Frame Rate is King

[fish44 0]

I just got a new video board, 7950GT, to put on my 4400x2 rig. I tested it out with the 'Sanitizing Operation' single player mission. I started with 1280x1024, and all settings pretty much medium, with post processing low. In the 'leafy' area in front of the town, FPS would drop to 15-20. The consequences of this was a difficulty in geting the aimpoint or the crosshairs onto the bandits as quickly as needed, and so be an effective rifleman. It was almost impossible to kill 2 guys with clear shots, close to one another, even if they were not alerted, due to this. Conclusion, at these settings it looks pretty, and pretty good, but playabliity is very questionable.

So I started to adjust things. I tried 1024x768, 1152x846, and adjusted the normal settings down to low. All settings were with AA4 and AF8.

As a result I have found a 'sweet spot' for this game (and my rig) . I got to 38FPS, lowest 30, from all low settings, and 1152x864 (almost 20% better than 1024x768! ) At this setting, the game became 'very smooth' and very playable. The movement of the aimsight became much more fluid, and all ingame action the same (on this mission).

The low settings, in my opinion dont' make much difference to the look, but a huge difference to the 'feel' and playability. I've been playing flight sims since 1991, and I have always mantained that for sims or shooters, frame rate is king. The point has been once again proved to me without any doubt.

Its nice to have the eye candy, but in the heat of battle, i will gladly trade off detailed leafs textures and 'complex' shadows, for frame rate.

Windows XP pro,

AMD 4400x2 @ 2.4gig

9750gt@663/1450mhz

2mb dual channel Corsair DDR 3200

[maddogx 13]

Strange, you have a very similar rig to mine (see my sig), but I'm running ArmA on medium to high with great framerates. What OS do you have?

[walker 0]

Hi all

I have also noticed that raising view distance solved a Frame Rate problem for me on my new rig.

I have an NVIDIA 8500 (512mb) AMD64 X2 Dual Core 4800+ 2 gig of ram that I have just loaded ArmA onto.

I noticed an odd surge and juder in FPS at default settings. Mostly Normal settings and 1200 view distance. A bit like being in a car with someone who does not know how to use the clutch. Similar to what people describe in trouble shooting as stutter.

I decided to experiment and was finding raising view distance and quality decreased it and eventualy actualy removed it!

Like you I found a sweet spot. In my case of of arround 3000m at 1024x768 with everything shifted to high or even very high.

I think those with realy good rigs may find this is true too.

Those with LOW FPS on a good machine. I know it is counter intuitive but try turning your settings up.

I suspect it is the way LODs are being loaded into the grphics card.

With higher and more complex demands on 3D cards at high view ditances in very heavy clutter environments such as ArmA with masses of AI; I think the flows of information along the buses of the different areas of the computer and on to the junctions of complex multi core CPUs, high end graphic cards with multiple shaders and very large memory; mean the flows of information are becoming complex enough to be truly chaotic.

I theorise it may be that chaotic strange atractor and emergent events are occuring within the GPU more so in the interactions between GPU CPU particularly in multi core and high memory levels.

As such with future games starting with ArmA I think there will be a place for a heuristic optimiser to set up a computer and get the maximum out of it.

Until then we have to hunt for that sweet spot in our settings.

Kind Regards walker

[-Puma- 2]

somehow I too found a sweetspot. played with settings yesterday, and raised view dist. to 2000 and fired up evolution, and my frames

went up like hell. Usually I was havin 20 fps at base, but now I get somewhere around 30-40 (tough the Grass was turned off)

But I too are starting to have this stuttering, where FPS suddenly drops to 3 and 5 seconds later jump back up very wierd....

[memnoch 0]

Is there a way of displaying the poly count for a given scene? It would be interesting to run comparisons with other engines out there.

EDIT: Oh, and I absolutely agree about frame rate. If it affects your aim, the difference between low and high frame rates can literly be a life or death situation. That's why I believe the Dual Core and multi GPU solutions should be addressed at some point, presumably BIS looking into the processor side of things and ATI/Nvidia the video card side.

[NeMeSiS 11]

EDIT: Oh, and I absolutely agree about frame rate. If it affects your aim, the difference between low and high frame rates can literly be a life or death situation.

Have you tried messing with the render frames ahead option? (search for it on this forum)

(This was my case: Framerate < 25 + 'flip queu size' (ati variant of 'render frames ahead' ) on default value = mouse lag which makes the game play like a pile of steaming poo. And i usually play with a framerate of 20-25.)

[Bunks 0]

I know it is counter intuitive but try turning your settings up.

This is the very true statement. Do not follow logic with Arma it doesn't apply. We tested this game with various cards on the same computer and found that each card had its own unique settings (sweet spots) based on resolutions and on detail.

+just to add, we also tested these on an AMD board and an Intel board and found these (sweet spots) were different on each setup. Which is why I never bothered posting the findings of our tests to avoid adding more to the confusion.

[memnoch 0]

Have you tried messing with the render frames ahead option? (search for it on this forum)

Unfortuntely that appears to be an Nvidia function. I went with ATI Crossfire. Not sure if there is an ATI comparable command?

[NeMeSiS 11]

Have you tried messing with the render frames ahead option? (search for it on this forum)

Unfortuntely that appears to be an Nvidia function. I went with ATI Crossfire. Not sure if there is an ATI comparable command?

Yes, you would have seen what its called if you had read the rest of my post.

(You may need to get Ati tray tools to be able to change it, and put the value to 0 (or 1))

[-Puma- 2]

Have you tried messing with the render frames ahead option? (search for it on this forum)

Unfortuntely that appears to be an Nvidia function. I went with ATI Crossfire. Not sure if there is an ATI comparable command?

Yes, you would have seen what its called if you had read the rest of my post.

(You may need to get Ati tray tools to be able to change it, and put the value to 0 (or 1))

it's flip que size in ATI cards.

[memnoch 0]

Yes, you would have seen what its called if you had read the rest of my post.

(You may need to get Ati tray tools to be able to change it, and put the value to 0 (or 1))

So you did. I currently have the CCC installed so I'll remove that and try the tray tools instead, unless of course they can be installed alongside each other. Thanks.

P.S. I couldn't find a smiley with a handbag but thanks all the same.  

[Espectro (DayZ) 0]

It is quite weird... I get my top FPS at viewdistance ~3700 metres.

[m1013828 0]

Im soo jealous..

[PaulHargreaves 0]

well guys i was wondering if you could help me ids here anybody here with a rig similar to this

pentuim 4 3.2mhz dual core

2x nvidia 7800gtx 512mb SLI cards

and 8 gig of ddr3 ram

i know my processor is the bottle neck in the system what would be in your opinon the best setting for this rig

by the way is there a utility that i could download so i could use the SLI option for arma