Will-my-pc-run-Arma3? What cpu/gpu to get? What settings? What system specifications?

[oldbear 390]

@ florianmuellerCH : there is no need to copy/paste the whole data sheet :)

We understand you have a "i7-3770K / HD 5700 / 8 Go / Z77 MoBo" rig.

The CPU is on the high end and the GPU on the low one, it seems that MoBo, RAM and OS [64 bits probably] are OK.

So you are playing Arma 3 on "High" @ 20/25 FPS. Before we talk about improvements, you must tell us all about these -"High" @ 20/25 FPS- results.

Are you getting this in Single player, in Multi players?

Are you getting this on Showcases, BIS SP Missions or Campaign ? On Stratis or on Altis ?

Are you playing on Teams public servers or on players owned servers ?

What are your video settings ?

[lerun 10]

I am about to bite the bullet and say farewell to my phenom II 965, i have my eyes on the 4770k, my GPU is a 7990 - open to any suggestions!

Don't listen to the others, they don't know what they are talking about.

I run the 4770k and 7990. Overclocking to (CPU @ 4.3 , GPU 1100/1600) i run the single player at 60 ++ fps with everything cranked up.

It auto-detected ultra settings out of the box, and the viewing distance was excellent (cant remember the exact number). Using SMAA (high) i get the best performance and the graphics just blows me away. Just remember to turn V-sync off.

The 7990 can have some throttling issues, but it can be fixed with using MSI Afterburner or flashing a custom bios. Remember to turn off ULPS (can do it in settings of afterburner)

(sorry could not post links)

[roni 11]

Am I the only one who don't see ANY difference between playing 4670k clocked at 3.4ghz vs 4.4ghz? Strange. No fps difference after oc'ing....

[oldbear 390]

@ lerun : welcome on the Forums, but I will say that starting here on a community forum telling ... "Don't listen to the others, they don't know what they are talking about" is not a good move.

Here, we are sharing experiences and some among us are having quite a lot of experience/knowledge.

Edited November 27, 2013 by OldBear

[lerun 10]

@ lerun : welcome on the Forums, but I will say that starting here on a community forum ... "Don't listen to the others, they don't know what they are talking about" is not a good move.

We are sharing experiences and some among us are having quite a lot of experience/knowledge.

Sure I might have been a bit harsh in the wording. Though the "dont listen to others" comment is referring to if the 7990 is a good performance / price card, and the bashing it got in a previous post. It is and that's why the "bad" wording post, though I do apologize for the hasty and bad taste in wording .

[jumpinghubert 48]

Am I the only one who don't see ANY difference between playing 4670k clocked at 3.4ghz vs 4.4ghz? Strange. No fps difference after oc'ing....

make a testmission with 40vs40 ai and look to the min fps. I assume you will get roughly 10 percent better min fps.

[Psilocybe 3]

Gents thanks for the info, and for some of the tips on tweaking my gpu. I look forward to seeing this in action!

[Ch3v4l13r 1]

Im looking at getting a new GPU to replace my Gigabyte GTX570oc 1280Mb. I decided to look for a GTX770, but now i have to decide whether to go for 2 or 4 GB of Vram version.

Im playing on a single 1080p monitor. From what i have read a lot of people say not to bother with 4GB vram if you use a single monitor 1080p setup. But there are also those that say that there are games already that us over 2Gb on this setup and the game that get mentioned the most when people are talking about this is ARMA3. A lot of people also say that 2GB is enough right now but if they had to buy a new GPU that they would go with something that as more than 2GB VRAM. In short there doesnt really seem to be a agreement on whether 2GB is enough for now and the foreseeable future. But perhaps someone here has done experiments with ARMA3 specific who can tell me what they think.

Other specs:

I5 2500K @ 3.9

8GB Ram

[Leon86 13]

If I were to buy new I'd want more than 2GB, problem is the 4GB variant of the 770 is quite expensive, you can get a R9 290 for that kind of money, which should significantly outperform the 770. 290's can be a bit loud though.

