PC Optimization For ArmA

[Mogley 0]

With all the problems and threads about performance of this game I thought a thread should be made to help folks find the optimal settings for ArmA. If anyone else has any tips please add them here so we all can look to one thread to get the most out of our hardware. Armed Assault uses alot of resources to run this beautiful game. I have seen alot of post about poor performance with this game. Well out of the box the game goes to its default settings which are too much for most people computers. After several hours of adjusting my setting to get the best framerate while still having the best graphics I finally found the optimal settings.

Now while everyones computers are different alot of the same settting will help us all. Here is what I found.

1)Turn off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering.

This uses alot of your resources for these two. Both of these types of filtering were produced to allow people to play at low resolutions without it looking so bad (jagged edges on objects) these types of filtering are really only needed for people playing at resolutions lower than 1600x1200. I play at 1920x1200 so I do not need it. The higher the resolution the more pixels are displayed on screen, this reduces jagged edges all by itself and the filtering is not needed. It just wastes resources to have these on at high resolutions. So if you play at high resolutions turn these off or to low. Even low resolution users can benefit from turning these down or off but you will not graphically look better.

2)Shadow Detail. If you want a massive increase in frames turn off the shadow detail. Since this game uses real time lighting and there is a gigantic world with many shadows it really makes a huge difference. No other single video setting will benefit you so much as this one.

3)Post processing effects. This one has a somewhat significant effect in framerate but not as much as shadow detail. I myself cant seem to tell much difference visually with this set low or high, but low really improves fps.

4)Terrain Detail. This is the next in line for the best boost in fps. Find the setting here where you can get the best performance.

5)All other settings. The rest of the setting wont have as much impact in performance and I can run the rest on high or very high without much noticable effect.

6)Video card settings. Use the control panel for your video card to either make a profile just for Arma or adjust the settings for all your games at once with the global profile. Here you can also manually turn off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering as well as other adjustments.

These setting will help the most if you are getting low frames in Arma. Its just that the game is so massive and so beautiful that even the latest hardware will not run the game with every single setting maxed out. So that leaves us all to find the optimal settings for our systems. It just takes some time to play around and find what works for you and your pc.

Now there are many things that can be done in windows to help also and many people may still have low frames no matter what due to thier hardware or maybe a software issue on their pc. Since there are so many things that can be done in windows I will just touch the basics.

Nothing will help more than a clean, fresh, new install on windows with the latest drivers. Period. I did this before I even installed ArmA. If you cant reinstall your OS, uses utility's like spybot to remove any spyware, run a antivirus check. Turn off your antivirus program before playing the game it uses resources. Run a disk defragmenter.

Hope this helps increase our framerates so we call all enjoy this lovely game that BIS has blessed us with. ArmA

[olemissrebel 0]

In OFP terrain detail was the number one killer of FPS besides viewdistance, but I have messed with it in ARMA and haven't really noticed much of a difference...

Remember, if you are using nvidia, change the 32 bit to 16 bit in your arma cfg

[Mr_Tea 0]

In OFP terrain detail was the number one killer of FPS besides viewdistance, but I have messed with it in ARMA and haven't really noticed much of a difference...

Remember, if you are using nvidia, change the 32 bit to 16 bit in your arma cfg

What for?

Arma works great in 32 bit.

It`s Dec 06, you know?

[Mogley 0]

I heard in the troubleshooting section about the 16 bit color. I wonder though how much worse the game will look at the color setting? Someone also said in that it didnt help ATI cards so much as it did the Nvidia ones??

[chipper 0]

I heard in the troubleshooting section about the 16 bit color. I wonder though how much worse the game will look at the color setting? Someone also said in that it didnt help ATI cards so much as it did the Nvidia ones??

There is no quality difference at 16 bit

[HitSqdhaXor 0]

OC that Nvidia Card!

Nvidia Overclocking Guide

* Be careful not to overheat or fry your card though!

Also for Nvidia 6800 AGP card users ...

You can unlock Pixel and Vertex shaders.

- I think Nvidia locks these so they can get more money out of a single chip selling them as GT's etc.

I am currently running an Nvidia 6800 with 4 unlocked Pixel shaders and 1 vertex. It made a very noticeable difference in performance, and was well worth the hastle. Increase was ~10fps and images look more crisp. Then I loaded up NGO's optimized forceware driver (93.81) and that seemed to help with IO without decreasing fps. Driver Link: NGO Optimized Nvidia Driver v93.81

[NeMeSiS 11]

I heard in the troubleshooting section about the 16 bit color. I wonder though how much worse the game will look at the color setting? Someone also said in that it didnt help ATI cards so much as it did the Nvidia ones??

