Hardware Issues: Tips/Tricks/Solutions

[Infam0us 10]

The best card for arma IMO would be the Geforce 7950 GT 512mb if u can stretch to it

Otherwise get a 8800GTS or GTX if ur going to buy a DX10 card.. the cheaper 8600 versions are not as good as people think they will be.

1950pro, cheap ATM and I play with it settings very high, with 1280x1024. fps ranging from 25 to 60

i have the same card X1950 PRO but the performance really does vary playing a game last night in Corazol, and i had to put all settings on LOWEST and the performance was so poor it was actually unbelievable, i actually felt like snapping my ArmA disc in half and having a huge ass rant on the forums about the poor performance.

Sometimes i can get a steady 60 FPS tho :| What drivers are you using?

I got a slow down on my 7900GS on the same map as you last night Jack. It was still playable but I did notice a definate slowdown, although thats in no doubt due to the fact we had three hours of blowing up buildings and killing, which all added to the lag.

Plus someone might have blew up all the Bridges in the early part of the game

[Jack-UK 0]

The best card for arma IMO would be the Geforce 7950 GT 512mb if u can stretch to it

Otherwise get a 8800GTS or GTX if ur going to buy a DX10 card.. the cheaper 8600 versions are not as good as people think they will be.

1950pro, cheap ATM and I play with it settings very high, with 1280x1024. fps ranging from 25 to 60

i have the same card X1950 PRO but the performance really does vary playing a game last night in Corazol, and i had to put all settings on LOWEST and the performance was so poor it was actually unbelievable, i actually felt like snapping my ArmA disc in half and having a huge ass rant on the forums about the poor performance.

Sometimes i can get a steady 60 FPS tho :| What drivers are you using?

I got a slow down on my 7900GS on the same map as you last night Jack. It was still playable but I did notice a definate slowdown, although thats in no doubt due to the fact we had three hours of blowing up buildings and killing, which all added to the lag.

Plus someone might have blew up all the Bridges in the early part of the game  

Yea i thought it mite have been a slowdown due to the map, but as soon as i got in the game it was just soo choppy i couldnt aim at a thing, and with all settings on minimum it made 0 difference to my frames.. it even made it *worse* on some lowered settings.. this game is unbelievable lol

[-Puma- 2]

im using 7.7 drivers and all details to high, shadows and AA normal. Honestly i dont see any diffrence in fps wether i set everything on low and 800x600 than everything on high 1240x1024. I get steady gameplay, but yes I have the same thing with night fights, somehow the preformance is terrible, when fighting in bigger citys(13FPS ) I've found out that burning vehicles affects ur performance at night fights(about 10 FPS drop). the moment u walk away from the vehicle, and dont see it anymore

FPS goes back up to 25.

[SWAT_BigBear 0]

How about lets adding "TYPE-O's" to this list.

Double check everything.

It's like painting 9 of your wife/girlfriends toenails red..and 1 of them puke green.

She will be pissed.

[-Puma- 2]

How about lets adding "TYPE-O's" to this list.

Double check everything.

It's like painting 9 of your wife/girlfriends toenails red..and 1 of them puke green.

She will be pissed.

[gL33k 0]

whats the difference between intel p4 3.6 ans intel p4 3.06?

0.54

[Dwarden 1124]

First post updated with :

new latest X-Fi beta drivers with OpenAl improvements (for all OSes) and link to Creative Labs driver issues report

enjoy

[-Puma- 2]

First post updated with :

new latest X-Fi beta drivers with OpenAl improvements (for all OSes) and link to Creative Labs driver issues report

enjoy

thnx

[ArmaVidz 0]

Here is a link to my NVidia Control Panel 3D Settings incase it helps someone with their performance. I find my ArmA pretty darned good now with these settings.  

Nvidia Control Panel Settings eVGA 8800GTS 640MB

These settings also helped alot when I was running a eVGA 7950GT KO Superclocked.

<span style='color:olive'>My Specs:

eVGA 680i Motherboard

eVGA 8800 GTS 640MB (Not OC'd)

2x1024MB Buffalo Firestix DDR2-1000 @ 1067Mhz

Core2Duo e6600 2.4Ghz OC'd @ 3.02 Ghz

Creative Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS

HDD0 WD Raptor 74GB

HDD1 WD Raptor 150GB

HDD2 WD Raptor 150GB

OCZ GameXStream 600Watt

Resolution: 1400x1050</span>

I know it's a high end rig, but these settings really do make a huge difference.

[Dwarden 1124]

You got core2duo

so i wonder why You got 'threaded optimization' disabled (off) ...

[ArmaVidz 0]

You got core2duo

so i wonder why You got 'threaded optimization' disabled (off) ...

I hadn't noticed any performance increase really. I could be wrong, and I'll test again to be sure. Is that threaded optimization for GPU<->CPU processing? Or for threaded optimization of the 3D app itself?

[-Puma- 2]

Here is a link to my NVidia Control Panel 3D Settings incase it helps someone with their performance. I find my ArmA pretty darned good now with these settings.

Nvidia Control Panel Settings eVGA 8800GTS 640MB

These settings also helped alot when I was running a eVGA 7950GT KO Superclocked.

