ARMA in maximum settings? is it possible?

[Ventura 0]

Smells like a very big pile of horse digested food.

Can someone tell me which graphic card should i buy, to play ARMA in maximum settings?

Game releases should be playable in maximum settings? right? They did developed it on a card that supported maximum game settings!? or were they speculating "Geez, sometime in the the future there will be a graphic card that will make ARMA look very nice". (sometime between ARMA and ARMA2?!.

Seems that the 8800 and the new ATi's are somehow incompatible with ARMA, "cannot create system memoryblabla!". and reducing memory with the -maxmem is not the solution, it throws my hard drive in an insane workout lagging the game as hell.

SO? is there a graphic card that plays arma in maximum video settings? or this game has been developed in such a way that there is no anser to this question?

I usualy play alot of game types, all have bugs, some more that others, but theres allways patch to fix them.

Strangely, ARMA is the olnly one which reports me, (and alot of other BIS CUSTOMERS by looking at the posts here), this error, and BIS doesnt take this seriouly.

Well they should! Specialy, because i heard there's a ARMA2 on the horizon, and i still can't get the minimum satisfaction out this product, which i bought with my working money, and beeing told only the minimum requirements! not the maximum.

No! its not a NVIDIA PROBLEM only, its an ATI problem too, some of us, also reported having this problem on ATI graphic cards.

Well being our money in your pockets, WE (the ones that share my point of view) say you (BIS) should talk to NVIDIA and ATI, to help resolve this issue in the next patch or do WE have to buy ARMA2 TO get this issue resolved?

Can someone tell me a configuration that you've seen working or experienced this game on maximum settings?

Ventura.

ps - I have a AMD 64 X2 5000, with a XFX 8800 GTS 320 RAM, a 10K sata drive, and 1,5 Gb ram. is this obsolete? or is it too good to play ARMA?

[ArmaVidz 0]

The problem is not your graphics card, it's your CPU. I was running a Athlon6000+ X2 and once I moved over to the Core2Duo's most of my issues went away.

Unfortunately, the 8800 Series has the fog problem and cannot create blah blah texture 2048x2048 problem. It sucks.

I'm now running a core2quad with my system, and I'm rather confident that I could 'play' ArmA close to max if they fixed the goddamn CTD 2048x2048 & fog issue. I've cranked the view distance to 10,000, with high AF (no AA argh) @ 1600x1200 and it was close to playable (30+ FPS).

[Lepardi 0]

My friend can play ArmA at full settings and 10km VD almost all the time 100fps. Forests dont lag at all, smooth as silk. He has an XFX 8800 Ultra, the overclocked model, 4GB ram and E6850 processor.

[Teliko 0]

My friend can play ArmA at full settings and 10km VD almost all the time 100fps. Forests dont lag at all, smooth as silk. He has an XFX 8800 Ultra, the overclocked model, 4GB ram and E6850 processor.

*drools*

[Madus_Maximus 0]

The "fog" issue is prevalent in all DX10 cards, not just the nVidia 8xxx series, it's in ATi cards too. It's because of the way they changed how fog is rendered on the DX10 hardware and it can render wrongly on DX9 apps, which is most games. ArmA isn't the only game suffering with this problem by any stretch of the imagination but it may seem more obvious because of the huge draw distances it's capable of.

My system isn't a monster but it seems to handle ArmA as well as I'd want it to. I put things on high settings and can get playable frames with everything on very high, but to be fair I don't really notice any real difference between high and very high when in the thick of it being shot at.

ArmA gives all aspects of your system a work out, CPU is especially important, and a graphics card with lots of VRAM helps a hell of a lot. It's more to do with memory space than pure rendering power so to speak, considering the size of the maps and view distances involved, and all the fancy effects like HDR and normal mapping and real time shadows on all objects.

ArmA is made future proof to an extent in terms of scalability. It's not uncommon. Most engines are made to take current hardware to its limit and beyond so it can take advantage of the extra power as newer things come out. It'd become obsolete very quickly if they didn't do this.

[baddo 0]

BIS told in a gamasutra.com article, which they wrote about the development of Operation Flashpoint, that next time they will try to make much better graphics quality, even if it looks insanely detailed to the hardware they are using at development time.

So, in ArmA they did that, put so much detail in, that now you can't expect to put the settings on maximum quality with a reasonable computer. Operation Flashpoint had quite low quality graphics, even though it looked just fine in 2001, but it was clear there were a lot of textures in it which were not well done. They admitted it themselves and made much better quality graphics for ArmA.