[Ch3v4l13r 1]

I have quickly looked up the R290 seeing as im completely unfamiliar with AMD CPU's. Im a bit worried about the noise/heat on the ref cards and their dont seem to be a lot of non-ref cards yet. My 700W power supply is also the bare minimum of what the R290 seems to need. Any GPU market expert he who can tell me if there are any foreseeable price drops coming up for Nvidia cards because of the R290 or have those already happened ?

[florianmuellerch 10]

@ florianmuellerCH : there is no need to copy/paste the whole data sheet :)

We understand you have a "i7-3770K / HD 5700 / 8 Go / Z77 MoBo" rig.

The CPU is on the high end and the GPU on the low one, it seems that MoBo, RAM and OS [64 bits probably] are OK.

So you are playing Arma 3 on "High" @ 20/25 FPS. Before we talk about improvements, you must tell us all about these -"High" @ 20/25 FPS- results.

Are you getting this in Single player, in Multi players?

Are you getting this on Showcases, BIS SP Missions or Campaign ? On Stratis or on Altis ?

Are you playing on Teams public servers or on players owned servers ?

What are your video settings ?

Hi OldBear

First, thanks for your response!

While reading, I just recognized that the Data is incorrect: I actually have a nVidia GTX 670 (GPU-Z seems to have included wrong data :j:...)

However, I usually get these FPS at multiplayer playing on a Wasteland with 80ppl on it... But for I'm actually quite "new" to ArmA 3, I can't really estimate if this is a good or a bad value.

Regards, Florian

EDIT: I actualized my sysprofile information: http://www.sysprofile.de/id180142

Edited December 1, 2013 by florianmuellerCH
Added Edit for sysprofile information update

[Leon86 13]

I have quickly looked up the R290 seeing as im completely unfamiliar with AMD CPU's. Im a bit worried about the noise/heat on the ref cards and their dont seem to be a lot of non-ref cards yet. My 700W power supply is also the bare minimum of what the R290 seems to need. Any GPU market expert he who can tell me if there are any foreseeable price drops coming up for Nvidia cards because of the R290 or have those already happened ?

If the psu is by a decent brand it should easily cope with a 290, gpu's never use over 300W, even a modern 550W psu should cope. Anyway, what's the exact psu model? Old psu's (not enough 12V focus) or really bad brands that have really optimistic wattage claims will break if you load them up to that level, that's why AMD recommends 700W.

It's not like a 290 has unbelievable power consumption, only uses 60-70W more than a 770.

Edited December 2, 2013 by Leon86

[bangtail 0]

I have quickly looked up the R290 seeing as im completely unfamiliar with AMD CPU's. Im a bit worried about the noise/heat on the ref cards and their dont seem to be a lot of non-ref cards yet. My 700W power supply is also the bare minimum of what the R290 seems to need. Any GPU market expert he who can tell me if there are any foreseeable price drops coming up for Nvidia cards because of the R290 or have those already happened ?

The prices likely wont decrease anymore than they have. The GTX 780 was quite heavily reduced when Nvidia announced the Ti version, but because AMDs 290/290x cards run very hot and loud, the impetus for Nvidia to lower their prices any further has evaporated.

With the introduction of 3rd party cooling, the AMD cards may well force Nvidia to drop their prices again but I just don't see that happening. Nvidia doesn't really seem to care what AMD does these days.

AMD is playing a big game of catchup and their newly released cards are pretty much on par with cards Nvidia released between 7 and 9 months ago. Of course, all Nvidia needed to do to rain on that picnic was release faster versions of the older cards (which they did) and those newer, faster versions beat anything AMD had (and don't suffer from the noise/heat issues).

There is Mantle of course, but I suspect that will end up relegated to the same status as PhysX, a few games taking advantage of it and even fewer taking advantage of it well.

I really wish AMD had bothered to sort their cooling solution out, as if the 290/290X had been released with a proper cooler, that may well have forced Nvidia to make some serious price changes as the 290/290x price point is excellent. Unfortunately, I think that if AMD had bothered with a better cooler, the cards would have been more expensive.