<span style='color:olive'>My Specs:

eVGA 680i Motherboard

eVGA 8800 GTS 640MB (Not OC'd)

2x1024MB Buffalo Firestix DDR2-1000 @ 1067Mhz

Core2Duo e6600 2.4Ghz OC'd @ 3.02 Ghz

Creative Soundblaster Audigy2 ZS

HDD0 WD Raptor 74GB

HDD1 WD Raptor 150GB

HDD2 WD Raptor 150GB

OCZ GameXStream 600Watt

Resolution: 1400x1050</span>

I know it's a high end rig, but these settings really do make a huge difference.

ur sound card is holding u back

[ArmaVidz 0]

ur sound card is holding u back    

I wonder if you can overclock a sound card?

[Infam0us 10]

ur sound card is holding u back

I wonder if you can overclock a sound card?

If you got an X-Fi you could always try overclocking the V-Ram I guess

[Dwarden 1124]

New Audigy (1-2) X-Fi beta driver released yesterday (w2k,wXP 32/64, maybe also w3k and Vista),

improvements mainly for Unreal Engine 3 games ...

to download click here

updated first post to ...

Is that threaded optimization for GPU<->CPU processing? Or for threaded optimization of the 3D app itself?

general driver optimizing, may be used for texture I/O and who knows what else ... ask NVIDIA and AMD.ATI coders about

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

I recently upgraded my rig too to get better fps.

Still got mad stutters all the time until I found a gem in this fixes/tweaks thread.  THANK YOU!

Lower your texture detail to Normal or Low (my rig runs best on low as only 256M vidcard) and go into your BIOS and change your AGP aperture, or PCI-Ex PEG Buffer length to Small / Short or whatever low setting your BIOS allows.

It has way improved my framerate and texture loading.

And I can now run virtually ALL other settings on HIGH.

Also I forced the windows disk access to 32-bit (it was defaulting to 16 bit in Windows-automatic-mad-world) and I also installed the game itself onto a raid set, purely for game installations.

The MOST important change for ArmA was reducing the texture sizes and PEG buffer length - makes it squirt textures in less-amounts and more-often to the vid-card - the PCI interface and texture transfer was defo my bottleneck.

Again, thanks for the original post in here that pointed me in the right direction to finally get good performance.

[KorpeN 0]

WarWolf @ Aug. 31 2007,10:59)]or PCI-Ex PEG Buffer length to Small / Short or whatever low setting your BIOS allows

What the consequences of this action?OK you gain more fps but what you sacrifice?

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

Basically, do the math.  The pbo files that ArmA uses are up near the gigabyte sizes, mostly full of textures.  I have a 256Mb graphics card, you possibly a 500 or higher so Normal setting for Texture detail may work better for you than me.  You don't lose anything with the PEG buffer length or AGP aperture settings, apart from losing most of the screen-stutter - all it does is force your hardware to send less data but more often, instead of tons-at-a-time.  Seems to really improve screen-stutter problems.

I combined this action with lowering the texture-detail setting as the amount of texture-memory your card has will limit the amount of texture that it can itself hold - therefore lowering the texture detail setting will allow less texture-swapping along the pipeline to the vid card.

You could ONLY change the PEG buffer or AGP aperture, and I bet you notice the difference with just even that setting tweaked, but the texture-detail will improve things further more: yes you lose some texture detail by lowering this as well, but with the other settings cranked up it makes very little difference.  With shading on max I can STILL fly over the northern forests with a smooth fps... even low-level flight.  GCard is Asus 1950Pro, clocked high, ram is 2G XMS2 and CPU is core2 1.86 clocked at 2.4, fsb 1600.

Not a really high-end system, but it runs damn smooth now even so.

[KorpeN 0]

thnx for the analysis mate.

[HGuderian 0]

Hi!

Does anyone have tried to set via RivaTuner pixel/vertex shader forcing them to "shader 2.0" (default "no override")?

It seems that improve a lot ArmA in Fps rate.

My specs:

- Mb Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe

- CPU AMD 4200 64X2

- GeForce 8800GTX 768

- 1024x2 Ram Kingmax

- HD Maxtor 150/7200

Resolution 1280x1024

[sabre4809 0]

just got new machine built here it is:

ECS nforce 650i

c2d e6750 (not oc just at stock 2.66)

geforce 8500 gt 512

2x 1g ram

xp

[-Puma- 2]

just got new machine built here it is:

ECS nforce 650i

c2d e6750 (not oc just at stock 2.66)

geforce 8500 gt 512

2x 1g ram

xp

ouch that 8500 is VERY underpowered card. U should have gotten atleast 8600 or even better 8800.

[Dwarden 1124]

updated main post with VISTA memory mapping hotfix entry

[Batstat 10]

Hi!

Does anyone have tried to set via RivaTuner pixel/vertex shader forcing them to "shader 2.0" (default "no override")?

It seems that improve a lot ArmA in Fps rate.

My specs:

- Mb Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe

- CPU AMD 4200 64X2

- GeForce 8800GTX 768

- 1024x2 Ram Kingmax

- HD Maxtor 150/7200

Resolution 1280x1024

Negative,

My test with fraps benchmark from the ingame campaign video for 60 sec. Run 6 times - this way:

1. no override (this is the default)

2. same as above

3. pixel & vertex shader 2.0 forced

4. same as above

5. pixel shader 2.0 foreced (vertex to no override)

6. same as above

My result show no difference what so ever. If there had been a difference I would have been suprised. Arma use pixel shader 2.0 as default, so forcing it should not magical do anything.

How did you measure your framerate improvment?

Links:

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

My spec

E6600 clocked from 266 to 333FSB

GTX 8800

2GB ram

edit typo

[malik22 0]

8800 owners do you get better performance with aa and af set ingame or in the control panel?