Crossfire work on arma??

[TurokEvolution 0]

Hello to all boys, I have been enrolled in this forum because I have a bad problem to be solved.

I would like to know if the crossfire tecnology works on Arma because I don't see any improvement with crossfire eith fraps...

My configuration is Cpu E6850+2x1950 1gb+2 Gb ram and omega driver with hotfix 7.10..

Please help me,there is an additional patch, or setting a drivers in a certain way,etc???

PLEASE HELP ME

[TurokEvolution 0]

Sorry I am forgot one thing,the game is allready patched to 1.08...

[TurokEvolution 0]

Please can sameone answer me,please?

[kklownboy 43]

yes works fine. but you have to rename the Arma.exe. I use Fear.exe. Somtimes it wont work untill you reboot(but that was awhile ago), or you delete your Arma cfg in your documents, and restart the game. Another thing is when updating drivers, its good to turn off CF in the CCC, before you do.... You HAVE to use the CCC to run CF, though "some" will say you dont... "some" are wrong with Arma. I have used CF in Arma since day one.October 2006. 1950xtx's and now with HD2900xt's. It doubles my frames @ 1600/1200 most of the time, and the rest 80% faster. SLI works too. Just copy your Arma.exe to your desktop, rename it, put it back in.

[max power 21]

It does work no matter what I name it. I guess it will be a toss up for you, too.

[TurokEvolution 0]

Thanks a lot for your answer I will tray it to copy Arma.exe to desktop,rename in Fear.exe and put it back in C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA...

OK???

Thanks a lot

[sluggCDN 0]

TurokEvolution, how did it go? Is it runnign any better? I tried CF but uninstalled it due to insignificant performance improvement.

[TurokEvolution 0]

If I did everything well,rename arma.exe in fear.exe,i don't see improvments...

kklownboy can you tell explain the process step by step,please

[TurokEvolution 0]

Can anyone answer us,please?

[max power 21]

Like I said, man, it doesn't work for me either. I'll break it down a little further tho in case you're not in the same black pit of no crossfire dispair as me.

Go to your arma directory... c:\program files\bohemia interactive\arma\arma.exe by default, I believe. It may be something different if you have the atari version.

click on arma.exe and press ctrl+c to copy it. Alternatively, you can right click on it and choose 'copy' from the context menu.

Paste the file by pressing ctrl+v. Alternatively, you can paste it by right clicking on an empty area of the folder window and choosing 'paste'.

A new file called 'Copy of ArmA.exe' will appear. Right click on it and choose 'rename'. Rename it 'FEAR.exe'. You can also try 'AFR-FriendlyD3D.exe'.

To launch arma, just double click on the newly renamed file. After you have that working, I can describe how to edit your desktop shortcut if you like.

[TurokEvolution 0]

Thanks a lot,I did what you told me,and now I will see improvments launching the arma icon reanemd Fear.exe or not??

[max power 21]

Thanks a lot,I did what you told me,and now I will see improvments launching the arma icon reanemd Fear.exe or not??

I don't see any improvement. Apparently, kklown does. I don't fully understand your question.

[TurokEvolution 0]

Sorry,after having renamed the Arma.Exe in Fear.exe what other it needs to do?

Thanks a lot for your answer and patience

[max power 21]

Turn on Crossfire, then launch ArmA using that new .exe. If you see improvement, good good! If you don't, oh well.

Making or converting a desktop icon won't do anything special for you, only allow you to launch arma with mods and crossfire at the same time.

I repeat, if crossfire isn' working at this point, making a desktop icon will not help you.

To make a desktop icon, go to the directory where 'FEAR.exe' is located- likely, the arma root directory I mentioned before. Right click on it, and choose 'create shortcut'. Rename it to something like ArmACF or something. Now copy it to your desktop. Now you can launch ArmA using FEAR.exe from your desktop. To put mods in there, open up the properties of the shortcut, and look for a field called 'target'. You will see the ArmA root directory in there in quotations. After those quotes, ad the switch '-mod=' and list the mod directories: '-mod=mod1;mod2;mod3...'. I repeat, none of this is relevent to getting CF working. If it doesn't work with just the renamed exe, then it's never going to work. You can try different exe names, like fear.exe, hl2.exe, AFR-FriendlyD3D.exe, but if those don't work, it won't work with the shortcut.

[TurokEvolution 0]

Thank you for having answered me and for the patience that you have given for me...