There is no quality difference at 16 bit

There is on my Ati x1600XT, the colors are very dark, and i cant get it to look like it used to with the gamma/brightness/contrast settings. But on my system the difference in performance is only 3-5FPS anyway.

But apparently geforce owners are happy with it

Also: See my sig, it made ArmA alot more playable for me (aiming was hell before i changed those settings)

[Visceral_Syn 0]

1)Turn off antialiasing and anisotropic filtering. *snip*

2)Shadow Detail. *snip*

3)Post processing effects. *snip*

4)Terrain Detail. *snip*

5)All other settings. *snip*

6)Video card settings. Use the control panel for your video card *snip*

Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering do a tad more than up visual quality at lower resolutions. Jagged lines can be seen at any resolution, the features eat more resources at higher resolutions because higher res's use more video memory. you can always tell yourself you can't see the jagged lines. Anisotropic filtering *DOES* make textures up close and a certain distance away look crisper, or more clear. And yes it requires more juice from the video card.

Shadow Detail is going to hound us for a while yet, til more powerful components come out or dev's come up with a more efficient way to render them.

Post Proccessing is a complete utter waste, that we should have an *option* to disable fully or not. NOT coded into the game.

We all know about terrain detail, this again falls under developers and efficient rendering techniques.

all the other settings do have an effect on Frames-Per-Second, however minute they may be.

Video card settings, via control panel settings are a whole different beast altogether. Since most nVidia card users do not or have not bothered to read the readme that comes with reference drivers, most manufacturers modify nVidia Ref. drivers. Newer titles with FSAA, AF, and V-Sync settings in the games settings menu's are the ones to be adjusting. In situations like that the driver should be set to Application. Games that do not list these within em, do not manipulate those settings, and the driver profile can affect them.

When Driver settings are active and in game setting are active, you are effectively trying to make 2 different settings work. And usually FPS suffer. Another nicety is nVidia's reference drivers don't truly turn on Triple Buffering, i have found a nice little applet called Dx-Tweak *you can google it* that does turn the Direct3D Triple Buffer on. With V-Sync on and Triple Buffering activated, there is a slight to significant Framerate-boost. I have found most games i use it perform better. It even helped the infamously bad performer Lock On Modern Air Combat with its addon. Improved performance for the bug riddled NeverWinter NightsË›. Even GTRË› and Half-LifeË›. I'm not using slouch of a rig:

Intel Pentium-D 830 3.0ghz

MSI Starforce 6800-GT

Crucial Ballistix 2gb DDR2-667

Asus P5ND2-SLI Deluxe nForce 4

Creative Labs Audigy 2ZS PLATINUM

Adaptec 29160 Scsi Controller

Seagate Cheetah 15k RPM ( 18gb / 2*36GB )

Winders XP Pro SP2

Yes a fresh winders install is semi-pristine for a gaming rig, BUT, Winders rarely installs itself correctly. So a trim, proper, tweaked and maintained, Winders install is almost better than a fresh install. Just my $0.02 on the OP's post.

ps. nVidia doesn't make video cards, they sell reference designs to manufacturers. Manufacturers can and do change the specs of those designs and typically warranty those devices. Changing those specs typically null and voids your warranty, basically think before you go *overclock* or *unlock sum pipes*

...Syn...

[Marines 0]

Might help...might not.

Hmm

[Mogley 0]

Thanks for your input on the subject Visceral_Syn .

A few comments, when I play at 1920x1200 on my Dell XPS M170 laptops native resolution, I do not need Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. Now I understand that anti-aliasing was originally designe a long, long time ago to help with the jaggies back when people where still playing at either 640x480, 800x600, or the high setting way back then of 1024x768. Back then jaggies were so bad they came up with anti-aliasing. Its really useless at resolutions higher than 1600x1200 and since I play ALL my games at 1920x1200 its utterly useless for me and others in the same boat.

As far as Anisotropic Filtering goes, yes it does a little more than help with the jaggies it does help in rendering but at my native resolution I cant see the differnence. So why leave it on?

All your other statements I agree with.

You mentioned windows being trimmed up and whatnot. Would you care to share some simple tips to help out the ArmA community. Perhaps a link to a site or something.

Again thanks for your input....cause we need all we can get with this game!!!

[norsu 180]

Also for Nvidia 6800 card users ...

You can unlock Pixel and Vertex shaders.

- I think Nvidia locks these so they can get more money out of a single chip selling them as GT's etc.

You can only unlock shaders in 6800 series AGP cards . PCIE cards can't be unlocked without some serious magic.

[aus_twisted 0]

I do not need Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering. Now I understand that anti-aliasing was originally designe a long, long time ago to help with the jaggies back when people where still playing at either 640x480, 800x600, or the high setting way back then of 1024x768. Back then jaggies were so bad they came up with anti-aliasing. Its really useless at resolutions higher than 1600x1200 and since I play ALL my games at 1920x1200 its utterly useless for me and others in the same boat.

