Hardware and settings for ArmA

[Dudester 0]

CPU: AMD 64 3800

Ram: 2 gig DDR400

Video Card: Geforce 7800 GS

ViewDist: 1500

Terrain: Normal

Objects: Normal

Texture: Normal

Shading: Very low

PostProcess: Low

Anistropic: Normal

Shadow: Off

Antialising: Normal

Very playable.

If you don't turn shading detail to very low. When you zoom into the trees in the forest using floating crosshair, you will see about 10 fps knocked off. Also if you don't disable shadows your in for a rough ride.

[Bram 0]

Hello there. I am going to upgrade my PC this month, but I am not sure will arma runs well on it. new hw specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz)

M/b ASUS P5B, P965

GeForce 7600GT, 256MB

1GB (2x512MB),DDR800 (maybe 2 Gbs)

250 GB, SATA-II

I know it's not highend pc, but it's all i can buy at the moment.

I'd drop the E6600 and pick up an E4300 or E6300 instead and put the cash you saved towards a better Graphics card. I've got a E4300 running at 2.5Ghz on stock air and volts.

[Chrisuk27 0]

Should my system be able to run ArmA ok>?

Ill answer my own post here, yes it 'should' I ran the system testing website that was mentioned earlier and it came out as ok. However it doesnt run full stop. (thats on a clean installed system too!

[Mora2 0]

It would be cool that Bis implemented an Arma mark in the control menu.

That way you could test all your settings changing them accordingly.

[desigamer 0]

What are the best settings for an

AMD 4400

nVidia 7900gtx

2GIG ram

Bcos everything on v.high is slow

[bonko the sane 2]

after 34 years (well not really, say 24) of crappy pc's im slowly buying this for ArmA (lets not forget IL2, SHIII (minus starforce) and MTWII)

CPU: Intel Duo E6600

2X 1GB Kingston DDR2 800 Mhz HyperX

PSU: LC-Power Arkangel 850W

2X Seagate 320 GB 16MB 7200rpm SATA II

1X XFX GeForce 8800 GTX XXX Extreme Edition

19" BenQ FP93GX (1280 x 1024) 2ms

Mobo: MSI P975X Platinum Powerup edition

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer FPS

NZXT Zero box (lots of low rpm fans)

it will run XP SP2 until DX10 is out, and Vista stops being absolute crap

im sure to overclock it slightly as the intel duo can reach ridiculous speeds

now...

will my dick grow bigger? no

will i pull more chicks? no

will i have an extremely expensive pc which ill have to pay over months, and cut down on lots of comodities? yes

will i have a noisy pc? yes, headphones will be handy, either that or some extra silent fans...or...i could sell my prized hamster and buy a zalman liquid cooling kit

will it play Arma? dunno, im buying the game this week, but it better run it like a dream.

ok, the powersupply, geforce and case are totaly and utterly noiseless, me so happy.

bought ArmA 505 for 39 euro (yay) and bought the above except these minor changes:

Samsung SyncMaster 206BW

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer

BFG 8800 GTX OC

after reading about performance issues with dual core and the 8800 here on the forum i was aprehensive, but:

(tested on a Samtron CRT 19" with patch 1.05 applied)

with 3000 VD and all settings maxed out @1280x1024 i got a minimum 15 FPS inside forests, and between 30 to 55 elsewhere...beautiful graphics but i guess that in a heavy mission it will be overkill.

with all settings at high with 2500 VD @1280x1024 i get a steady 70+ FPS except on wooded areas where it lowers just a tiny bit.

im yet to overclock my rig...so i can expect a substantial increase in performance.

so...whats the beef with some people complaining about poor performance on high-end machines?

GREAT JOB BIS! granted, theres bugs to fix and room for improvements, but so what, this is one hell of a game.

edit: im running latest Creative and Nvidia drivers, dloaded from their sites

[JimLad 0]

Well you are very lucky then.