For AMD to make idiotic statements like 'it's fine for the card to run at 95c for it's entire lifetime' is just plain irresponsible. I'm sure you can run the GPU at that temp, but I certainly wouldn't be happy with the combination of noise/heat that those cards produce, especially since that stock cooler actually throws heat back into the case.

Anyway, I digress.

If you are going AMD, I would strongly suggest you wait for aftermarket cooling solutions.

Edited December 2, 2013 by BangTail

[oldbear 390]

@ florianmuellerCH : As my main rig is "i7 3770/GTX670OC/8 GB" , I am having some first hand experiences and data.

With such a rig, you can run all the General>Quality settings on "Ultra" , in this General section, the only setting having a huge impact is "Visibility". You can play it at "Overall = 3800m / Objects = 2000m" in Single player. I am getting 50 FPS with such settings, but as I am a mission maker for my team I always set the value at "Overall = 2000m / Objects = 1300m" for these values are also used on our dedicated team server and then I am getting 70 FPS on GUI !

The only other part I have tweaked a bit is the AA&PP section. I have fully disabled the Bloom and Blurs and for the Antialiasing part I am using the HardOcp combo : "... best AA combo in this game, FXAA Ultra + 2X/4X or 8X FSAA"

Well, with those settings, I am getting 45 FPS on Arma3Mark Stratis non-official benchmark.

In game, in single player SP missions, Showcases or Campaign on Stratis I am getting 30/60 FPS.

On a SP mission I am working on ATM, I am getting 25/45 FPS on Altis with some short slips down to 20 FPS in urban environment, heavy fire fight, many IA involved but I must add visibility was tweaked and "terrain grid" as well. When I build a mission, my main concern is that all the members of our team, even those having not so good rigs can play over 25 FPS.

My own standard is that the game must be played at 30 FPS [i have been using this standard since I had started making missions and building islands and terrains for Arma*]

In game, in MP, as I am playing every days, many hours on various server, I am getting a wide range of FPS values, from 1 FPS , the "slide show kind" on a mission generating tons of errors in .rpt on a makeshift server to 30/40 FPS on a decent well hosted/well managed server hosting a well built mission. I think the 20/25 FPS you are experiencing on this Wasteland server are a bit low, I had higher FPS on the CZ hosted Sa-Matra Wasteland last week.

From my point of view, the 25/35 FPS range is a common playable zone for Arma* games. If you see FPS rate sinking down under the 20 FPS line while you play missions, don't change your settings, switch from servers until you find "the right one" !

[Maslofski 10]

im thinking about getting a new pc with a look at A3 how would this do (i prefer high view range over GFX):

R9 270x or maybe a gtx760

i5 4650k 3.4 or 4.4

i believe a 80i cpu cooler

asus maximus IV gene

8GB 1866

850W since i want it to be upgradable in the future

120GB ssd 840 evo

1tb 7200

bitfenix phenom

and a nice asus vg248qe to round it up

[oldbear 390]

@ AssassinenMuffin : Arma3 is first "CPU dependent" and second "GPU demanding", so you must look first for the best available CPU then the best available GPU in your budget range.

In order to play and enjoy the game an Intel i5 is a good choice, so whatever one you can get from i5 4440* up to i5 4670k is probably a good choice [*i5 4430 not available in my country ATM].

If you are thinking about over-clocking you CPU [choice of the K version] look for an over sized cooling such as H100i ... but I don't know if such a model can fit in Bitfenix Phenom ...

"R9 270x or maybe a gtx760" why not but I still think that GTX 770 is showing the best balance.

120GB SSD 840 Evo is way too small, you must go for 256 GB or better [that's the way I am upgrading ATM :256 SSD 840 Evo for System + 256 SSD 840 Evo Arma* dedicated]

Asus Maximus is quite an overkill from my point of view ... as is 850W Power unit !

