Arma 3 Performance vs. Arma 2

[pathetic_berserker 4]

Another angle that is often overlooked,

ArmA 3 is on newer tech than A2, and the ArmA franchise has always allowed for a scaleablility that will see it push systems 2, 3 years or more after release.

So getting a comparable visual quality to high visuals in A2 may mean having medium settings in A3. And if your a slider goon then you may be disapointed your extreme gaming machine cant cope with every thing maxed out. (though if your on tripple head you probably can't max out sliders in A2 yet!)

Edited March 1, 2013 by Pathetic_Berserker

[Alex72 1]

Please keep questions about system requirements in its respective thread to keep it tidy. Thanks.

[crazyjake56 10]

The requirements aren't too bad except for the graphics card one but as long as there aren't as many trees as chernarus I'll be alright with this one. Only thing I really hope for is the ability to turn off shadows.

[Binkowski 26]

Hopefully ArmA3 is optimized pretty quick after release. ArmA1 and ArmA2 were a pain and took a few patches to fix a lot of optimization issues..

[vegeta897 13]

The requirements aren't too bad except for the graphics card one but as long as there aren't as many trees as chernarus I'll be alright with this one. Only thing I really hope for is the ability to turn off shadows.

I hope for the opposite, because it's a serious MP balance issue in Arma 2.

[iceman77 18]

I would guess, that if you can run arma2 very well, a3 shouldn't be a problem at all on moderate, or even higher tier settings. My2c.

Dean Hall alone is a great reason to love BI, the effort and time he is putting into DayZ and not releasing garbage.

I would think many,many other devs would be a good reason to play Arma aswell. Not to mention all of the hundreds upon hundreds of community modders & editors.

[Scoggs 1]

My main hope to see at least 75% of my gpu in use when playing(at all times)

[JojoTheSlayer 35]

Lets just say Arma 2 runs very well on higher settings on my rig (I7-920 stock, 6gigs, 32bit OS, GTX680). Take on Helicopters with dynamic clouds, picture in picture etc dose not. Needed to go much lower in that game to get a decent fps to play single player...

Point is, I am pretty sure Arma 3 will not run "good enough" for the average hardcore PC gamer on the "recommend" hardware.

[Redjevel 1]

i has gtx 460 and 4 gb ram ;p i think i will be able to run arma 3 on the lowest...

[cadmium77 16]

The question is; how many cores will it use? I've got 8. I'm hearing Arma 2 only uses 2. Unless you run as a server with the headless client for the AI which delivers a vastly improved AI.

[nodunit 397]

I hope for the opposite, because it's a serious MP balance issue in Arma 2.

That should come down to server settings...ultimately there is no real easy way around this, they can't bake the shadows into the map like battlefield 3 or many other games have done to make shadows significantly less taxing. Ultimately, if people want everyone to run SOME setting all at the same time, then there must be rules to force them to run those settings.

[vegeta897 13]

Is there a way to force shadows in Arma 2 servers? Or mission settings?

If not, I hope there is in Arma 3.

[kernriver 4]

Yeah that has to be considered too. We will have better Performance on Stratis then on Lim.... Altis

I hope they include a godd benchmark Mission.

I also hope that they include a hint system in the settings that tells you what each setting does and if it is CPU or GPU heavy.

This is very important, good thinking.

[Droikka 1]

That should come down to server settings...ultimately there is no real easy way around this, they can't bake the shadows into the map like battlefield 3 or many other games have done to make shadows significantly less taxing. Ultimately, if people want everyone to run SOME setting all at the same time, then there must be rules to force them to run those settings.

Battlefield 3 shadows are not baked... They're fully real-time and you can alter the time of day with a mod in a server without PB. Battlefield 3 runs in a very impressive manner, stop denying it. Should ArmA 3 look even anywhere close to it, you'd never be over 3 fps.

[old_painless 182]

hm, i7 in the gamescom rigs you say. doesn't go much higher than that. would have liked it better if they had ok performance on an i5 machine

[chrisb 196]

Its always been the case with this game, concerning systems, just luck of the draw, as they say..

Its down to how you set your system up and knowing where the limitations are. If you expect the highest settings for everything, then you will probably be disappointed, if you expect to mix settings, then you’ll probably be pleasantly pleased.. Thats how its always been with this series.

That’s where OFPElite had it down, on the original xbox, you played and enjoyed, instead of worrying regards settings, it was pretty basic, but I enjoyed it for that. Seventy ai max limit, draw in the fog and play, marvellous stuff. Spend a fortnight on the pc playing with settings to try and get the same experience.. Great editor too considering the system restraints.

Anyway, A2 v A3, be the same old story, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking….;)

[Droikka 1]

hm, i7 in the gamescom rigs you say. doesn't go much higher than that. would have liked it better if they had ok performance on an i5 machine

2600k, it's just a 2500k with HT. It's not particularly high-end anymore, just like 920 and such are not.

[chortles 263]

That’s where OFPElite had it down, on the original xbox, you played and enjoyed, instead of worrying regards settings, it was pretty basic, but I enjoyed it for that. Seventy ai max limit, draw in the fog and play, marvellous stuff. Spend a fortnight on the pc playing with settings to try and get the same experience.. Great editor too considering the system restraints.

Funny thing is, this is pretty much the best case for a console port of an Arma title. :p

[nodunit 397]

stop denying it.

Denying what? I never said anything about how battlefield runs, simply that the shadows are less taxing, defensive much? And what is this mod?

[Droikka 1]

Denying what? I never said anything about how battlefield runs, simply that the shadows are less taxing, defensive much? And what is this mod?

But you are spreading false truths.

http://theblue.co/freecam.php

[nodunit 397]

Interesting, I thought the shadows were baked considering when I turned them to the lowest setting they were still there in relatively the same image.

Edited February 28, 2013 by NodUnit

[vegeta897 13]

Perhaps turning the shadows off switches to a baked version?

We should probably stop discussing BF3...

[brightcandle 114]

I played through a lot of the demo scenarios in Cologne and while they were obviously decent PCs it looked and ran incredibly well compared to Arma 2. They could have been running triple SLI under there on a 3960k and the entire game in RAMDisk to fool us on what the performance would look like but I doubt that amount of cheating in the demo. Doesn't tell us how the real map will fair or what its like when the AI count goes up a lot but it was smooth 6 months ago despite the fancy graphical fidelity. My guess is we'll be pleasantly surprised with performance and the visual quality we get at the various points of performance, for the 5 minutes we get to play it between memory leak crashes.

[sproyd 2]

My guess is we'll be pleasantly surprised with performance and the visual quality we get at the various points of performance, for the 5 minutes we get to play it between memory leak crashes.

Wait the gamescom build had memory leak issues? This is going to be a real problem at 32 bit, given the max 2gb of RAM.

[DShKM 18]

I'm sure they fixed the memory leak issues by now. Gamescom was almost 5 months, if that hasn't been fixed by now then we have a serious problem.