My specs:

Core 2 Duo E4300 @ 2.4GHz

2GB DDR2

8800 GTS 640MB

Vista X64

Settings in ArmA:

Res - 1680x1050

View Distance - 3000m

Terrain - High

Textures - Normal

Shading Detail - High

Post processing - Low

Shadow detail - Very High

Anti Aliasing - Low

Blood - High

With these settings I typically get about 20-24fps on the ground, slowing to 15fps in action, rising to 30fps if in the air. How some of you are claiming to get over 60fps with all settings maxed on similar spec machines is beyond me

[Possessed 0]

Well you are very lucky then.

My specs:

Core 2 Duo E4300 @ 2.4GHz

2GB DDR2

8800 GTS 640MB

Vista X64

Settings in ArmA:

Res - 1680x1050

View Distance - 3000m

Terrain - High

Textures - Normal

Shading Detail - High

Post processing - Low

Shadow detail - Very High

Anti Aliasing - Low

Blood - High

With these settings I typically get about 20-24fps on the ground, slowing to 15fps in action, rising to 30fps if in the air. How some of you are claiming to get over 60fps with all settings maxed on similar spec machines is beyond me

Low resolutions and small view distance. Normally people always forget something from those "all maxed" comments. And I don't believe anyone can use overall high settings AND high postprocessing after 1.05.

But anyway there is something wrong in your computer. With the settings you are using I would easily get double framerates compared to your results and GTS vs. GTX cannot be the reason.

[Balschoiw 0]

@JimLad

Reduce your viewdistance and reduce shadow quality. From my experience the shadow calculations eat a lot of gfx power.

Also reduce your shading details.

I have all textures and details on high, AA on low and shading details at low aswell.

You should experience a major FPS increase if you apply the changes.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

hah dual core has only slowed down arma

youll need to set it to only use cpu 1

As contained in other posts here by the developers of the game ARMA is not Dual AMD or DUO intel optomized programme yet. So a dual/quad core may not speed up the game at all.

Most of the x2 CPU's are still pretty fast even when running 1 core games, and both AMD and Intel have help on their sites on how to do this. There are software and settings that can help many games work better on the new CPU's.

GPU, I'm running the EVGA 8800 KO ACS3 GTX, which is a beast of a card and runs ARMA at 1600x1024 with everything but terrain detail set to very high at great FPS. I have found huge performance increasses in having AA turned on with my card. This may be due to the 8800 handling parts of the game (shadows? the AA?) while the CPU takes care of the rest.

Try triple buffer and vsync On and off, different rigs and monitors produce different results.

The 8800 card is currently in a AMD 4000 single core PC (3d mark 06 76XX). Which is basically a mid range CPU at best and not overclocked, this rig runs ARMA at 1600x1024 16:9 at between 30-60fps. In fact the 8800 cards like the 7 series and ATI 19** often work better at higher resolutions they bottleneck at 1024 res.

One of the real eye-candy elements of ARMA is having min 4xx AA set and having gamma correct Alias turned on and Supersample Transparency Turned on. This makes shadows, light bloom and HDR effects very immersive. I suspect only the 8 series Nvidia cards can do this with a decent FPS right now in ARMA at above 1280 res.

Nvidia users remeber to tell your GPU that AA and AF settings should be done by the application. Don't let your GPU overide the ARMA settings.

For those with smaller monitors AA and HD res, isn't an issue but if your monitor is above 19" inch's you probably know how AA and supersample makes a huge difference to GFX.

The two biggest performance differences in ARAMA, is Shadows on V high, seem to work better by a long way than any other change for improving FPS on my system.

Terrain details set to low, over any other terrain setting can lead to 60 FPS while flying.

My 8800 has 700+ ,meg VRAM, so textures on very high with AF filtering produces nice eye candy and seem once, loaded to provide very stable framerates. I guess my rig is preloading all the textures, I hardly ever have the texture problems others describe.

