Zargabad suddenly turned unplayable

[sethos 2]

Hey

After a few months break I finally return to ArmA 2 and I was ready to get stuck in right off the bat, guess not. I loaded up an old mission in Zarbabad and it was unplayable - A mission I've played several times on this setup with the exact same settings. It's like the game keeps turning down the LOD on EVERYTHING. My soldier looks like something from low settings, along with every other texture and trees / bushes turn into massive blops. Then all of a sudden, everything goes back to normal for a second and the game just freezes for that second, then back down to shoddy details and everything will also be flashing, like a constant flicker between lowest and medium details.

Exact same rig, exact same specs as a few months ago and now I just can't play it. I did try a few weeks ago on the last set of WHQL drivers from Nvidia and the Beta patch at the time.

Now I'm using the 1.60 RC and the latest Nvidia Beta drivers, exact same result.

Did something happen in a patch somewhere I'm unaware of or did something else happen?

Oh and I say Zargabad in the title, I suspect this might be happening in every situation with "lots going on", which has NEVER been a problem on this rig, 60FPS constantly! Zargabad is just a great test because it's so performance heavy.

Edited December 2, 2011 by Sethos

[Dwarden 1124]

what's your video memory setting ?

[sethos 2]

Well, last time Zargabad worked perfect I had it on Very High. Now I tried both Default and High with pretty much the same result.

[sethos 2]

barring no changes to your system, game, or game settings, I'd say you need to dust out your computer. (no kidding)

My computer is dust free - I clean it regularly :) No other game has seen any performance drop either, so there's a sitting or something with this game that has changed.

The only thing I could think of is, I haven't played the game in a while so the "last accessed" on the files is rather old. I defragged a few weeks ago, maybe it put all the files towards the outer plate on the HDD which means slower read times, hence all the texture problems?

[Dwarden 1124]

hmm that malloc You use try use TBB v4 instead default v3

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2:_Custom_Memory_Allocator

also did you defragment after patching? cause it's the patching what cause data gets fragmented all over the drive ;)

[sethos 2]

hmm that malloc You use try use TBB v4 instead default v3

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2:_Custom_Memory_Allocator

also did you defragment after patching? cause it's the patching what cause data gets fragmented all over the drive ;)

Ran a quick defrag after applying the 1.60RC and added -malloc=tbb4malloc_bi to my launcher. It seems to be sorted now, runs even better than before :)

Thank you so much Dwarden.

[Dwarden 1124]

well i'm not so sure if it's better

i discovered that \dll\ folder is not present in the RC at all

so it's using "Windows" allocator all the time ...

oops it got missing while packaging the RC ;)

also moving this thread to beta section, 1.60 is not out, RC is still like beta

p.s. check if you dont have beta listed in Extensions (UI)

so please in Your game UI goto Extension > select ARMA 2 OA beta and choose Disable and restart game :)

Edited December 3, 2011 by Dwarden

[sethos 2]

It's definitely using RC. Then that might not have been what worked, could easily have been the defrag that put things in order, plus I'm now using FXAA where I was using regular AA before ( Was still using FXAA during this problem ) - That could also give me a nice performance boost. In any case, it's working and I'm hitting a solid 60FPS in Zargabad where it would fluctuate and even dip to 40 sometimes in the past.

EDIT: Just booted up the game again, I was playing last night just before I went to bed and everything was perfect. Now it does it again, weird - I haven't changed a thing.

Edited December 3, 2011 by Sethos

[Black Russian 10]

Have you tried other games? It seems more likely that your PC or OS have some issues. I would check for viruses and similar.

Also check the temperatures of your cpu and gpu. Maybe the cooler is loose in one area and the cpu scales down because of the heat.

[sethos 2]

Have you tried other games? It seems more likely that your PC or OS have some issues. I would check for viruses and similar.

Also check the temperatures of your cpu and gpu. Maybe the cooler is loose in one area and the cpu scales down because of the heat.

Every other game is working fine, temps are fine and no, cooler isn't loose :)

[Dwarden 1124]

again, the issues are expected as the game is now not using the default memory allocator it was using in beta

you can easily 'check it' by copy the \dll\ folder from beta into main root of game (where arma2oa.exe is)

if you get stutter / issues w/o the folder and none with default or tbb4 allocator then it's clear ;)

[Beagle 684]

again, the issues are expected as the game is now not using the default memory allocator it was using in beta

you can easily 'check it' by copy the \dll\ folder from beta into main root of game (where arma2oa.exe is)

if you get stutter / issues w/o the folder and none with default or tbb4 allocator then it's clear ;)

Can't we just copy the old beta .dll folder over so it would work?

If yes, where should that folder go? ArmA2 root directory? or expansion folder?

[Dwarden 1124]

that's what i said, all you need is copy the dll folder from \ARMA2OA\Expansion\beta\dll\ to \ARMA2OA\dll\ ...

(it's root of directory where the .exe is)

[Beagle 684]

that's what i said, all you need is copy the dll folder from beta ....

Ah... roger, I read it to late.