As far as Anisotropic Filtering goes, yes it does a little more than help with the jaggies it does help in rendering but at my native resolution I cant see the differnence. So why leave it on?

Sorry but thats not true, no matter what resolution you run Antialiasing will improve quality by a lot, especially on objects that are far away from view. And again no matter what resolution you run Anisotropic filtering turned on at say 8x compared to off is a huge difference for textures that are facing the places view on sharp angles otherwise you will see very blured textures.

[Mogley 0]

Sorry but your wrong read this wiki or any of these articles tweakguides section on antialiasing or google this "antialiasing useless" and enjoy your reading.

Im not just pulling this out of my arse, it really is not needed at high resolutions.

[aus_twisted 0]

Sorry but your wrong read this  wiki or any of these articles tweakguides section on antialiasing or google this "antialiasing useless" and enjoy your reading.

Im not just pulling this out of my arse, it really is not needed at high resolutions.

lol well you must be blind then.

Just wondering have you ever made textures or graphics for a 3D engine? or ever done any graphics design?

Wether you think it's needed or not needed at high resolutions doesn't change a thing, the difference in quality with either settings on or off is a big difference no matter what resolution.

[Visceral_Syn 0]

You mentioned windows being trimmed up and whatnot. Would you care to share some simple tips to help out the ArmA community. Perhaps a link to a site or something.

i've got a coupla slight advantages to my "Optimized Rig", being that i have multiple computers. I specifically use the one i listed the specs for in gaming. There is no Firewall sw on it, because that rig is behind 2 routers, the anti-virus sw is installed but not left on, it doesn't even boot up when the OS boots up. i run the AV, once a week then turn it off. I do use Diskeeper 9, besides the fact that Diskeeper Lite is the default defragmentation program built into Win2k/XP/2k3/MCE. The full product defrags multiple drives at the same time. The biggest boost to performance i'd say is determining which windows services are needed and which are not. I've got the game rig at a point where when its completed boot, it idles with 15 running processes eating 120mb of ram. I wish that like in Linux, if you feel you have enuff ram, you can disable or not use a swapfile, but alas in winders-world this doesn't happen. If you turn off the swapfile, winders creates one behind yer back and calls it a system file. And or randomly, whenever some application thinks it needs one, the OS will turn it right back on. So anyone with Winders2k/xp/2k3/MCE with their swapfile disabled, sorry for the bad news, its still on. Another personal pet peeve of mine, Winders XP is perpetually doing something on the hard disk. With scsi disks that are semi loud, right next to 6000rpm HSF on cpu, that got annoying, not sure if it did anything to performance but to disable that constant HD-chatter went in registry: HKLM\system\currentcontrolset\control\filesystem and added DWORD:NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate, then modified it with decimal: 1. This one ranked right up there with the Winders Indexing service, that fortunately SP2 turns off, in annoyance for me. Otherwise, daily defrag to the beast at boot, keeps it trim, proper and maintained. Oh yeh, i run a thorough scandisk with Diskeeper 9 once a month. Now my laptop, that i use to surf random *websites* with, its loaded to the gills with stuff for protection.

...Syn...

ps also about the high resolution you game at, opinion here: i game at 1280*1024@75hz on a "19 Samsung CRT. At any resolution higher than that, refresh rates are typically locked at 60hz, and is a headache waiting to happen. As well as, i don't like tear frame, one gets with v-sync off. So i have absolutely no use for gaming at any higher resolution than that.

[Universel 0]

Advising to turn off Anisotropic Filetring is maybe the worst advice I've ever heard.

If you see no difference in quality between AF off and AF 4x then you MUST be blind.

If you like to play with AF off then you're definately blind or your monitor is definately broken.

And saying that AF has a performance impact shows once again how wrong you are, AF is one of the cheapest effects aviable and turning it off is the best way to RUIN your game experience.

If there is one thing you should never disable, it is AF, in any game.

[maxqubit 1]

My XP SP2 on a 1GM RAM system has around 820MB free physical RAM after booting up. I can push it to 825MB if i remove the few services which are still active (e.g. use EndItAll, see my sig)

I use a conservative -memsize=768 to play ArmA

I could set it to -memsize=800 (+something) but i dunno if those last couple of MB's will help.

With -memsize=768 i can have Totalcommander, Ultraedit and Fraps active which come in handy when fiddling with the editor and stuff

Mind you that i didn't fresh install XP for ArmA, i'm just very conservative with installing all kind of shit on my comp.

[sickboy 13]

I think you mean -maxmem, because -memsize aint gonna do squad?