One thing ARMA impresses me with is that even if you mess with all the GFX setting constantly in game 95% of the time ARMA carries on working. Just try changing settings in many other games and watch them fall over or beg you to restart them.

I have 2 gig ram currently, I often notice ARMA is always on my hard drive up to something. I defrag my drive alot and notice this helps ARMA alot. I suspect a good defraged HD may also really help ARMA's performance.

In fact is there a setting to tell ARMA go gobble my ram and ignore the HD?

8800's GTS 360 meg vram (only about 10-20% slower, if that than my GTX! start from in the UK from £200. They have become very cost effective. So if you are about to upgrade I would recommend them.

Some words of warning, are the 8800 drivers are not yet perfect and lead to crashes in some games ARMA included. The drivers will get better over time. The crashes are screen lock ups, but you can CTRL/ALT/DEL stop ARMA and restart it. This problem will go as Nvidia keep updating the drivers. Xp seems better for games and 8800 than vista at the moment.

8800's Bottle neck on anything below a Core 2 DUO intel E6300-E6600, any CPU below that does not get the full FPS and GFX that the 8800 can really provide, you lose 10-35% of the power of the GPU, you will still see massive improvements even over a 79** single cards (or below) though, even on an older CPU. Basically an 8800 allows you to run higher res with more AA effects.

8800's run very hot you need a "cool air flow" decent PC case, you will also need a PCIE mobo with x 16 slots and a decent PSU (600+W with dual 12v rails).

If you want to run ARMA at 1024x768 on a 19" 4:3 monitor or below, with eye candy on high or better a 7800 GTX or ATI 1950 with 256 VRAM or better should be fine. A CPU (AMD 3800 single core) and 1 gig ram should make that run ok. And those are now very cost effective components (either brand new or second hand).

Widecrseen monitors above 24" 1600x1024 16:9 widescreen. Very high eye-candy settings with 4xx AA and SSAA etc an 8800 GTS is the min spec, with a AMD 3800+ single core and 2 gig ram this will deliver 30+ FPS.

i don't know if TrackIR impacts performance, or how real triple head display affects it either. I suspect if you use the matrox triple output box you need to provide it with a decent high res image to split and that may mean a 8800 GTX is the min spec for eye candy on triple head setups.

Is there a massive improvment with 7800/7900 or 8800 SLI setup's for ARMA anyone actually know?

[dirtylarrygb 0]

Hello there. I am going to upgrade my PC this month, but I am not sure will arma runs well on it. new hw specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz)

M/b ASUS P5B, P965

GeForce 7600GT, 256MB

1GB (2x512MB),DDR800 (maybe 2 Gbs)

250 GB, SATA-II

I know it's not highend pc, but it's all i can buy at the moment.

I'd drop the E6600 and pick up an E4300 or E6300 instead and put the cash you saved towards a better Graphics card. I've got a E4300 running at 2.5Ghz on stock air and volts.

Yep, a E6300, instead of a E6600, the savings from that should almost upgrade your 7600 card to a 8800 GTS.

The 8800 is a min' 250% more powerful than the 7600, while the CPU drop may affect a 10% drop in some RTS games but no difference really in ARMA.

A non overclocked E6300 performs the same in most becnmarks online for games as an AMD 62 FX. the E6300 is 1/3 the cost of the FX 62!

Prices today from scan.co.uk:

320MB BFG Technology 8800GTS Overclocked, PCI-E, Mem 1600MHz, GPU 550MHz, 96 Streams, 2x DVI/HDTV = 200 pounds

256MB XFX 7950GT, XXX, PCI-E (x16), Mem 1600MHz, GPU 610MHz, 24 Pipes, 2x Dual Link DVI-I/HDTV = 160 pounds

256MB Leadtek 7600GT PCI-E (x16), Mem 1400 MHz, GPU 560 MHz, 12 Pipes, Dual Link DVI-I/DVI-I/HDTV = 90

8800 GTS is 2x faster than GX7950, will run DX10 costs + 40 pounds more than the GX79**.... 3 to 4x faster than a 7600 for 2x the price!

