RAM thing is good to know about. Whether it was needed or not, I flaged my exer and upped the RAM usage, just in case. Might as well since it's quick and easy.
As for higher quality and higher resolution, it should be possible, but I can't find the relevant ini file. I've done it in at least two games. Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (and every other game in the series) are too old to support even a 1600x900 resolution monitor, so the size has to be set manually. I also have a custom setup for Skyrim (which has two graphical ini files) to take advantage of some of the stuff that can't be selected in game, as well as things that can be set higher than in game (though my computer can't cope with anything close to what that game can actually do), just to eek some extra performance out of my card.
So there should be an ini file for this game that will let you set the graphical settings.
The other thing you can do is open the Catalyst Control Center (might be AMD VISION now, the name changed from my last drivers. NVIDIA cards have an equivalent, forget the name, should show up if you right click the desktop), and change the 3D application settings for the game (which can be set to override the game settings). This is mostly useful for forcing a particular type or grade of anti aliasing as well as anisotropic filtering, and I also have options for vertical sync (as well as forcing triple buffering), and some stuff about tessellations that I just leave on default. This is particularly useful on older games that predate anti-aliasing, like Jedi Outcast (maxing out the filters does a surprising amount to making the graphics of the last decade less distracting).