I let you know as soon as possible I'll return to home

[evilnate 0]

I can confirm that the file rename method works, I setup a video intensive mission. Here are the results:

arma.exe with CF disabled in CCC - 25FPS

arma.exe with CF enabled in CCC - 19FPS

fear.exe with CF enabled in CCC - 37FPS

Just to make sure nothing was wrong I used the console to rename the file from arma.exe to fear.exe.

Thanks for the tip, now I don't feel so ripped off.

Windows XPSP2

Intel C2D E6600

2X X1900XTX

2GB PC8500

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

Something I noticed with the 7.10 equivalent Omegas (3.8.421) on my setup was that you'd see artifacts in transparent textures, the GPS map would look 'cracked' sometimes and that the whole system would CTD occasionally with no error message, or occasional clashes with other program's texture memory. This is on an Asus P5WDH with 2xAsus EAX1950Pro and CFMaster cards.

So I rolled back to the 7.9 equivalents (3.8.413) which worked fine before, and lo everything is back again as it was.

All works great again without the artifacts and CTDs.

The CF seems only to kick in at resolutions 1024x768 and upwards, Simple way to decide if it's working is with the FEAR.exe the HDR flickers at startup, unless you have Vsync forced off in drivers (always leave it on anyway).

Important - as the standard drivers don't seem to adjust fan speed on the secondary card use ATI Tool (not traytools) to manually set the fan speeds yourself at each startup - else you'll cook the second card quite quickly.

I have found that setting the Antialiasing to game controlled, but forcing other settings in the drivers works best.

Also, in the ATI TrayTools set your LOD Bias to -2 you might be pleasantly surprised. And in the advanced tweaks bit make the 'beta' multithreaded support = ON (ticked) and set to 4 worker threads - it increases FPS by 10+ on my rig.

Hadnt seen this question before so hadnt answered previously, glad it's now working on your rig.  Now comes the tweaking phase :D  Have fun.

[evilnate 0]

yeah actually I do notice some strange stuff going on.

The flickering of HDR, and the creepiest thing.. I was playing last night and had NV on. When I was sweeping some buildings, a screen would flash and show a page of strange text, like a russian optical test page....

Tweaking required indeed.

[max power 21]

It does not work for everyone

Having crossfire enabled just crashes ArmA on startup for me, regardless of the resolution, etc.

[evilnate 0]

I did some more testing today and got strange results. I was able to produce the CTD when launching arma with arma.exe or fear.exe. It would happen when I would try to launch the game with FRAPS in the background. I would disable FRAPS, launch the game, ALT-TAB the launch it and it would work.

The gains that I am seeing with CF enabled isn't as much as I hoped for. Without the CF with fear.exe I will get frames in the 20's range. With CF and fear.exe I would get near 40FPS.

I want to keep using CF but I am unable to get over this problem with the flickering HDR and strange artifacts. I tried all sorts of settings with CCC, then I installed ATI_tray_tools without CCC and tried nearly all refresh options to no avail.

Bottom line is CF will work (for me) renaming arma.exe to fear.exe but I am unable to get past the side effects. Next weekend I will try different driver versions to see if I can get passed this.

If anyone has successfully got CF to work without the side effects, please post and let us know how you did it! I have been scouring the internet to get this to work.

System specs:

2 ATI X1900XTX (512MB) driver ver 7.10

Intel C2DE6600

Asus P5W-DH Deluxe

2GB DDR2 PC8500

Windows XP (sp2)

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

That page of strange text in NVG mode indeed only happens with the ATI 7.10 drivers, the 7.9 (or equivalent) does not have that problem.

The flickering at startup you'll have to live with as it seems to be a part of the crossfire 'thing'. Using sam2.exe instead of FEAR.exe relieves that flickering, but at the expense of losing some FPS, I chose to live with the startup flickers and use FEAR.exe.

Gonna re-post my settings here, from the troubleshooting thread, in case it helps here too.

ArmA and machine/graphics settings I use:

Have been asked a few times about how this rig is setup for ArmA, so here's a short precis.

Might help some, but follow any advice here at your own risk.

I have many tweaks on the system itself, almost everything that CAN be overclocked is.

The settings are running on an Asus P5WDH mobo using 2xAsus 1950Pro configured in crossfire mode.

ArmA installed on Raid-0 array 2xfast SATA2 drives.

Okay, here goes with the basic graphics setup:

In the BIOS I have the PCI-Ex settings adjusted as follows..

PEG Buffer length = Short (reduces the stutters on texture loading)

PEG Link mode = Fast ("Faster" gave problems as the PCI already overclocked)

PEG Root Control = Enabled

The drivers I use are the Omega drivers for ATI card.