CPU:

E6300 = 116 pounds

E6600 = 200 pounds

e6300 not overclocked is only 30% slower max.

A PSU to run a non SLI 8800 and E6300 starts from 50 pounds you need 600w + and DUAL 12v rails.

Your budget your choice ;}

[dirtylarrygb 0]

Well you are very lucky then.

My specs:

Core 2 Duo E4300 @ 2.4GHz

2GB DDR2

8800 GTS 640MB

Vista X64

Settings in ArmA:

Res - 1680x1050

View Distance - 3000m

Terrain - High

Textures - Normal

Shading Detail - High

Post processing - Low

Shadow detail - Very High

Anti Aliasing - Low

Blood - High

With these settings I typically get about 20-24fps on the ground, slowing to 15fps in action, rising to 30fps if in the air. How some of you are claiming to get over 60fps with all settings maxed on similar spec machines is beyond me

Low resolutions and small view distance. Normally people always forget something from those "all maxed" comments. And I don't believe anyone can use overall high settings AND high postprocessing after 1.05.

But anyway there is something wrong in your computer. With the settings you are using I would easily get double framerates compared to your results and GTS vs. GTX cannot be the reason.

As I said in some cases the 8800 cards work better at higher res and seem to love max shadows, in fact everything max bar terrain seems the key for sexy FPS at HD res.

Possibly the extra VRAM in a GTX helps?

Dual cores not set up correctly may slow ARMA?

Vista verse XP?

All good reasons.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

after 34 years (well not really, say 24) of crappy pc's im slowly buying this for ArmA (lets not forget IL2, SHIII (minus starforce) and MTWII)

CPU: Intel Duo E6600

2X 1GB Kingston DDR2 800 Mhz HyperX

PSU: LC-Power Arkangel 850W

2X Seagate 320 GB 16MB 7200rpm SATA II

1X XFX GeForce 8800 GTX XXX Extreme Edition

19" BenQ FP93GX (1280 x 1024) 2ms

Mobo: MSI P975X Platinum Powerup edition

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer FPS

NZXT Zero box (lots of low rpm fans)

it will run XP SP2 until DX10 is out, and Vista stops being absolute crap

im sure to overclock it slightly as the intel duo can reach ridiculous speeds

now...

will my dick grow bigger? no

will i pull more chicks? no

will i have an extremely expensive pc which ill have to pay over months, and cut down on lots of comodities? yes

will i have a noisy pc? yes, headphones will be handy, either that or some extra silent fans...or...i could sell my prized hamster and buy a zalman liquid cooling kit

will it play Arma? dunno, im buying the game this week, but it better run it like a dream.

ok, the powersupply, geforce and case are totaly and utterly noiseless, me so happy.

bought ArmA 505 for 39 euro (yay) and bought the above except these minor changes:

Samsung SyncMaster 206BW

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer

BFG 8800 GTX OC

after reading about performance issues with dual core and the 8800 here on the forum i was aprehensive, but:

(tested on a Samtron CRT 19" with patch 1.05 applied)

with 3000 VD and all settings maxed out @1280x1024 i got a minimum 15 FPS inside forests, and between 30 to 55 elsewhere...beautiful graphics but i guess that in a heavy mission it will be overkill.

with all settings at high with 2500 VD @1280x1024 i get a steady 70+ FPS except on wooded areas where it lowers just a tiny bit.

im yet to overclock my rig...so i can expect a substantial increase in performance.

so...whats the beef with some people complaining about poor performance on high-end machines?

