Hardware Issues: Tips/Tricks/Solutions

[killerwhale 1]

speaking of "Overclocking", ATI control center gives the obtion of enabling Overdrive but it also warns you of enabling such obtion, I wonder what could possibly happen? and has it happened to anyone before and is it better enabling?

[4 IN 1 0]

for ATI users who have possible driver side problem, if the standard ATI drivers didnt work

try Omega drivers

it fixed lots of gaming problems and even perforemce boost for some other games, i still didnt test the latest built(based on 7.1) but this driver works on my system

[CG Man 0]

Overclocking

A while back a needed more performance out of my comp.

I baught a Zaleman Resorator Water cooler.

Be warned only do this if you built your own computer or can afford the risks of doing it wrong. You have to place a bracket under your motherboard so maybe not a job for a newbie builder.

I removed the cooler off my graphics card and cpu and replaced both with a water block each.  The resorator holds 2 litres of water and makes no noise at all.

I also added graphics RAM heatsinks that came with the resorator and blue tacked a case fan to the graphics card so it blewdown the length of the card towards the rear case fan. The performance figures are 20- 30Mhz below the instability figures.

Performance increase

AMD 64fx 51 CPU from 2.2Ghz  - 2.3.Ghz

Nvidia 6800GT 256MB  

GPU 400 - 435Mhz  Ram  

Graphics Ram 1Ghz - 1120Ghz

[killerwhale 1]

Can Overclocking your card possibly damage your GPU card or the motherboard? is there danger to it?

[fasad 1]

Yes, it can.

I have found ArmA responds very well to overclocking my way old video card (raedon 9600xt).

[Shashman 0]

Overclocking

A while back a needed more performance out of my comp.

I baught a Zaleman Resorator Water cooler.

Be warned only do this if you built your own computer or can afford the risks of doing it wrong. You have to place a bracket under your motherboard so maybe not a job for a newbie builder.

I removed the cooler off my graphics card and cpu and replaced both with a water block each.  The resorator holds 2 litres of water and makes no noise at all.

I also added graphics RAM heatsinks that came with the resorator and blue tacked a case fan to the graphics card so it blewdown the length of the card towards the rear case fan. The performance figures are 20- 30Mhz below the instability figures.

Performance increase

AMD 64fx 51 CPU from 2.2Ghz  - 2.3.Ghz

Nvidia 6800GT 256MB  

GPU 400 - 435Mhz  Ram  

Graphics Ram 1Ghz - 1120Ghz

Those improvements hardly look worth the cost and effort

CPU : 100Mhz improvement on a 2.2Ghz CPU

GPU : 35Mhz improvement

VRAM : 120Mhz improvement

I guess some people just have too much time and money

[Jack-UK 0]

Can Overclocking your card possibly damage your GPU card or the motherboard? is there danger to it?

Yep it can, but sensible overclocking can help you squeeze out those last frames you need for the game to run smooth

Like i suggested, google up about overclocking

But if you're having issues with your card, such as heat related issues, its very dangerous to overclock your card.

You could try underclocking if you think the card is overheating or something...

[sixfour 0]

A little addition about the page file :

Its very important that the page file is not fragmented. To make sure your page file is not fragmented I recommend moving the page file to a different partition, then defragment the old partition that used to host the page file, then move the page file back again. And its very important that you do not let windows manage the page file size. Set the size about 1.5 gigs both minimum and maximum size

[Pipou 0]

I have a "low" system spec

Athlon 3200+

1 Go RAM

6600 GT 128 Mo

I have done a lot of test with the ingame setting and the Nvidia control panel setting.

My conclusion is that the shadow system and the vegetation impacts mainly the framerate.

Trees (object low) + Shadow (low) + Shading (low) = poor framerate

Desert + Shadow + Shading = ok

Trees + No shadow + Shading = ok

I desactivated the shadow. I can set other setting in low and normal

Terrain -> normal (vis 1000m)

Object -> normal

Texture -> low (video memory limitation)

Shading -> very low

PostProcessing -> low

AA -> normal (this setting doesn't impact so much my framerate 2 or 3 fps diff)

Anisio -> low (same as the AA)

Shadow -> off

An interesting feature for "low spec" would be an optimization of the shadow for vegetation (no shadow for little foliage, simple shadows for trees).

The second setting which impact mainly the framerate is the post processing high setting. Keep it low.

PS : There is some weird things in the Nvidia tweak guide linked on page one. The optimizations (more performance, less quality) like anisiotropic filtering is set to off ?? I have better perf with 'on' setting.

[Jack-UK 0]

Well the most influencial settings appear to change depending on which graphics card you have. I think ATI cards tend to have more shaders, therefore shading detail + "bush lag" doesnt seem to have as much lag as with some nvidia cards.