I miss the texture quality in list of important settings...

As the texture quality makes the texture size, and the texture size is pretty important for the amount of video ram you have I think?

BTW, some people are saying that Anti Aliasing gives higher quality textures, that's of coarse a wrong terminology.

The quality of the textures isn't altered at all..

A circle or a corner anyway, in current way of 3d rendering, is built up out of squares, the more little squares you make (higher resolution) the more round the object is going to look, anti-aliasing blends the squares with eachother to make them look cornored instead of little 'stair' blocks.

So indeed, the higher the resolution, the less need there is for anti-aliasing as the problem occurs already less, altough minimal anti aliasing is encouraged as it smooths the, altough already very small, blocks

[WhoCares 0]

It would generally help to link the various settings with the available resources. Some of these settings strain the GPU (AA, AF), others can be directly linked to the VRAM (Texture Detail), Terrain Detail stresses RAM and CPU, ...

If a GFX card is bottlenecked by the CPU+RAM, you will see little difference in performance when toggling AA or AF, but terrain detail and view distance might boost your FPS.

[lee_h._oswald 0]

About AF in ArmA:

It's your choice to diasable it.

MfG Lee

[aus_twisted 0]

BTW, some people are saying that Anti Aliasing gives higher quality textures, that's of coarse a wrong terminology.

The quality of the textures isn't altered at all..

Thats right, thats what Anisotropic filtering is for.

[maxqubit 1]

I think you mean -maxmem, because -memsize aint gonna do squad?

Yeah ... (but i will check my shortcut tonite anyway;)

[holly_tyler 0]

I had a problem with the textures loading up fast enough.

Go to control panel> system> hardware> device manager> IDE> Primary and Secondary> Advanced settings>

and make sure that your disc drives are running at their optimal speed.

PIO mode is bad. If windows stalls because of a scratched DVD or something and cant read the drive, it switches down from HIGH DMA modes to PIO. You would probably have noticed your PC chugging to a halt at times if it is in this mode. You want your drives to be running in the highest DMA mode possible. Both my drives are now running in ULTRA DMA 5 mode.

If you want to make sure that your drives are running as fast as possible, go to this link and follow the instructions.

http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjaduck/itserviceduck/udma_fix/

A thorough defrag with perfectdisc helps, as does running spybot, adaware, cccleaner, and registry mechanic. Use IIARN taskinfo to make sure you don't have any processes hogging your cpu.

I am on a 2.6ghz, 1.5gig ram, 6600gt, with a x-fi card.

I play in 1024, with everything turned down low. Detail level at 50000.00, no AA or AF. Theres no doubt I could benefit from a reformat but for now at least I have got the game playable whereas before it would chugg along in 640.

It's such a great game. It takes cahones for a studio to release a game with integrity like this one. I look forward to some optimisations and fixes with both the graphics and the gameplay, but I'm having fun in the mean time.

Hope this post helps someone.

[LT.INSTG8R 0]

Having sat with FRAPS and adjusted my settings in a spot where I am getting low fps( I use Convoy Ambush) I have found a few things.

AA on Low gives me more fps then disabled??(Normal costs me 1-2fps)

AF does cut into fps until set to very High

High Shadows give the best fps out of all the shadows settings??(now of course I dont run shadows because they cripple fps at any level, but the point still stands)

Texture Quality has no effect on fps what so ever

Object Detail does not decrease fps until set to high(1-2 fps drop)

Textures are all a matter of VRAM(tho I can clearly see that it is not using both my cards fully)But for me they dont really start effecting my fps until High

Post Processing again is up to you whether you want to take the hit but this is the bottom line to it.

I see alot of people complaining about grass and its obstruction view and the games lack depth of field. Well when Post is on High those things are there! Grass becomes transparent thru your scope if its within your FOV. Your hands and field of vision blur as you focus on your scope, your movements thru the scope will allow your vision to blur, etc.

As I said this is a personal thing but I REALLY like the effects it adds and I sacrifice the fps it cause me so I can use it.

Now I did all this on the rig in my sig but I can also say with 95% certainty that I am not utilizing Crossfire when playing ArmA as I saw no difference in fps when disabling it so I am basically running .

I also attempted to force Crossfire on it and it resulted in worse performance(this is up to ATI to fix and no one else, which I might add I have attempted to make them aware of it as well)

I will bring it up again as I dont want this to get lost:

All foliage(trees and bushes) are using Alpha Textures which is why it is killing fps so badly, BIS may need to rethink that.(I confirmed this when I was experimenting with ATIs new AA which directly deals with Alpha Textures.That basically resulted in "screen door" trees.

[stisoas 0]

About AF in ArmA:

It's your choice to diasable it.

MfG Lee

nvidia card ?