Next to latest drivers (as the new ones cause alpha-transparency problems on my rig).

So I am using the Omega v 3.8.413 drivers.

Settings here are taken from ATI Tray Tools (replacement for CCC which is NOT installed.)

Anti-Aliasing = Application Controlled

Adaptive Anti-Aliasing = ON, Mode: Peformance

Anisotropic Filtering: 4x, Quality with Trilinear

HQ AF = OFF

Texture Preference = High

MipMap Detail = High

Vert Sync = Application Controlled

Refresh Rate Override = Disabled

Support DXT format = ON !!

Support Bump Mapping = ON !!

Alternate Pixel Centers = OFF

Anisotropic Filtering Optimization = OFF

Trilinear Filtering optimisation = OFF

Geometry Instancing = ON !!

Temporal AA = ON, 2X, Manual Frame Threshold @ 75fps

Catalyst AI = LOW

Flip Queue Size = 2

Smart Shader = "No Effect"

AND THIS ONE IS COOL:

Texture LOD Adjustment = -2 (minus 2)

THIS seems to quadruples the image quality, hence AF left at 4X above.

----

In the other GL settings (some do affect DX..)

Vert Sync: Always off

Triple Buffering = OFF !!

Force Z Buffer Depth = DISABLED

Temporal AA set same as DX settings 2X, Manual, 75

----

In standard tweaks section...

Dont override anything,

Optimize Pixel Shader Code = ON

Geometry Instancing = ON

Force MipMap Filter = OFF

----

In Advanced Tweaks...

MultiThread Support:

ENABLE = ON

Max and Min Working Threads set at 4

----

ARMA SETTINGS:

Terrain Detail I have Normal.

Object Detail VERY high (reduces stutters on this setting)

Texture Detail - LOW (surprised?)

...If you have 256Mb or less graphics card then stick to LOW texture detail(this includes 2x256 in CF).

...512 should work with Normal fine, any higher on texture detail and you'll notice stutters when the thing is streaming from disk.

Shading Detail = Very High

PostProcess Effects = LOW (hate those on high)

Anisotropic Filtering = Normal (but overridden by graphics driver settings anyway)

Shadow Detail = Very High (again reduces stutters)

Antialiasing Low/Normal = generally use LOW online, and the 2x Temporal setting in drivers effectively doubles this)

Blood = High (who'd expect me not to like blood?)

I run normally online at 1152x864x32 resolution.

and a higher res offline.

View distance I adjust to taste or lower if the map is a heavy one (edit: just remember that the larger the viewdistance, then the more stuff has to be loaded / unloaded when you are moving relative to the scenery, therefore increasing loading stutters).

I lock the refresh rate at 75, pointless using any higher.

----

I also found improved framerates when I hand-edited the ArmAProfile file in my documents,

turning ON (=1) the hardware sound, and OFF(=0) the EAX.

----

Generally I achieve between 30-60fps depending on the map, occasionally it'll drop below 30 when loading complex textures

over Corazol, or low over dense woodland in Tres Valles it can go below 25.

If I unlock the vertical sync (force off in drivers) i have seen the rig achive 170fps on these settings on CloseCombat map.

but then you get texture tearing, so allow ArmA to use the sync.

Okay, so maybe you can pick the bones from these settings to help you tweak your own system in.

Heartily recommend the Omega drivers, and ATI TrayTools.

ATITool (different from ATI TrayTools) is also invaluable for clocking and/or fan speed control

far beyond what the standard stuff can achieve, and crossfire fans are not catered for in standard CCC(dumb or what?)

----

p.s. not really interested in discussing these further, just posting these for information only.

[max power 21]

WarWolf @ Dec. 21 2007,10:48)]crossfire fans are not catered for in standard CCC(dumb or what?)

Can you please elabourate this statement?

[Dwarden 1125]

anyone retried with 7.12 ?

[ArMoGaDoN 0]

nope on 7.12 as they aint been omega'd yet unless I missed something.

The fans thing, CCC doesn't seem to adjust the fanspeed on secondary card, leaving it running at about 20% and consequently overheating on my machine. Hence I use the ATI Tools to set the fan speeds manually for both cards separately at each restart of the machine. Its a drag, but it works.

This might I suppose be due to Win2K incompatibliiltes, but I doubt it?

[evilnate 0]

Update:

I installed the 7.11 drivers and it runs very smooth now if I only have one card enabled, without AA. Tried all the tricks in the bag to get crossfire to work, but now I realize I must throw in the towel and hope the next dual card investment will be of any value.

Average frame rate is now 40 - 60.