It also depends on the shader model used (2.0 or 3.0) and also some cards have little effect with post process on high (i only lose approx 2 FPS from turning it on high)

And Anistropic Filtering should be set on Application controlled, or "Off unless application specifies" therefore you can turn it on and off using ArmA

[PKC 0]

also some cards have little effect with post process on high (i only lose approx 2 FPS from turning it on high)

True enough, i'm on a 7600GS which is by no means powerful but it doesn the job till i get a new system, but turning on post processing to high loses 0-2fps overall. Also anti-aliasing from off to normal does no performance damage at all.

Odd thing really.

One thing, is there a recommended version of Nvidia drivers that should be used? or should i just stick with 91.47.

[Jack-UK 0]

I *think* its best to just use the latest drivers... people usually only use older drivers if it really dips their performance or they encounter issues with the driver.

[frostwyrm333 1]

Option for 16 bit graphics would be nice, it could save 20%-30% of performance.

[patham 0]

@Jack-UK

I'd just like to share my tuppence-worth, the demo ran reasonably at 1024X768 most

settings normal except AA, shaders low, blood off, shadow detail low. I didn't

have the foliage slowdown, I think because of the shaders. But the full game ran

much worse than that. In missions, huge blocks that should have been textures,

trees without detail, only base textures on vehicles. The campaign cutscenes were

either 2D cartoons or white text on black screen. I tried all of your hints, no

change. Write combining had a small effect, but the tweak that cracked it was

changing the AGP Aperture in the BIOS from 65 to 256. Now up until this the

conventional wisdom was this setting should be as low as possible because VRAM

was big enough to handle anything thrown at it. This game is different, probably

bad LOD drop down handling. Run in windowed mode it became evident that my CPU

was not stressed (60%) and there was plenty of system RAM unused (300Mb). This

fix probably is only useful if a user has 128Mb of VRAM and >1000Mb system RAM.

Apart from gameplay, the change increased my Armamark score from 1309 to 1722.

Hope this helps some of the community play a long-awaited game properly.

[Jack-UK 0]

Hmmm interesting, thanks for your response.

I too am having these issues, along with some others, i originally thought it was memory but your findings are intriguing(sp?)...

It never occured in the demo but sometimes textures 'pop' in at close range from the lowest texture quality to the higher texture quality...

I'll give this aperture setting a fiddle with later and report back whether it worked for me too =)

Cheers!

[Jack-UK 0]

Hmm i tried your tip but i couldnt find the AGP aperture setting in my BIOS..

I've got an Award Bios (i think) and i checked everywhere in it but no setting for AGP aperture..

I wonder if theres a way i can configure the aperture outside of the bios...

By the way, im not too knowledgable on this setting, what is the apeture setting... can it damage your hardware or anything?

[patham 0]

Jack

I've got an Award BIOS as well, hit the Delete key during startup. When the menu

appears select "Advanced Chipset Features". About ten items down you should see

"AGP Aperture Size", immediately above the "Init Display First" entry. I'm not

sure changing this setting in your case will help, as you have probably the fastest

AGP card around with 1/2 a Gig of VRAM, but you could try it. This setting does not

"ring-fence" that portion of system RAM for GFX so it shouldn't make your PC run

badly. See URLs below for explanation.

http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_D....02c.htm

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/bios.ars/3

http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/bios2/12.shtml

[Pedroshin 0]

Tried everything for my Nvidia cards and Dual core processor.

It's soooo funny that I still get an average of 28-42 FPS with 640x480x32 + ALL Very Low or Disabled + Distance view 500.

I mean.. I have 2 7800GT 256 MB and a AMD X2 4400+. I run BF2 and the rest of other games perfectly so this must be a joke right?

Might I just as well add that I ran OFP with an average of 40-70 FPS with 1024x768x32 + All Very High or Enabled + Distance view 3000 with my old ATI 9800 XT 256MB and Intel P4 3.2GHz.

Please fix it. I've already defragged, optimized, updated, installed dual core optimizers and all that stuff...

[Frosty_theAussie 0]

This computer has been newly formatted, with all the latest drivers installed and runs all other games absolutely fine, but when it comes to Armed Assault it's very laggy, even with all the settings on lowest. Particularly in town areas. I'm not sure why.