About OFP people said graphics were not good.

Now they face complaints that Arma is too demanding on hardware.

It's a situation in which they always get complainst no matter what they do.

What kind of a solution I could think to this problem? I would try to direct (force) the users AWAY from the graphic settings control panel altogether! And make the game manage the settings according to the abilities of the hardware it is running on.

A method for doing that would involve a benchmark run after installation. This is done by many games I think. At least several that I have played had this kind of performance test. A stress-test comprising of a demanding scene would be run. Some frames-per-second value would have been set as a target, and the game would adjust its settings so that the FPS would be at least in the level of the target FPS. If it means drop to lowest graphic detail then that's what you would get.

Now the "Ãœber-geeks" who just love to tweak their computers (because they have Teh Skill and Teh Knowledge and what else) start crying,

"but I want to control my anisotropic filtering! It's my favourite setting!"

For these people the game could have a "warranty void if you press this button" section in the options dialog. It would include a long, daunting text written with the help of lawyers, to make it clear for people that what they are doing is not going to get any support from BIS. Or better yet, don't have such settings in-game at all. If people then get their settings adjusted somehow (finding the hidden, encrypted&signed settings file and modifying it), it is not something BIS would need to give support for.

[Ventura 0]

Leopardi,

I too can set the settings at maximum (or very high) on my rig, a get a flowing game.... for a while... just as soon as the damned "8007000e" error and the game crashes. If i set the maxmem parameter, another problem comes up. My disk drive starts scraching like a cat on heat, probably, because memory on the graphic card is loaded, and the game starts moving textures to the disk. (just speculating..)

Maximus,

I think the fog issue and the "8007000e" are diferent problems. right?

The fog issue, as some impact on game play, i know specialy if youre flying a plane, at 500 or 600 Km/h or Mph you dont have time to aim to a target, or evade a mountain, but the game still works.

Im talking about crashing, 5 to 15min of play. Im talking about not being able to play a mission longer than this time. Its like starting a trip to the beach on vacation, and de car stops working on 5 to 15mins the way from home, and then you got have to get back to home and start the trip all over again. (nice vacations, maybe you get there sometime in your holiday.)

Point well taken, i agree that maximum settings could be left to some of the future graphic cards, but the problem im underlining is that i have to lower my perfectly aceptable settings to "low" or, in some cases even "very low". (exp: grass, should be off because its transparent to enemy AI.) because theres a bug, in the game which crashes or degrades performance to a level of unsatisfatory gameplay.

i hope i got my message over, english is not my first language and probably im just sending the mesures of the playmate of the month.

Bottom line, fix this bugs, or present us a solution to this problem, because im really ceptic on this, it smells like this will be ignored and ARMA2 is coming on, only to fix this bugs and not much more.

The question still stands, can anyone play this game in high to very high config, and dont crash with "8007000e".

Thks ppl. And good gaming.

Ventura

[Guest Ti0n3r]

I play ArmA with everything set to very high on a 8600GTS. I still get some FPS decrease in dense forests though... Got some more tweaking to do I guess

[gassybutt 0]

I had an 8800gts w/640mb of ram and had alot of problems with it .. from the fog issue, random crashes to desktop, random black screen, memory errors. I just got so fed up with it, I went back to my old videocard I still have - x1950xt w/512mb of ram and Arma rarely crashes at all now. I can only run it on 'high' but it's extremely playable and stable. I play hours-long CTI missions regularly without one single hiccup or slowdown as well. It's like night and day.

I think either Arma or windows itself has major problems with alot of the newer cards that are DX10 compatible - Arma doesn't seem to be made for them. My advice - dump the 8800 and go back to a good DX9 card. Yeah, you already blew $500+ for that nifty new 8800 but maybe Arma 2 will work better with it.

[ArmaVidz 0]

Now the "Ãœber-geeks" who just love to tweak their computers (because they have Teh Skill and Teh Knowledge and what else) start crying,

"but I want to control my anisotropic filtering! It's my favourite setting!"

For these people the game could have a "warranty void if you press this button" section in the options dialog. It would include a long, daunting text written with the help of lawyers, to make it clear for people that what they are doing is not going to get any support from BIS. Or better yet, don't have such settings in-game at all.

If any game shipped without settings I'd either boycott it or wouldn't buy it at all. You can't make the fanbase suffer for a few handfuls of ignorant or impatient folk.

