Solving your IL-2 patch 3.001 graphical performance issues

March 15, 2018

1–2 minutes

Many players say version 3.001 performs better than ever before and many other players are having trouble getting the frame rates that they are used to. There are many new features and graphical options that can make the game look incredible but also rob you of precious frame rates and smoothness.

Bugs, issues, and progress

As expected, with such a large release comes bugs and issues that players and the team need to contend with. The biggest issue so far is one of game performance. IL-2 version 3.001 unleashes a series of new features that will definitely have a performance and visual impact.

All of these features continue to gobble up system resources and many players are having issues with stutters and reduced frame rates.

Check out my video showing a fairly consistent 40-60 frame per second rate but with stuttering (especially starting around the 1:00 mark).

The stutter issue seems to have taken on multiple dimensions but there are some solutions to at least some of the stutter issues. One of those appears to be a bug with the way that the game renders on some systems. Counter-intuitively, turning ON the 4K texture mode smooths performance significantly. As Mr. Spock would say… Fascinating.

IL-2 needs more VRAM?

I’ve also discovered that many of the new features need more VRAM and that means that people with middle of the road cards like my 2GB GTX 960 may struggle – frame rates remain high but VRAM is gobbled up quickly to the point where that 2GB is completely filled.

For me, a future upgrade is probably needed (maybe when GPU prices drop – ha!) to maintain or exceed the graphics that I used to be able to run smoothly.

New features are of course great but they come with a performance cost for people who want to have everything turned up to the maximum.

How you can get help

There are some helpful suggestions out there and Jason Williams has been very hands on trying to sort out issues and help players get to flying.

Are you having issues with this? Check out Jason’s Quick Guide to 3.001 Graphics Smoothness.

One response to “Solving your IL-2 patch 3.001 graphical performance issues”

Benedict Tan Shan-Wen

March 18, 2018 at 11:53 pm

When I initially started playing 3.001 I did discover that my previous settings were largely incompatible with the new version. I run an older rig with a 670 and in addition to performance issues I also had severe spotting issues. Like aircraft would disappear at 500m kind of spotting issues.

My advice to anyone who is experiencing similar would be to drop the terrain distance settings down and turn ground filtering to blurry as well as turning on sharpen. For the most part my frames stay solidly in the 50-60 range now and spotting is as good as it was to the previous version. Turning off HDR will increase the contrast ratio in most situations slightly but I keep it on because it looks far nicer and makes the instruments easier to read.

So far, my only issues left are the occasional microstuttering many others are reporting, the wonky clouds and the fact that the roll axis of TrackIR flips when looking backwards. I really wish they would implement a contrast slider, which would help immensely.

On the upside of performance, framerates when flying through smoke have improved immensely which is pretty rad.

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