improving my framerate

[marksken 0]

Just bought ArmA. I need to play it on minimum setting to have a framerate of 25-32 fps.

my spec are

windows xp -sp2

amd 64 x2 3800+

3 giga pc3200 ddr ram

ati radeon x1300 512 mb

any suggestions ? would love to play game on something more than minimum settings. Got a small budget so maybe a other videocard could help ?

[5133p39 12]

there already are other HW/performance related threads, try ask in there (here for example: Hardware Issues: Tips/Tricks/Solutions).

Either that, or you should use the search button please, no need having everybody opening new topics about their exact HW configuration.

[spetznaz14 0]

You need a new graphics card, simple as that really.

[marksken 0]

You need a new graphics card, simple as that really.

Because i'm on a tight budget i can't affort more than 150 euro would something like this make a difference ?

Asus Extreme N7600GS Top Silent HTD 512M PCI-E

[scarz^ 0]

You need a new graphics card, simple as that really.

Because i'm on a tight budget i can't affort more than 150 euro would something like this make a difference ?

Asus Extreme N7600GS Top Silent HTD 512M PCI-E

I wouldnt recommend yo to buy now a new graphics card.You should wait till the prices of new DirectX10 GPU's drop.

[marksken 0]

Are the rest of my config gooed enough ? for normal settings if i replace the videocard ?

[spetznaz14 0]

Are the rest of my config gooed enough ? for normal settings if i replace the videocard ?

Yes, I could play Arma ok on the same processor and an x1900xt @ 1024x768 normal detail.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

Are the rest of my config gooed enough ? for normal settings if i replace the videocard ?

Yes, I could play Arma ok on the same processor and an x1900xt @ 1024x768 normal detail.

A 8800 GTS is cheap (200 pounds), only a little more than a 7900 1950, But you may need a bigger PSU or new motherboard to get it work properly.

I know you said you budget is less than that, just either save up more or wait for the rpices to fall further ;}

Anything less than a core 2 duo can "hamstring" an 8800 a bit, but its really NOT as big an issue as many pople claim it is. it's about a 10% performance drop. As a 8800 is 2x faster than any other card you can buy, losing 10% is not something you will really care about.

[-Puma- 2]

Are the rest of my config gooed enough ? for normal settings if i replace the videocard ?

Yes, I could play Arma ok on the same processor and an x1900xt @ 1024x768 normal detail.

A 8800 GTS is cheap (200 pounds), only a little more than a 7900 1950, But you may need a bigger PSU or new motherboard to get it work properly.

I know you said you budget is less than that, just either save up more or wait for the rpices to fall further ;}

Anything less than a core 2 duo can "hamstring" an 8800 a bit, but its really NOT as big an issue as many pople claim it is. it's about a 10% performance drop. As a 8800 is 2x faster than any other card you can buy, losing 10% is not something you will really care about.

I would wait a couple of weeks, as the dx10 midrange cards from nvidia are coming. U can get 8600gt for the price of 7600gt (not really 100% confirmed tough, but I think u'll find a card for u)

[Infam0us 10]

I agree, get a new card .., I can run ArmA all on high / very high with the following setup

PSU - 500W Silverstone SLi Dual +12V

Mobo: Gigabyte GA K8N51GMF-RH NF410 - S754

Processor: AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 Processor 3400+ Newcastle S754 2.5Ghz

RAM: x 2 512 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM

Hard Drive: 335GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS 256MB - Overclocked

Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2

And it works great!

[walker 0]

Hi all

As has been pointed out in a lot of threads the best mid range card to use is the ATI X1950 pro. It has got rave reviews in lots of magazines. It is also just within your price range.

I would not recommend and 8800 until they fix the drivers there are loads of people with them complaining about fog at any view distance beyond 3.5km. There also a lot of reports of bugs for other games for this card. It seems to me the problems for this card are that it is an early adopter DX10 and Vista card; there are a lot of complaints about lack of drivers on various forums for them.