[Dwarden 1125]

problem of ArmA is overdraw, alpha textures and resolutions versus AA ...

ATI X1950pro/xt and NV 7800/7900 are cards to start with (512MB versions)

ofc bit weaker runs ArmA too but You forced to drop down visuals

so for example how it runs

You may get great FPS in most lower resolutions with AA (frontier is somewhere between 1280x1024 to 1440x900)

in high resolutions w/o very detailed shaders for vegetation with some AA (up to 1600x1200)

or most nearly maxxed w/o AA in medium to high resolution

ofcourse in moment You enable adaptive/transparent AA modes (alphas) then performance hit is huge

but in moment You think about something like 1920x1080 and beyond with AA and maxxed quality You got problem

You need like 768 to 1024MB VRAM at least and huge shader power (8800 Ultra with 'oced' shader units or oced 2900xt) or card not yet released(upcoming ATI/NV models)

as CPU i suggest something like 3GHz C2D/C2Q or similar AMD

or just wait for ArmA II

[baddo 0]

Now the "Ãœber-geeks" who just love to tweak their computers (because they have Teh Skill and Teh Knowledge and what else) start crying,

"but I want to control my anisotropic filtering! It's my favourite setting!"

For these people the game could have a "warranty void if you press this button" section in the options dialog. It would include a long, daunting text written with the help of lawyers, to make it clear for people that what they are doing is not going to get any support from BIS. Or better yet, don't have such settings in-game at all.

If any game shipped without settings I'd either boycott it or wouldn't buy it at all. You can't make the fanbase suffer for a few handfuls of ignorant or impatient folk.

Sorry but I think you missed my point. This is not about who is smart and who is not! So drop that argument right now please

I am questioning the technology. There is a major difference. One can rightfully question why there is a need for you to know about all those settings in the graphics options. In my opinion you need not to know! There is now possibility to view either basic or advanced settings, but I think that is not good enough, the system is designed so that it leads too easily into a situation in which users try to beat the system and lose, and then complain here about it. I have spent a good amount of time studying product development & product design, and also have worked in product development projects, so I didn't just pull the ideology from the hat. Even though not from the sector of software development, it doesn't matter, the exact same ideas can be applied here as well (and really should).

I am not sure if this term translates right but here in my country we speak about "technology blindness", and people who insist they must have this and that option in the graphics option suffer at least from a mild form of the said blindness.

If you insist you need to know, then uuh well... why do you bought the game, oh you bought it so that you could get to adjust antialiasing and friends? I don't think that is the reason why you bought the game.

I described in my previous post what could be a potential solution to people complaining because the game doesn't run smooth enough as they think they should be able to use high quality settings. An obvious solution to such a problem is that we take the buttons away from the user, to protect the user! AND then we can tell the "people like you" that there is the settings file somewhere, go find it and adjust it BUT if you do that then we give no support!

Of course there would be lots of work for the programmers to come up with a reliable test process to determine the capabilities of the users' hardware. But I think it would in the end benefit the programmers as they then would in my opinion get less complaints about the game's performance.

Best Regards,

Baddo.

[Ventura 0]

Well

I do play arma, i love the game, but i haven´t bought a 8800 just to play it.

I usualy play with low on AA, shadows and AF, normal on all other settings except blood and postprocessing efects high, and very low on terrain. 1280x1024 Res. Even so the game crashes if no maxmem=512 or lower is defined.

I tried high on all settings, and the game WORKS AND IS VERY PLAYABLE, bushes do drop fps (only looking trough the scope), but with that i can live (loading and unloading huge number of textures on the leaves of the trees, thats some hard code to optimize) . but then... it crashes "8007000e". (usualy happens when im on the north side of the island).

At some point, i can even believe, that arma got out just when an unforseable turning point in graphic tecnology - DX10 - could make some incomatibilities with DX9 software. Be that as it may,

I'm still under the impression that these crashes are related to some kind of ingame wrong memory handling.

Does anyone, by flushing regulary textures from cards memory, got an extended time of game play? say from 5-15min to 30-1 hour?

btw, ALT-TAB!, why does it make the "8007000e" worse? (crashing sooner than later).

Ventura.

[Ventura 0]

Well,

If theres an ingame advance settings, its BIS responsability,to make it work. if someone edits a config file that's his problem. We must all agree on that.

I talking about crashing, not low fps.

Quote[/b] ]What kind of a solution I could think to this problem? I would try to direct (force) the users AWAY from the graphic settings control panel altogether! And make the game manage the settings according to the abilities of the hardware it is running on.

