Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis Options Help

Option descriptions

Device:

The video card detected in your PC.

Driver:

The DirectX 8 driver installed for this video card.

Screen resolution

The available video modes. A higher bit depth improves visual quality, at the expense of performance for some (particularly older, 16MB) video cards. Higher resolutions will reduce performance (frame rate) when using high quality terrain, even with high-end video cards.

# Highest quality Z-buffer

Selecting this reduces visual artefacts that may occur, at the expense of performance for some (particularly older, 16MB) video cards.

Texture quality:

LOW setting uses 16 bit textures.

HIGH setting uses 32 bit textures.

Having more bits in a texture reduces colour “banding” since colour transitions are smoother.

Older video cards may get some performance hit using 32 bit texturing, particularly when the video card doesn’t have much memory (16MB cards). For latest video cards there is no performance difference. The only advantage to lowering the quality is that they use less system memory, which may be an issue for machines without much memory (96MB and below).

# Terrain detail

This option specifies how smooth the terrain should be. The higher the setting, the smoother the terrain at the expense of frame rate.

# Terrain quality

The texturing quality of the terrain. The higher the setting, the more realistic the terrain will look. This option will be limited based on your video card’s capability. Reducing the quality may improve performance on some hardware. Reflective water is only available when the terrain quality is HIGH, due to hardware technical limitations.

This option will have the most significant visual impact of all options.

# Model quality

This is the model quality in the foreground. Depending on this setting, some structures may look different. HIGH quality is very high, and will have a significant performance impact on all but the best video card/CPU machines.

This setting will have the most significant effect on performance of all options, particularly on less powerful machines.

# Movie quality

This is the quality of the movies displayed in the game. If the movies do not appear to play correctly, try setting this option to LOW.

# Effects

This affects the quality of particle rendering (such as smoke). Increasing the quality incurs a slight performance cost.

#

# Draw distance

Affects how far into the distance objects are drawn. Increasing this will allow you to see more of your park, but this will decrease the frame rate, particularly on less powerful machines.

# Grass enable

Specifies whether or not to draw volumetric grass. Drawing grass is recommended only for powerful machines.

## Reflective water

Select to get the best quality water. This may not be available on some hardware. Also, for this option to be accessible, the terrain quality must be set to HIGH.

Recommendations

16MB Video card (few years old) eg. TNT2

Screen resolution: 640x480 (16 bit)

# Highest quality Z-buffer: No

Texture quality: LOW

# Terrain detail: LOW

# Terrain quality: MED if available

# Model quality: LOW

# Effects: LOW

# Draw distance: LOW

Grass enable: No

Reflective water: No

32MB NVIDIA GeForce256

Screen resolution: 800x600 (32 bit)

# Highest quality Z-buffer: No

Texture quality: HIGH

# Terrain detail: MED

# Terrain quality: MED

# Model quality: LOW

# Effects: MED

# Draw distance: LOW

Grass enable: No

Reflective water: No