The 7900s seem to be a good Nvidia card though. You can save your self a lot of money by going for a 7900 or better an X1950 pro. They are both cards that are well supported and very stable. And as you can see most of those on this forum with those cards are very happy.

Dyslexi has done a post recently showing one of the beta versions of the next ArmA patch and has got a view distance of 10km out of an X1950 pro!

With 1.05 it runs most stuff maxed with a view distance of 3km. That means ArmA is rendering almost 10,000 times what Fear or R6V do at max settings.

The view distances and rendering power of ArmA is that much more than any other game on the market but for all ArmA can do it is much better with a half descent graphic card like a X1950pro

Kind Regards walker

[marksken 0]

i found a Nvidia 7950 gx2 1024 mb gainward for 200 euro

is that a good one ?

[JimLad 0]

With 1.05 it runs most stuff maxed with a view distance of 3km. That means ArmA is rendering almost 10,000 times what Fear or R6V do at max settings.

The view distances and rendering power of ArmA is that much more than any other game on the market but for all ArmA can do it is much better with a half descent graphic card like a X1950pro

Where on earth did you pull that figure of 10,000 from? The whole point of LOD is that it reduces the detail at distance so you don't have to render as much.

[walker 0]

Hi all

In Reply to JimLad

Fear and RV6 are just little corridor shooters they rarely render as much as 100m view-distance. In ArmA you can with say an X1950 pro or 7900 happily run ArmA at 3km. You can be seeing the dust of a tank giving away its position by movement more than a mile away At the same time you can, with a suitable zoom on your scope, view a snipe-able targets freckles before placing one between their eyes and at the same time see the weave of the cloth on your jacket arm.

Sorry but other games are just not capable of that unless you want to post up some pictures of Fear or RV6 with a 3km view distance. I await your doing this with baited breath.

Kind Regards walker

[JimLad 0]

A great example is really Crysis, where you can have up to 16km, and 10km mountains as well!

I agree though ArmA has an impressive view distance.  I just think the performance could be better in light of the afforementioned .  I would be interested to hear if Arma features any geometry culling algorithms and exactly how the LOD works  

EDIT : I might add that I am using an 8800 though so I suspect I won't get the performance I ought to until the next patch or new drivers

[walker 0]

Hi all

in reply to JimLad:

Perhaps you can post some pictures showing your copy of Crysis to prove this. Some shots of you doing this in an MP game would be nice. Also some shots of say 300 AI in battle would be good.

What machine are you playing Crysis on? If you are playing it on your machine with the 8800 on it, has Crysis solved the 8800s view distance beyond 3km fog bug?

Kind Regards walker

[JimLad 0]

Obviously I don't have a copy of Crysis on my machine . I'm basing this on what developers have said and demonstrated in videos - you might want to check this one out in particular : Crysis GDC07 video

Someone who went to the conference and spoke to the Crytek guys learned the machines running there were core 2 duos with single 8800s, ie. similar to mine. Also I'm sure ArmA can have that many units, but I've never seen anywhere near that number and the performance is still a bit iffy (again could be down to an issue with my 8800!. All I am saying is there is fair room for improvement in the efficiency of the code as far as I can tell, and that claiming ArmA to be rendering 10,000 times as much as RS:V is nonsense

[dirtylarrygb 0]

A great example is really Crysis, where you can have up to 16km, and 10km mountains as well!

I agree though ArmA has an impressive view distance. I just think the performance could be better in light of the afforementioned . I would be interested to hear if Arma features any geometry culling algorithms and exactly how the LOD works

EDIT : I might add that I am using an 8800 though so I suspect I won't get the performance I ought to until the next patch or new drivers

I have all the Crysis videos even the HD ones, and the kit used to make the videos was a Duo core intel and a 8800, both Oc'ed.

In close combat videos in the jungle you can see FPS just like ARMA take a plunge, or as soon as the videos enter the "Cold Zone".

The fancy videos of Crysis flying round the islands is because Crysis like Far Cry before it can perform extreme LOD on world objects such as trees and almost "2d Sprite" anything to far away".