I sure dont agree on that, crashes can't be handled by test performace.

And its near impossible to code a test performance that acuratly sets settings acording to all hardware configurations in the market today. And when it fails? should the developer tell the customer "well, now you have to edit that little config file in that folder...".

Developing does take time, and which is usualy controlled by the Marketing department and the finacional department. With this kind of pressure to release games, bugs do happen, and alot are time taking with high cost. I think this one, is one of those.

regards,

Ventura.

[Lepardi 0]

I'm quite pissed off with my performance, it is way less than it shuold be. I'm thinking it is because of Vista.

Should installing XP 32-bit help in performance? Cause I'm gonna install XP back if it really has better performance.

[Madus_Maximus 0]

Vista is a bit of a resource hog and in most tests I've seen on the net and stuff it generally performs 10-40% worse in the games they test, and in general. It uses 800mb of your RAM to idle, which is a bit exessive if you ask me.

Anyway, use a dual-boot if you have the disc space, there's plenty of guides on the net on how to do it, and in some threads around here. It's less hassle in the long run and gives you the best of both worlds. When/if things are fixed with Vista you can just delete the XP partition instead of having to reinstall it all and update and set things up again.

[sickboy 13]

@Madius:

In my experience, Vista usually uses about 300-600mb RAM for system stuff, no idea where the 800mb comes from. All free ram will ofcourse be eaten by the Vista Cache, but this is to speed up the user experience, and this memory gets freed whenever needed for other tasks.

Ontopic:

My System, atm:

[*] Motherboard: Asus P5N32-E SLI Plus

[*] CPU: Core2 Duo E6600, running on 2x 3.15ghz.

[*] RAM: 4GB DDR2-800

[*] GPU: Geforce 8800GTX 768mb, stock speeds.

[*] SND: Creative X-Fi

My Settings, atm:

[*] Video: All settings very high (or high when not otherwise possible), antialising on normal (or off when using MaddMatt's ArmA effects, which seem to drain FPS abnormally with AA enabled). Sometimes I have to set postprocessing to low due to dense forest areas but usually putting it back to very high continues to run fine. Resolution: 1600x1200@100hz. HDRPrecision=32

[*] Audio: EAX and Hardware Acceleration Enabled

[*] Startup parameter: -maxmem=512

My Experiences:

This experience is based on Multiplayer Gaming.

Singleplayer does mostly the same unless I go crazy with a lot of scripts and 200 ai units and 30 vehicles that are all moving. (e.g. with my AI-Manager). This can lower the FPS by 5-10 depending on situation.

[*] XP, 32-bit, all windows updates, 163.71 series drivers, latest drivers for audio card and chipset:

~60fps throughout the various Islands available

~30fps in dense forest areas and otherwise graphically 'busy' parts

[*] Vista, 64-bit, 163.71 series drivers, latest drivers for chipset, 2.15.0002 audio drivers, memory limited to 3GB and hotfixes installed:

~50fps throughout the various Islands available

~25fps in dense forest areas and otherwise graphically 'busy' parts

But my fps seems to be more often pulling to the mentioned 25fps instead of 50, compared to XP.

So basicly my experience tells me:

ArmA is certainly playable on highest settings, better on XP than on Vista, altough the latter doesn't do that bad atm.

I have a dualboot but I stick to Vista because my game restarts faster which is great for editing, aswell as that I prefer Vista over XP in terms of Interface and general operation of the os.

More powerfull system and possibly next generation videocards aswell as upcoming patches may further improve the performance and go from "playable" to "high fps"

[Lepardi 0]

You have a very similar system to mine, nice to see it runs great. Maybe my 8800gts 640mb can handle normal/high settings playable on XP. Gonna install it back, even though I went back to Vista just a few weeks ago...

By the way, does that -maxmem=500 command improve performance, or is it just a stability tweak for Very High settings?

[Ventura 0]

Thank's Sickboy, that was the kind of info i was looking for.

I sure cant edit more, specialy the scripts, because the ALT-TAB issue. Just got to find a solution to my hard drive workload wich starts lagging the game at some point.

I got all drives defraged all times, i have alot of small partitions, about 15Gb each so don't have to defrag all disk at once, usualy 1 to 4 games per partition, swapfile on a diferent disk drive, (away from the S.O. and installed games disk).

Going to check all updates latest drivers for audio card and chipset, and SO.

