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3.4 provides new graphic settings to tweak - you can see if your brand new device can handle it all, or you can dial things back to help make the game playable on an older device. If you're on a PC, you won't have the "New Render" setting; if you're not playing on an Apple device, Blitz uses OpenGL. The graphics aren't quite as nice with OpenGL but at least you're likely to be able to max out all the settings 
If you have an old device, start with using the Ultra-Low or Low graphics quality setting. If you have a newer device read on to see what these new settings do.
Here's the settings I use for my iPhone 6 and iPad Mini 4, both of which use the A8 processor:
Water Quality when set to High show water with rippling reflections. Medium shows some reflections but looks odd and Low just shows a blue, non-reflecting surface.
Object and terrain quality at Medium still allows distant mountains to have textures on them; set to low they are just blobs of colour and not nice to look at. If set to high, FPS drops significantly on old devices. This controls quality of textures on distant surfaces and not number of polygons from what I can see.
Vehicle quality controls amount of detail on the surfaces of the vehicles (at High, it appears to enable bump mapping from what I can see)
Effects Quality has a big impact on game performance. Use Medium or Low unless you have an A9 or A10 processor as explosions of tanks will freeze your screen until the explosion is gone, and smoke and fires from dead tanks can also kill your frame rate.
Draw distance controls the number of polygons used for objects around you. On old devices anything higher than the Low setting is a killer. Note that even if set to high, tanks on distant hills may appear to float above them as Blitz reduces the polygons being shown for that distant hill.
Fog quality at medium does allow fog to be shown, helping with depth perception. Without it, distant objects have no fog to help you identify them as distant. Some maps only show fog if quality is set to High, and you can see if your device can handle High for this setting (it doesn't seem to be a big-ticket item).
Anisotropic filtering, if turned on, show distant surfaces with more clarity. While it will make the game appear a bit more real, it does impact performance so you'll want to turn it off unless you have a new device.
Antialiasing smooths diagonal edges on your screen, and unless you have a large screen you're not likely to notice a big difference. AA also has a noticable impact on frame rate and does not greatly improve the visuals for most players.
Camo doesn't seem to impact performance much. If you crash Blitz often, turn it off.
Flora quality also has a major impact on frame rate. Set to OFF will hide all the grass in the game, but keeps bushes and trees visible. Grass has no camo rating anyway! Medium and High are only recommended for new devices.
I have HD Sound turned off and Shadows on. Lower Resolution mode is VERY grainy and you're unlikely to find it useful. The New Render switch enables use of the Metal API for devices using iOS 8 or newer and an Apply A7 processor or newer (iPhone 5S or newer; iPad Mini 2 or newer; iPad Air or newer). Metal improves performance AND graphics quality, so it's a win in pretty much all cases if it's available for you to use.
Other settings in iOS to help make your device run as lean as possible (old device desperation mode):
- Turn all Notifications off so your device doesn't have to think about them in the background
- Turn Push off for all mail and calendar accounts and set Fetch to manual so that your device doesn't check for mail while you play
- Turn Automatic Updates off so your device won't update apps while you play - this is a real killer!
- Turn Background App Refresh off so your device only focuses on the app you're using
- Disable iCloud, iMessage and Facetime
Hope this helps owners of older hardware! With these settings I get 50-60 FPS with an iPad Mini 1 in our house that still runs Blitz 3.4 pretty well.
Edited by reluctanttheist, 04 January 2017 - 05:14 AM.
Graphics settings have no impact on ping, just framerate.