GREAT JOB BIS! granted, theres bugs to fix and room for improvements, but so what, this is one hell of a game.

edit: im running latest Creative and Nvidia drivers, dloaded from their sites

I've noticed i get odd effects in wow or arma if i enable hardware sound on my XIFI in ARMA, I have eax on, Hardware off. All lastest creative openal drivers.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

after 34 years (well not really, say 24) of crappy pc's im slowly buying this for ArmA (lets not forget IL2, SHIII (minus starforce) and MTWII)

CPU: Intel Duo E6600

2X 1GB Kingston DDR2 800 Mhz HyperX

PSU: LC-Power Arkangel 850W

2X Seagate 320 GB 16MB 7200rpm SATA II

1X XFX GeForce 8800 GTX XXX Extreme Edition

19" BenQ FP93GX (1280 x 1024) 2ms

Mobo: MSI P975X Platinum Powerup edition

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer FPS

NZXT Zero box (lots of low rpm fans)

it will run XP SP2 until DX10 is out, and Vista stops being absolute crap

im sure to overclock it slightly as the intel duo can reach ridiculous speeds

now...

will my dick grow bigger? no

will i pull more chicks? no

will i have an extremely expensive pc which ill have to pay over months, and cut down on lots of comodities? yes

will i have a noisy pc? yes, headphones will be handy, either that or some extra silent fans...or...i could sell my prized hamster and buy a zalman liquid cooling kit

will it play Arma? dunno, im buying the game this week, but it better run it like a dream.

ok, the powersupply, geforce and case are totaly and utterly noiseless, me so happy.

bought ArmA 505 for 39 euro (yay) and bought the above except these minor changes:

Samsung SyncMaster 206BW

Creative Soundblaster XFI Xtreme Gamer

BFG 8800 GTX OC

after reading about performance issues with dual core and the 8800 here on the forum i was aprehensive, but:

(tested on a Samtron CRT 19" with patch 1.05 applied)

with 3000 VD and all settings maxed out @1280x1024 i got a minimum 15 FPS inside forests, and between 30 to 55 elsewhere...beautiful graphics but i guess that in a heavy mission it will be overkill.

with all settings at high with 2500 VD @1280x1024 i get a steady 70+ FPS except on wooded areas where it lowers just a tiny bit.

im yet to overclock my rig...so i can expect a substantial increase in performance.

so...whats the beef with some people complaining about poor performance on high-end machines?

GREAT JOB BIS! granted, theres bugs to fix and room for improvements, but so what, this is one hell of a game.

edit: im running latest Creative and Nvidia drivers, dloaded from their sites

I've noticed i get odd effects in wow or arma if i enable hardware sound on my XIFI in ARMA, I have eax on, Hardware off. All lastest creative openal drivers.

Like me you went the GTX route as its lazy and delivers Xd10 and sexy FX, for the VERY smart upgrader, the E6300 oc'ed with 2x 8800 GTS SLi could deliver upto x2 the performance we single GTX owners get in games that are DX9/10 SLI enabled.

In anything not, you'd get a 10-20% drop or a sore head from banging your head on the wall shouting SLI sucks.

will my dick grow bigger? no, well you new machine WILL browse the web faster! And if you register all your new hardware you've bound to get more spam viagra email.

will i pull more chicks? no, it will run SIMS2 great, install that and attract female game players ROFL.

will i have an extremely expensive pc which ill have to pay over months, and cut down on lots of comodities? Tinned food is good while you play 24 hour ARMA sessions, most us of are to fat in the western world, so spending food money on a PC is helping save the planet.

;}

[goodguyswearblack9 0]

I'm going to try upgrading before the summer so what do you guys recommend I get to play ARMA on high setting (I also want the components to last me for the next few years). Thanks

P4

2.54 GHz

1024 MB RAM

ATI Radeon X1300

[deevius 0]

Hey guys, im looking at upgrading from my tired old AMD 2800+ agp system to this:

AMD Dual core 4600+ Socket AM2

Motherboard:Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4 rev2.0

RAM:2x1GB DDR2-667  

HDD:320GB SATA2 HDD

Optical drive:18xDVDRW

Graphics:xfx 256MB Geforce 7900GT 520M extreme edition with vivo

Raidmax O2 500w ATX Case

running on a 19" LCD monitor...