Leopardi, i think its just for stability.

Regards,

Ventura.

[-Puma- 2]

ok heres what im running now: e6750 @3ghz, 2gb ddr2 800mhz, 8800gts 320mb, p5n32-e SLI

i play with everything high/normal, 1280x1024, AA low. no paging file, wich helps the texture load and makes game smoother. get usually about 50-80 FPS and around 25+ in citys, forrest. I agree with sickboy, AA should be off or low on nvidia cards, since nvidia's cant really do AA and HDR at the same time. im using -512 maxmem and havent had a crash since.

somekind of FPS lock would really benefit the gameplay, it was discussed in another thread here in TROUBLESHOOTING.

heres the link: http://www.flashpoint1985.com/cgi-bin....t=68450

[sickboy 13]

@Puma;

AA+HDR is not a problem on Series 8 Nvidia cards anylonger mate, not even in 32-bit HDR + AA.

But as I wrote, the problem lies with the MaddMatt's ArmA effects + AA, if there is no Smoke or haven't got Matt's ArmA effects installed, the framedrops do not occur any longer.

AA Low and Normal perform equally for me, takes about 3-10 FPS depending on situation, but when there's smoke it takes the fps many times down to as low as 10-15

[Maddmatt 1]

But as I wrote, the problem lies with the MaddMatt's ArmA effects + AA, if there is no Smoke or haven't got Matt's ArmA effects installed, the framedrops do not occur any longer.

Do you have transparency AA on? Haven't had this issue myself, and I always play with AA on. I turn off transparency AA because it doesn't work when set to multisampling and is too demanding at supersampling.

Without transparency AA on, the particles shouldn't get any AA (they don't need it anyway) so you shouldn't have much of a performance hit.

Besides, particles should only hit your FPS when there's a lot of them on screen and it's mostly up close when they are demanding.

Maybe I'll do some more experimenting myself. Can't stand playing without AA though.

[dmitri 0]

or just wait for ArmA II

Which, lets face it, will be running a modified version of the same engine. I'm not sure how different performance\stability will be. If it was an easy fix, BIS might have implemented it by now. I'm sure it will be improved in ArmA II though. On an average night I get 1 crash an hour. I'm not sure this is hardware related or if it's the missions themselves and the complexities of JIP imposed on what is basically good 'ol non-jip OFP engine.

I've gotten used to it though (as have other players on my local server, "X is losing connection" is as much a feature of the game as the Sahrani map itself).

Just dropped cash on a 8800gtx. I'm curious to see what kind of issues I'll have. Moving to a 24inch LCD, so needed the performance for 1920. I'll stick with XP for now, I will be happy if the game runs at medium with only a few crashes. Modern gaming.

[Maddmatt 1]

On an average night I get 1 crash an hour. I'm not sure this is hardware related or if it's the missions themselves and the complexities of JIP imposed on what is basically good 'ol non-jip OFP engine...

That is definitely not normal. I haven't had ArmA crash in a very long time.

Good drivers, and not using the -maxmem parameter unless you need it should prevent crashes.

And I've had crashes caused before by keeping the page file too low. 2 gigs seemed to keep things stable.

Using Nvidia 163.76 drivers right now, with no crashing issues.

Could be the missions themselves. Evo has a lot of scripting, might be something buggy there.

[The Susser 0]

I found that changing drivers cleared all issues with every game I played. The only annoyance is the fog now

My system: Gforce 8800GTX, Q6600 oc'ed @ 3ghz, SB XFI, 2 gig ram, Abit IP35 Pro mobo. Operating System is XP home.

When I built this machine and installed the latest drivers from the Nvidea website. Every Fooking game I played, crashed to desktop or locked the computer up. Pressing reset was the only way to remedy the problem. Till the release of 163.44 beta.

I cannot begin to tell you the joy I felt as I got past my first hour of ArmA with no lock ups.

I then tried Planetside and managed to get through a good 4 hour session with no CTD's (anyone who has played Planetside will tell ya that game is prolly the most buggiest game about).

The only game that has crashed is BF2142 and that was only when I alt tabbed. Never crashed during game use.

So 8800 users get the 163.44 beta drivers and forget about the rest. Until they release something more stable.

Nvidea 163.44 beta

EDIT: Games I play with no issues at all

ArmA - Queens Gambit

HalfLife Orange Box

Quake Wars

Planetside

BF2/BF2142 with Pirates mod and FirstStrike mod. Pirates is brilliant btw