[Maslofski 10]

@OldBear, ok, so i remade the build:

Corsair 500R

ASUS Z87A

H100i

i5 4670K @4.4

RM650

2GB NVIDIA GTX 770

8GB Kingston HyperX 1866Mhz (2x4GB)

120GB Samsung 840 Evo Series (cant take more, and i dont need more imo)

1TB 7200 (i already have this in my old PC

ASUS VG248QE

[disco.modder 116]

Which ones generally better for A3? A HD7950 or GTX760?

[oldbear 390]

@ Modder : I would say GTX760.

[jamsus 11]

I don't know if this is the right section but...

I got a i52500k (not overclocked) + 8 gb ram (KingstonDDR3) + GTX760, the game was ok before...

Now i'm using an SSD and the game is a completely different game.

Just for helping on increasing performace, it runs really smooth.

[roni 11]

I don't know if this is the right section but...

I got a i52500k (not overclocked) + 8 gb ram (KingstonDDR3) + GTX760, the game was ok before...

Now i'm using an SSD and the game is a completely different game.

Just for helping on increasing performace, it runs really smooth.

Yup, most arma players know about this.

[oldbear 390]

@ karlmax1103 : I can't clearly understand your message :confused:

But speaking about the needed OS, I will say "Windows 7 SP1 64bit"

@ AssassinenMuffin : what I tell about SSD size is based upon my own experiences.

At start I was very dubious about what SSD can change in my gaming experience.

So I had bought a small Intel X25-M 80 Go and found soon the effect was great and the SSD too small, I had then switched to a Crucial 128 Go and now to a Samsung Evo 256 Go.

If your SSD is too small even after having sent your "My Documents" on a large HD, you will have to do constant management of your files not too get over 80% occupation of the disk [my own security limit] and soon you will find it boring.

At the moment, on my 2nd rig Windows 7 plus some Internet & PC basic tools are occupying 45 Go and Steam library 18.3 Go so having the reused Intel 80 Go as system disk means there is not much room left.

Edited December 7, 2013 by OldBear

[Tyl3r99 41]

what are laptops like running arma 3? what would the average fps be?

im gonna presume that its no where near 50-60 lol

[arotished 10]

Hi all!

I just got my new computer in order to be able to play ARMA3 with decent FPS on higher setting. The spec on my new computer is:

4770K @ 4.5 | EVGA GTX 780 Ti SLi @ 1150/7800 | Asus Maximus VI Formula | 4x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum 2133Mhz | Win 8.1 64 Bit | Samsung 840 PRO 512GB SSD x 2 | Corsair AX 1200i PSU | Corsair Obsidian 750D | NZXT Kraken X60 | ASUS | Creative Sound Blaster ZxR | Asus VG248QE

On Autodetect setting I get around 10-15 FPS when playing any missions which takes place in Altis which is kinda low for my system (I hope)

I have been reading around on different optimalization tips and I think I have used all tricks in the book by now (enter all the different startup commands, did the edit arma3.cfg files ect) but to be honest, they didnt really get any increase my FPS according to FRAPS so then I tried to lower every setting.

My following settings are now:

Sampling: 100%

Texture: Very High

Objects: Very High

Terrain: Very High

Shadows: Standard

Particle Quality: Very High

Cloud Quality: Standard

PIP: High

HDR Quality: Standard

Dynamic Lights: Very High

PPAA: SMAA High

Dynamic Lights: Ultra

Overall View Distance: 3000

Object Draw Distance: 200

Shadow View Distance: 100

Post-Processing: Bloom/Radial&RotationBlur/Depth Of Field = 0

SSAO: High

FSAA: 4x

ATOC: All Tree+Grass

PPAA: FXAA - Very High

Anisotropic Filtering: Very High

V-Sync - Disabled.

With these setting I get around 25-30FPS when playing mission that is on Altis. My question is, should I be happy with this? Or what settings do I need to adjust to be able to play this game above 60FPS? Do I need to get the 6-Core 4960 processor? Cant really upgrade any other parts of my system.

Edited December 12, 2013 by arotished

[roni 11]

With such graphic card, graphics settings shouldn't chagne fps much. Check fps in infantry showcase, should be 65+. Custom mission and multiplayer aren't good for checking performance.

If even in showcases you have low fps, then something is wrong with your system.