Team Fortress 2

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 10th October 2007
Comments (50) Stumble

The Phong Song

One of the most impressive things about Team Fortress 2 is the sheer graphical fidelity and smoothness of play which we experienced – though we’d expect nothing else from an 8800 Ultra and 2GB RAM. The new art style is also a pretty big change, taking the Source Engine into the cartoon dimension by using a custom made phong shader.

Still, being a multiplayer game, Team Fortress 2 has to be pretty scalable and offer decent performance over and above all other things. We never had any lag on our rig or connection, though there were around 10-to-12 crashes as a result of being built on the sometimes shaky Source Engine. Generally though, once we managed to get online there were very few problems as long as you didn’t try to fiddle with the graphics options.

But that’s no sort of life for a bit-techer, so we threw caution to the wind and started to have a look at the different graphics options that we could tweak in Team Fortress 2. We’ve picked out the most important sliders here, so you can see just what your system might be able to make the game look like.

Texture Detail

The texture detail setting in Team Fortress 2 has four options; Low, Medium, High and Very High. Here we’ve got screenshots of Very High, Medium and Low so that you can gauge what your game will look like. Check out the pictures below.

Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song! Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song! Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song!
Texture detail Very High (left) Medium (center) and Low (right), click to enlarge

As you can see, the close-up textures like the ground and walls are the most heavily affected textures and there really is a great deal of difference between the settings. Obviously the higher settings look a lot better and if there’s no performance hit then this is what you should be aiming for.

The High and Very High settings are just about distinguishable, but either will do for most people.

Model Detail

Model detail falls into three settings; High, Medium and Low. We’ve got screenshots of all three below, focusing on everyone's favourite character, the Heavy Weapons Guy. Once again take a look at them before you read on.

Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song! Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song! Team Fortress 2 The Phong Song!
Model detail High (left) Medium (center) and Low (right), click to enlarge

The main and most obvious difference between the settings is how angry/crazy the Heavy Weapons Guy looks. Just look at those eyes – on High and Medium the character looks fairly human, but on Low the eyelids and brow are scaled back and he takes on a whole new sense of menace.

Another important place to look is at his hands, which demonstrate how the polygons have been bought more fully under control in the lower settings. Either of these settings is passable, but as always you should push the setting as high as you can without taking a performance hit.

Shopping