----------------------------------------

This is roughly the best I can afford at the moment with my budget.

Do you guys think Armed Assault will run good on this system, as my current system it plays like crap

cheers  

[fitzee 7]

This is roughly the best I can afford at the moment with my budget.

With the memory usage in ArmA and other new games I'd try and squeeze a 512 meg vid card in there.

[deevius 0]

ok, any recommendations?

i also might bump the DDR2-667 memory upto DDR-800 too if that makes any difference..

thanks

[jfri 0]

I have almost the same specs as you jfri, except I have an AMD64 3000+. I can run the demo with most settings on low, but with textures on normal. It still looks good though.

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/2047/aasettings2cp2.jpg

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/494/aasittingbridgegg8.jpg

http://img128.imageshack.us/img128/5436/aawatershootingyi3.jpg

http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/5401/aamountainshootingda6.jpg

The only problem is that the settings are limited in the demo. As far as I know, the view distance slider does nothing. I also had to force AA 4x from the control panel because the in game settings didn't seem to do anything either.

But the fps remains high enough most of the time. Be sure you update you Video Card drivers, and Directx. When I enter large forest then I notice a tiny bit of slowdown. Big cities also used to slowdown my computer, but I haven't checked after updating the software.

That leads to the question if the demo has the same performence as the reatil game with the latest patch.

Otherwise I don't think I agree that your pics looks good. My impression is that it's not much better tham OFP.

Also the FPS isn't really that important as long as you don't have stutters. So do you have problems with stutters? I use the 84.21 nvidia drivers. The latest drivers give me problems in FS9 and I have been told they are only good for cards above 6600GT

[smellyjelly 0]

I usually don't have problems with stuttering, except for at the beginning of missions. Even then it happens on only 25% of the ones I've played, and it last up to a few minutes.

Also, I have issues where, somewhat rarely, my game will freeze for a minute to five minutes, and then suddenly resume like normal. It's unfortunate, but not too big of a deal, (until it happens again, then I'm angry ).

By the way, I changed my settings a bit. I moved the view distance up a bit, and turned shadows to high, (oddly enough, it's less of a performance hog than low). However, I turned AA and AF down to low.

[Kamikaze666 0]

dunno if it has been asked before, but how does a 8800 gts 320 mb perform compared to a 640 mb version?

[jfri 0]

Also, I have issues where, somewhat rarely, my game will freeze for a minute to five minutes, and then suddenly resume like normal. It's unfortunate, but not too big of a deal, (until it happens again, then I'm angry   ).

I have experienced something like this with a game called Oblivion which btw I can run with fairly high settings without a problem except with multiple enemies.

[BLUEmako 0]

Can someone please recommend some settings for me? I've messed around with the card and in game settings and can't seem to find a sweet spot. I can get around 20-30fps reasonably steady at 1280x1024 with 1200m view distance but the texture load times are long and inconsistent.

My rig:

P4 3.2GHz oc'd to 3.8GHz

2GB DDR RAM

ATi X800XL 256 MB AGP vid card with ATi Tray Tools, running about 5% o'c with cat 6.7 drivers only.

WinXP SP2 DX9c

TYIA

[majoris 10]

Turn off Anti-Aliasing, it's the best thing you can do. Use coolbits to disable "render frames ahead." Also make sure your aspect ratio is set to normal, not widescreen or anything else.

The vegetation and shadows eat up performance with AA turned on. It doesn't look as great, but hell, it's worth the 20+ FPS boost that you get.

That's the best thing I can recommend. I struggled with 15-20 FPS performance on a brand new Alienware laptop. Turned off AA and now my FPS is through the roof.

[BLUEmako 0]

Tried with and without AA and I get virtually no difference in performance with either setting. AA on high, fps max 50, min 30. AA off, fps max 50, min 30.

Seems that the anisotropic filtering and object detail make the biggest hits to the frames...