Also the much vaulted Volumetric clouds were seen in the DX9 game "Just Cuase" which also has long views and a very complex gameworld and makes very good use of DX9 shaders and in almost as impressive gameworld as Crysis, ARMA or Alan Wake.

ARMA appears to have state of the art texture streaming, terrain division, Object LOD. Culling wise, I'm not seeing much evidence of as I'm running the 8800 GTX and have fog till 1.06.

What i will say is with texture high, shadows very high, object detial high, terain detail very low, filtering very high, post process high, HDR high. Arma is pretty playable at a stable 60 fps most of the time at 1600x1024 wuth 4x aa SSAA enabled (only a 8800 can do that by the way).

I have no texture issues like some report, I have no object or foilage LOD in my viewable distance which I find an "Immersion" breaker if i see objects suddenly grow in complexity as i approach and ARMA is simply the most stunning DX9 graphical game to date I have played.

Some of the physic's in Alan Wake and STALKER are just as impressive as Crysis btw.

To compare a FPS shooter like HL2 to ARMA is like trying to compare a F1 car and Humvee, they are both cars but very very different and both great for certain sorts of tasks.

The closest "huge sandbox" +100sq km engine on the PC to ARMA for new features is Just Cause by Eidos. A james bond style aracade shooter set in south america.

The crysis engine is a hybrid of the DOOM FPS linear engine and the ARMA style vast Sandbox Engine, Just like Far Cry before it.

To some extent you could compare the FSX engine to ARMA, ARMA then becomes like Far Cry in comparrision. The ARMA gameworld is tiny by flight sim standards. The WOW gameworld is almost the same size as ARMA and theat took over 2 years to detail.

The level of detail on the 400 sq KM of the ARMA, in the game map is still very uprecidented on any games platform.

[fardwark 0]

8800 cards are cheap? I beg to differ

The X1950 series of cards still have the viewdistance-fog bug, but at least the outer limit is around 3000-4000m for the fog (increasing viewdistance above that point does not actually increase the viewed distance). The problem is that it really sucks framerate.

I did some testing yesterday, to see what kind of framerates I got at different viewdistances (mostly I wanted to see how far I was from a playable experience at 10 000m viewdistance).

First I tested with the settings I had currently (these) to get a benchmark.

Main street of Corazol, 67 fps.

Mountain peak south of Passe Espone, 75 fps.

Then I did a control measurement with graphics detail increased to these settings.

Corazol, 38 fps.

Espone, 51 fps.

Then I tested various viewdistances with the lower graphics details.

Corazol, 2000m, 65 fps.

Espone, 2000m, 70 fps.

Corazol, 4000m, 46 fps.

Espone, 4000m, 45 fps.

Corazol, 10000m, 21 fps.

Espone, 10000m, 23 fps.

My HW:

Intel Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHz

Radeon X1950XTX (512MB)

2048MB PC-5300

These screenshots are all of me standing completely still, so these are peak framerates and not average framerates. As soon as I was moving around, and bringing objects into and out of view, the framerate dropped.

I've settled on running the lower graphic details at 2000m viewdistance for now, as that gives me a good balance between framerate, quality and viewdistance. I could probably experiment with the graphics details and turn some of them up to improve the appearance of the game, but I haven't bothered doing that yet.

We will just have to live with the fact that ArmA is poorly optimized. Anybody who says they run at high settings with good framerates are probably lying through their teeth or spending 90% of their monthly salary on upgrading their computer.

Also, I think many people who say they run at high settings with no problem have a very high tolerance for poor framerates.

[JimLad 0]

Nice post fardwark.  Two screens in particular demonstrate where the ArmA performance is really disappointing -

2000m

10000m

Load both those screens and note the very small amount of difference in quantity of geometry being rendered.  There is no good reason why the framerate should fall by 70% for what few extra polys are displayed. However I wonder if it is actually rendering many more polys but they are not visible due to the fog bug. That would explain it.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

8800 cards are cheap? I beg to differ

In comparisson to how the 7 series cards held their price last year the 8800 GTS 320 meg is a fantastic price to performace ratio. not just my view but Tomshardware, gamespot and Nexus etc.

