F1 2015 Hardware Settings Config Help Please.

[Aerasia]

Hi,
Does anyone have any idea what the folllowing part of the hardware settings config file does?

<crowd billboardPercentage="100" lod0Distance="4" lod1Distance="10" lod2Distance="25" lod3Distance="70" billboardDistance="700" finDistance="1000" lod0Quantity="5" lod1Quantity="20" lod2Quantity="50" lod3Quantity="300" billboardQuantity="22000" finQuantity="5000" propQuantity="50" />

I played around with some of the settings and reduced the percentage and quantity. I couldn't get a side by side comparison but it does appear to show less billboards. One thing for me anyway is it appeared to make my game run faster.
If anyone knows for definite what the values are for it would be appreciated.

 

[Carl Hughes]

I copied this from good old Google if it helps:
Short answer:
LOD determines how far away an object has to be before the game decides to render it at a lower quality.

Long answer:
Things far away are not rendered at the same quality level as things close to the camera. This is done for performance reasons. It may reduce the number of polygons, switch to lower quality textures, reduce animation updates, even turn the model into a 2D cardboard cutout. The LOD distance setting determines the distances at which these things occur, so a setting of "far" means that even far away things are rendered as if they were close to the camera. These things may be so far away that you wouldn't even notice a quality difference, yet your game might take a large performance hit by rendering at full quality. That is why it is probably set to "Normal" even on ultra setting.