There are several points I would like to make concerning Istaria and how textures/shaders will impact your system.

First and foremost the Istaria graphics quality is, like all games, dependent on your hardware. This is one of those immutable truths that is present on the gaming world. Those of you playing on laptops or desktops with integrated Intel graphics will not experience the full graphics quality of the game no matter what you do.

Intel graphics chips are meant for business charts and not much more. Depending on which Intel graphics chip you have, it will vary from nearly no support for 3D acceleration and shaders to somewhat limited support. The Intel graphics processors also lack the rendering pipelines needed for getting a high frame rate with lots of polygons on the screen.

Bottom line is that there is no Intel graphics chip on the retail market that renders game graphics very well. They just don't. So if you own a machine with one of these chips then you are out of luck in seeing what Istaria is actually capable of.

Graphics processors that are manufactured by Nvidia and ATI can perform quite admirably in Istaria. If you want to experience the full capabilities of the Istaria graphics you do not need a very beefy video card as far as I can tell.

It appears to me that the Istaria engine is supporting only DirectX version 9. That means that even many older ATI and Nvidia graphics cards are capable of rendering them well. But the older cards will suffer from slower GPU clock speeds and less capable rendering pipelines. So they may not get good frame rates on busy screens.

If Istaria does indeed support DirectX 10 then I stand corrected. But I do not see any evidence of that within the game as I have been dissecting it. This is a game engine issue and only the developers can really tell us.

The second point that I would like to make is that there is WITHOUT QUESTION a difference between fullscreen mode and windowed mode from the programmers standpoint. When you run in windowed mode you have to make compromises based on what the operating system will allow your graphics card to do. That is necessary because the operating system does not reset the graphics card when you switch between different windows.

It is normal for things like color saturation and gamma settings to be disabled in windowed mode. It has to be done so that your program doesn't make all of the other open windows look washed out or over-saturated in color. It is possible to program your game so that you can override the limitations placed on you in windowed mode. But in that case you will see the impact by getting the aforementioned washed-out or over-saturated video on other screens when you tab out of the game.

Because of this FACT of programming in Windows, there are a number of graphics features that can often be seen only in fullscreen mode. Many of them have to do with how shaders work and impact the system. But with the limitations that I suspect are in the current game engine the differences will mainly be in things like glare and object reflections.