A 8800 GTX costs 2x more than a 1950 but costs 2x more, big factor is more vram and DX10. So you get what you pay for. A 1950 or 7950 will run ARMA fine at 1024 res with eyecandy etc, only a cross fire or SLi setup (if they work with arma) can deliver the GPU horse power to compete with just 1 8800 GTS or GTX.

If you plan on a large monitor, then you NEED a 8800

If you play to use a 15-21" a 7950 or 1950 are fine.

Thing is a 8800 GTS only 40 pounds more than a 7950 or 1950, so they make sense at that price.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

8800 cards are cheap? I beg to differ

The X1950 series of cards still have the viewdistance-fog bug, but at least the outer limit is around 3000-4000m for the fog (increasing viewdistance above that point does not actually increase the viewed distance). The problem is that it really sucks framerate.

I did some testing yesterday, to see what kind of framerates I got at different viewdistances (mostly I wanted to see how far I was from a playable experience at 10 000m viewdistance).

First I tested with the settings I had currently (these) to get a benchmark.

Main street of Corazol, 67 fps.

Mountain peak south of Passe Espone, 75 fps.

Then I did a control measurement with graphics detail increased to these settings.

Corazol, 38 fps.

Espone, 51 fps.

Then I tested various viewdistances with the lower graphics details.

Corazol, 2000m, 65 fps.

Espone, 2000m, 70 fps.

Corazol, 4000m, 46 fps.

Espone, 4000m, 45 fps.

Corazol, 10000m, 21 fps.

Espone, 10000m, 23 fps.

My HW:

Intel Core2Duo E6600 2.4GHz

Radeon X1950XTX (512MB)

2048MB PC-5300

These screenshots are all of me standing completely still, so these are peak framerates and not average framerates. As soon as I was moving around, and bringing objects into and out of view, the framerate dropped.

I've settled on running the lower graphic details at 2000m viewdistance for now, as that gives me a good balance between framerate, quality and viewdistance. I could probably experiment with the graphics details and turn some of them up to improve the appearance of the game, but I haven't bothered doing that yet.

We will just have to live with the fact that ArmA is poorly optimized. Anybody who says they run at high settings with good framerates are probably lying through their teeth or spending 90% of their monthly salary on upgrading their computer.

Also, I think many people who say they run at high settings with no problem have a very high tolerance for poor framerates.

If your running alarge LCD witha 60hz refresh rate you only need a stable FPS of 60.

Only a crt monitor running at 120 hz needs 120 fps.

Always make me laugh when people see a benchmark of 200 fps in doom3 and say I need that card. What you should be looking for is a card that runs the level of eye candy and Anti Alias alias you need to run a stable FPS rate in your games that matches your monitors native res and refresh. it's as a simple as that.

BTW, in ARMA mp to many peoples dismay, my 1600x 1024 res with 4x aa and SSAA on 322 LCD, allows me to see you and snipe you with a SAW or PKM about 400 meters away zoom level 1 only LOL, I know people I'm shooting are saying "How the fook can he see me!!!"

[dwringer 45]

