. Paratroopers continually parachute in, planes whiz by and explosions dot the landscape, indiscriminately reducing buildings to rubble.

This atmosphere is pretty important to the game, so we decided one of the most important settings to look at was the World Detail Distance setting, which controls how good the world looks in the distance. As usual there’s three options and we’ve got the screenshots for them all below.


Again, a subtle difference between the sliders. The key here is too look at the background and not the foreground. On Low setting we can see an attractive enough skyline and a series of parachutes but that’s all, but on Medium the world looks a lot more populated. Explosions in the distance, a further reaching skyline and god rays beautifully illumination the whole thing.

A further bump upward to the High setting gives the full picture with a better skyline, more detail and more clouds. There’s just more. While you can still enjoy the game perfectly on the Low setting, pushing higher and further will give you a fuller experience and make you appreciate the game a lot more – if you can go for the High setting then do.

Water Quality

Next up on our list of Important Graphical Settings is the Water Quality option. Now, the game doesn’t feature any naval units per se, but there is still a lot of water seen throughout the game. What else did you expect when the Russian invasion starts with the Soviet Navy storming in to Seattle?

There are two graphical options to choose from here, not the usual three. You’re limited to just plain old Low, or extra-pretty High. Let’s have a look at both below.


Mmmm, it’s like being back on holiday again, but this time without the sore throat with some more explosions. The water in the Low setting looks good, worthy of any DX9 game, but on the High setting the water the effect is tripled and the water looks photo-realistic. If you can push up to the High setting, then do.

Anti-Aliasing

Finally, we have the ever-popular Anti-Aliasing option. It’s actually been a while since we looked at a game which had Anti-Aliasing in it thanks to a slew of games based on the UE3 engine which currently doesn't support AA properly thanks to a focus on Multiple Render Targets.

Taking an excerpt from Tim's DirectX 10 overview, he explains that Multiple Render Targets essentially allow the developer to render more than one pixel colour value to different surfaces with a single draw operation. Tim explains that this means that developers can create more complex shader programmes. Under DX10, anti-aliasing can work in conjunction with MRTs, so it's a case of either the developers or driver writers adding support.

That's over my head, but hopefully it'll give you an insight into why anti-aliasing isn't working in those games.


Anti-Aliasing I do know about though. It’s the method by which vertices are smoothed out on screen so not to as appear all jagged. Put simply if there was a single graphical setting you were to push to the fullest, then it should be the AA – it makes that much difference to the game, especially when the camera is jumping about. Stick it as high as you can manage.