My specs are:

AMD Athlon XP 3200+

ATI Radeon X800XT 256MB

1024MB DDR400 RAM

[Jack-UK 0]

Jack

I've got an Award BIOS as well, hit the Delete key during startup. When the menu

appears select "Advanced Chipset Features". About ten items down you should see

"AGP Aperture Size", immediately above the "Init Display First" entry. I'm not

sure changing this setting in your case will help, as you have probably the fastest

AGP card around with 1/2 a Gig of VRAM, but you could try it. This setting does not

"ring-fence" that portion of system RAM for GFX so it shouldn't make your PC run

badly. See URLs below for explanation.

http://www.adriansrojakpot.com/Speed_D....02c.htm

http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/bios.ars/3

http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/bios2/12.shtml

Wierd.. the setting isnt there, checked everything.. its not there :\

[Pedroshin 0]

Hello, sorry for repeating this on some other threads, but it should have gone here in the first place...

Tried everything for my Nvidia cards and Dual core processor.

It's funny that I still can get an average of 26-42 FPS with 640x480x32 + ALL Very Low or Disabled + Distance view 500. This means graphics MUCH worse than OFP.

I mean.. I have:

2 7800GT 256 MB in SLI;

AMD X2 4400+;

2GB of RAM;

Hitachi HDT722525DLA380 250GB (30GB Partition for OS and OS-related Programs and the 2nd 220GB Partition for everything else);

SAMSUNG SP1213C 120GB for storage;

GA-K8NXP-SLI Nforce 4. Supports SATA II, dunno if that's 1.5 or 3.0 or something in-between.

I run BF2, Rainbow Six: Vegas, Oblivion and the rest of other games perfectly so what the hell is this?

Might I just as well add that I ran OFP with an average of 40-80 FPS with 1024x768x32 + All Very High or Enabled + Distance view 3000 with my old ATI 9800 XT 256MB and Intel P4 3.2GHz.

It's amazing how this game gains so few FPS when you change graphics from Very High to Very Low (including changing the resolutions). It makes me think that there's really something wrong with it. Turning Anti-Aliasing On/Off seems to make only a 2 FPS difference while in other games it can make a 10 FPS difference. This would be a good thing if the performance was good to start off with.

When I run at Normal to Very High + 1280x1024 in ArmA with my current setup FPS can dip as low as 25 FPS in most of places, 20 FPS near cities, 15 FPS inside cities and 10 FPS in vegetation areas. It only barely touches 40-35 FPS when I'm looking at the sky in an open field...

Please fix it. I've already defragged, optimized, updated, installed dual core optimizers and all that stuff... Unless someone tells me they have a system like mine and get the same results I won't consider the problem to be my setup.

By the way, just saying that it seems to run smooth or run good is not enough to do an analysis of how well the game runs for the rest of you. You must say the FPS and besides saying if the graphics are low, medium or high you should specify the resolution.

I LOVED OFP and I LOVE this game but, to my disapointment, I HATE the performance... and I'm not really into doing a full system upgrade just because of one game...

I'm using 92.91 drivers. They are the best all-round drivers for me in most games. 93.71 gave me some problems with a couple of games.

I still have some hope that Nvidia will address ArmA's issues, including SLI issues, in the next official driver release, which is taking some bloody long time to be released (latest driver was released about 4 months ago). They seem to be only focusing on 8800 and Vista drivers lately...

[patham 0]

@Jack-UK

What's the make/model of your motherboard?

[Jack-UK 0]

Patham: its a Gigabyte K8 Triton Series, Model: GA-K8VM800M, Socket 754 Micro ATX

Thanks for your continued help btw

[patham 0]

Jack

I've checked Gigabytes web site and yours is not the only M/board type that does have

an AGP aperture size selection in the BIOS. For some reason Gigabyte have not implemented

this item. I thought initially that it may have to do with the VIA chipset but least one

Intel 865PE chipset board (ga-8i865pe) is similar. More explanations below of AGP aperture

http://www.techpowerup.com/articles/overclocking/vidcard/43

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agp

There also seems to be a problem with driver handle leaks on certain ATI drivers see this    

    PH

[r3pent 0]

im sorry if this has already been said or it sounds a load of sh*t but it was some advice offered to me from another help/tech forum....

i got a new gfx card 7600 gt,and while its not the fastest i was expecting it to be better than my previous card(x700)which allowed me to run games like bf2 at 1280x1024 at 30-40 fps(no AA no AF).

my new card was not even getting close to this in any games,i was very dissapointed,so the advice offered was to push the card harder in order to take some pressure off the cpu,turned on AF to 16x in control panel and AA to x2 or x4.......and hey presto.........games now run pretty well...even ArmA runs at between 40-50 fps and my pc is by no means good.

also guys maybe play around with sound settings,try lowering themn for increased performance.

celeron d 3.06 overclocked to 3.89

1 gig kingston ram

160g sata hdd - 80g ide hdd

7600gt 256mb

sb audigy