Only one thing I'd like to add in the x1950 vs 8800 debate. True, 8800 as a new card is plagued with driver issues, but anyone with an ATI card will tell you the exact same thing. For example, check the sticky on the troubleshooting page about ATI cards. Well, guess what, the 6.7 catalysts don't work with x1950's, as the 1950 is a completely different/newer GPU. This doesn't make ATI or nvidia worse, per se, but it is a more balanced perspective. My main reason for going with 8800 over the 1950 (hopefully I'm not in for a shock when it arrives, as I just ordered it) is that when I tried a x1950, it was DOA. It froze my PC within minutes of running any 3d game, and the higher the detail settings, the faster it would freeze. Temps on the GPU itself were reporting below 70C, but the voltage regulator module on it was getting blazing hot - it was enough to give me a 1st degree burn on my finger just from touching the heat sink on top of it for about 4 seconds. I looked online, and a LOT of people had this problem. Hundreds of people mention that it's due to the immense PSU demands on the card, but I tried 2 brand new 650w power supplies, one of which was an Antec, and both of which had over 40 Amps on +12v. Maybe my power wasn't "clean" enough. Whatever, it still appears to be a monumental problem. Plus, because of my RMA I lost out on a rebate and have been without a PC for about a week and a half. This certainly makes me biased against the x1950, but I'd hate to see somebody else encounter the same problem who had thought "this couldn't happen to me" ... that was me about 2 weeks ago. Searching for similar problems with 8800 cards yields pretty much nothing, while there were several front-page google results on the x1950 freezing up.

[dirtylarrygb 0]

Only one thing I'd like to add in the x1950 vs 8800 debate. True, 8800 as a new card is plagued with driver issues, but anyone with an ATI card will tell you the exact same thing. For example, check the sticky on the troubleshooting page about ATI cards. Well, guess what, the 6.7 catalysts don't work with x1950's, as the 1950 is a completely different/newer GPU. This doesn't make ATI or nvidia worse, per se, but it is a more balanced perspective. My main reason for going with 8800 over the 1950 (hopefully I'm not in for a shock when it arrives, as I just ordered it) is that when I tried a x1950, it was DOA. It froze my PC within minutes of running any 3d game, and the higher the detail settings, the faster it would freeze. Temps on the GPU itself were reporting below 70C, but the voltage regulator module on it was getting blazing hot - it was enough to give me a 1st degree burn on my finger just from touching the heat sink on top of it for about 4 seconds. I looked online, and a LOT of people had this problem. Hundreds of people mention that it's due to the immense PSU demands on the card, but I tried 2 brand new 650w power supplies, one of which was an Antec, and both of which had over 40 Amps on +12v. Maybe my power wasn't "clean" enough. Whatever, it still appears to be a monumental problem. Plus, because of my RMA I lost out on a rebate and have been without a PC for about a week and a half. This certainly makes me biased against the x1950, but I'd hate to see somebody else encounter the same problem who had thought "this couldn't happen to me" ... that was me about 2 weeks ago. Searching for similar problems with 8800 cards yields pretty much nothing, while there were several front-page google results on the x1950 freezing up.

Yep the 8800 has the fog bug, it sucks with a few games. but in general all the power of a 7900 SLI set up on one card. Just plug and play.

1950 is a great card so is the the 7900, never forget the 7900 can't do VIVO or AA and HDR in many games. With GPU's and them going wrong it is luck of the draw. I normally buy XFX or EVGA as if things have gone wrong both companies have been very good with RMA's.

If your running a 17" monitor you dont need an 8800 yet. If you run above 1024 then an 8800 or r600 will become more and more needed if you want eye candy this year.

BTW Both the alan wake videos and crysis videos shown were on VERY OC'ed machines. And both videos show FPS stutter when the action gets hot. So just a DUO and 8800 aint gunna run 100 fps at 1600x1024 in those games.

[The-Tim 0]

I agree, get a new card .., I can run ArmA all on high / very high with the following setup

PSU - 500W Silverstone SLi Dual +12V

Mobo: Gigabyte GA K8N51GMF-RH NF410 - S754

Processor: AMD Athlonâ„¢ 64 Processor 3400+ Newcastle S754 2.5Ghz

RAM: x 2 512 MB PC3200 DDR SDRAM

Hard Drive: 335GB

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 7900GS 256MB - Overclocked

Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition Service Pack 2

And it works great!

Hello,

I read that you can run Arma on high/very high... what resolution? what's your FPS then? because i have a better system then you (AMD 3500+; 2GB's of Ram, 7950GT and i can only run at medium at 15-25 FPS... What did you do to get it run so smoothly?

Greetz