Has anyone found out how to run this game?

[SDF 0]

Has anyone found out how to run this game ON vista with an 8800? I have a texture bug where all the tetures go to shit and lag lol. Anyone figure out how to fix this.

[nubbin77 0]

Yes. When I have more time I'll write back with a longer post. Just posting so you don't dispair. it is possible.

[SDF 0]

I just bouight this game today and I get a graphics issue, after playing for like 10 mins, my textures go from ultra high to total crap (see screeny) is this a game issue or hardware issue? Is there a way to fix it?

Screenshot link

FROM THIS:

http://img124.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lawlvp9.jpg

TO THIS:

http://img509.imageshack.us/my.php?image=wtfbv1.jpg

[binkster 0]

From my experiece, I just got tired of the problems so I made a dual boot with xp. You can boot either xp or vista at loadup. I use xp for dx9 games and I will use vista for the future dx10 games. Its not hard and if you want to ill be glad to help, just drop a pm.

My performance pretty much doubled from vista to xp but the texture bug is a problem with having more than 512mb of ram.

Best thing to do is set textures on normal, and when things get choppy or looking bad just hold down left SHIFT plus MINUS (on numpad) then type F-L-U-S-H..... This flushes your video ram durring game. This works for now untill a later fix.

[nubbin77 0]

how do I get it to work minus the xp dealy

Well. Your milage may vary, but here's what I've had to do.

You didn't fully describe your issues, but I have had roughly the same experiences in the past, and now I am fairly stable.

What I am going to tell you is how I got stable play, rather then optimal visual quality / framerate. I had the texture curruption you described above and the 807000e (or whatever) crash before. With these steps I am stable.

1. Upgrade to the latest direct x 9.c or whatever the latest direct x thing is from microsoft. I know this sounds RETARDED, since vista comes with DX10 and what I thought was the most recent version of DX. Evidently they keep releasing updates. This is important - even though they don't change the version name, the month changes. I think the most recent is June 2007.

2. Uninstall your video drivers completely restart, reinstall the most recent video drivers. I am really digging the beta 163.11 drivers just released 2 days ago.

Set your 3d settings in your video card settings (in windows). Most people need to do a couple tweaks like force off vsync and some other things. I personally think its better to set your Antialiasing to whatever setting you want (like 2x or 4x) in the video driver, rather then in game (in game I have it set to off). The way I understand it, if you set it in the video driver and in game, the AA method fights against the other. That could be a bunch of BS, but that's what I've read - I have no proof.

3. Start up parameter - evidently you have to add -maxmem 512 or 256 to your start up parameters (let me know if you don't know what I am talking about)

4.Arma user profile - set HDR from 8 to 16.

5. In game settings.

There are 2 in game settings that are important.

Textures - I have to set them on Normal (or less) or else my game crashes in 5 minutes to an hour.

Shaders - I'm less certain about these - I really think its only the texture setting that matters, but I have these set to normal as well.

The other settings don't seem to matter much other then getting a balance between performance and looks.

I tried a million things to get this thing stable. I'm not 100% sure what eliminated the texture issue, but I know that I couldn't fix the crashes until I did all of the above. I may have left something out, but I think I covered the important things.

I did mess with my page file as well, but I didn't notice a difference between enabling and disabling it.

I hope this helps.

[CharveL 0]

8800GTS and Vista here. Same problems. Still waiting for some word on a solution from the devs or nVidia or anybody.

I doubt you have to go through most of those steps the guy above wrote although most of that probably can't hurt. I'll tell you that I've tried just about everything with a bunch of drivers and the only thing that really keeps you from crashing is to run low settings in the game. Either way expect your shiny new 8800 to perform like a 7800 or worse.

Despite the fact that our cards have 640mb you'll have to settle for Normal or Low. Same with just about every other setting although you can get away with some AA and Low HDR effects perhaps. Terrain on low or very low.

This problem seems to relate to video memory and how it's being handled. It seems like there's a lot of swapping to the hard drive for some reason, or just bad management of it between ArmA and Vista. ArmA is not a "Game For Windows" so BI doesn't guarantee how it works under Vista but I'm hoping they will be able to fix this somehow or nvidia will address it if it's their problem.

[tethys 0]

Yet another 8800 on Vista user, and I can confirm that despite tweaking the hell out of my config settings, dialing down my resolution, fiddling with HDR, and updating every damn driver I can think of, this game is still S L O O O W W W W...

I can fully understand an initial lack of support for Vista - but speaking as someone who works for another small game dev shop, I can tell you that Microsoft (and Nvidia for that matter) has worked very closely with any interested game devs on getting their bits up to par for Vista. It is a shame that BI hasn't placed more of an effort here. With XP evaporating from the retail and volume sales channel, I would think that it is in BI's best interest to capture the Vista audience.

[SkogUlv 0]

I've been having fun trying to figure out how to get this thing to work and as others I got no failsafe solution, but I taken note of few things:

8800GTX, Vista64, 4gb, 163.11 drivers, 4x 10k rpm drives in raid0, all other stuff works great.

Starting arma fullscreen or window = black screen , briefly watch some polys but no textures, and graphic seem to move sluggish.

Testing all imaginable settings on graphic driver and ingame or config files, but no noticable effect.

Game loads and show textures ok at approximately 1 of 15-20 times.

This reminds me of early BF2142 betas, so I tried the same trick here with setting swapfile to OFF ...

THEN the game loads every time and works just great.

Obviously something about how arma allocates graphic memory but here on my pc it now works, with more or less same fps rate as in xp.