When things change...

[jolulure 0]

Hi.

I downloaded the demo two weeks ago, and have passed the missions and everything that came with it at medium settings, 800x600 and nice fps (+25).

However, now, with the full game up to 1.08, everything runs so slow and laggy and stuttery.... wtf??? !!!!

my pc comes with a 8400gs, 2gb RAM and upper class CPU. i have done all tweaks seen in the forum (defrag, pagefile, nvidia control pannel, etc...)

what is happening? any ideas??

[Messiah 2]

try 1.12 first, it certainly sped things up for me.

What is an 'upper class' CPU? Was it educated at eton?

I assume you've tried the maxmem command and read all the Nvidia 8XXX card threads? There are certain problems associated with the 8XXX series of cards.

What OS are you on?

[jolulure 0]

no, it was educated in the streets.... its a Core2Duo T7700 (max in laptops till 2 months ago )

didnt try that maxmem.... ill do that asap. Any other tweaks for 8xxx series?? cant find them in "search" function....

thanks mate!

[Messiah 2]

hehe - laptops and arma are a little past my experience

I can gaurantee there are a loooooooooooot of 8XXX series threads, its just the search function on this forum is a little 'odd'

make sure you tick the 'and older' box before searching, and it should reveal a wealth of information.

[jolulure 0]

the -maxmem command didnt solve much. maybe 2 or 3 fps gain, but still too slow.

im talking about 14fps average at lowest graphics settings and resolution!!!

[BraTTy 0]

Isn't the demo just the small island? Not sure ,I never tried the demo.

For one....8400gs is certainly not a top-end video card

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphic....art=318

Its quite a bit below the recommended 6600gt that the game requires

What kind of view-distance are you trying? I played Arma on the laptop I had and it was a XP4000+ cpu and a x600 256meg video which is low end video also.

I used 1100-1300 view distance and it was sluggish but worked ok on very low settings

I could suggest to make sure your laptop is not set for power save and even the video usually has its own powersave mode.

You could overclock the video a little but i don't recommend if your not used to that

And your Arma is patched to 1.12b?

[jolulure 0]

distance set to 700, everything to low, lowest resolution, dont seem to get more than 15 fps.

[jolulure 0]

ok, here are the results:

Multiplayer demo: cooperative mission (some AI guys)

-everthing set to medium, except shadows, AA, AF, after processing, reflections.. set to off.

-distance to 700

-resolution to 800x600 32bit

-fps never lower than 25 (FRAPS)

FULL GAME 1.12

-everything set to lowest or off

-distance to minimum

-resolution to 600x480 32 bit

-fps never lower than 25 when alone without trees, without AI, without cars, without water.

-fps lower than 10 with some AI

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE AI?? WHY DOES IT LOWER FPS??

IS THIS NORMAL???!!!

[FritzDaKat 0]

If you have Vista with KB936330 installed, skip this post.

I'm guessing you have some form of Vista on this machine?

If so, have you been to windows update?

And if so & so, has it let you install service pack 1 yet?

In order to have SP1 show as available in Windows update, your system has to meet a number of prerequisits.

You might have been there and it let you get some updates but if  some of your systems drivers have not yet been updated to "meet SP1 standards" (Before it was hardware waiting for Vista catch up, now it's Vista waiting for Drivers to catch up.) then when you were there getting updates, SP1 would not have been made available to you.

This holds true for alot of updates it seems. From the time SP1 released on March 18, 2008, I also went to Windows update twice a week to see about getting Sp1 but it hadnt become available to me until lst night.

In addition to all your systems hardware drivers being "SP1 compliant" there are also a series of windows updates which also need to be installed prior, these being  KB937287, KB935509 and KB938371.

KB936330 - SP1 Wont show itself to you in Windows update untill the aformentioned conditions have been met which means you might have been to WinUpdate 3 or 4 times in one day already trying to get SP1 but your system might not as of yet had all the nessisary updates installed so you never saw the option.

Basicly just open Windows update and check the list of installed updates, if you dont see KB937287, KB935509 and KB938371 then check for updates and try to get them, also check for updated hardware drivers (might want to do that first and again after getting the new KB937287, KB935509 and KB938371 updates just to be sure.)

Once you have SP1 installed you should see a great deal of improvements.  

[jolulure 0]

i have windows XP

thanks for your help....

but the weird thing is that DEMO WORKS GREAT!!! .... however, full game doesnt.

[FritzDaKat 0]

Meh.... lol, get Vista....

Seriously thou,

Run the Demo, look at the map

Run the game itself, look at the normal map.

Is the demo map alot smaller?,,, (Never tried the demo myself but if the demo uses the smaller Sara-lite map that would explain alot)

Off-the-shelf ArmA eats up alot of resources just rendering the vegetation so you may want to try using an addon or two to help with that,,,, hmmm. PROPER vegetation fix is still in beta and the Armaholic link is down... Try a search in the addons section here for vegetation ---->>>( or just click here ) and you'll  find a number of vegetation "solutions" *****EDIT***** This includes trees. which should help improve the game performance. The trees and such might not look as pretty, but the game will perform better.

As far as why the game takes a performance hit when AI is present, simply put the AI takes up additional resources from the system which is already having trouble running the game (25 fps and under should not be considered as "Acceptable performance" imho. If 25 were the low mark, it wouldn't be so bad, but as a high mark, it's like watching a friggin' slide-show.)

[jolulure 0]

I HAVE GOT THE SOLUTION!!!!

ITS ALL ABOUT TREEEEESS!!! tried with the editor: no trees (42fps) - 1 tree (15fps)

COULD YOU GIVE ME A LINK TO TREES TWEAKS AND MODS?

ARE THERE ANY???

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[FritzDaKat 0]

The vegetation search I linked above there lists mostly posts in the addon and mods section where a majority of the posts contain links to the latest versions on the first post of the topic to the related addon.

[BraTTy 0]

You looking for an addon called "lowplants"?

I don't think that helps with trees?

What programs are you running in the background?

[jolulure 0]

no services or applications running in the back....

the weird thing is that the demo runs flawlessly...

[lee_h._oswald 0]

Which NVidia forceware version(vga driver) are you using?

MfG Lee

[jolulure 0]

final words:

tried LowPlants, which improved fps in around 5-10.

However, i do know the problem. It is all about forests. In missions without dense forests (maybe many trees, but not dense) i get 45fps average (FRAPS).

However, with those with forests, i get 17fps average (FRAPS)

is there any way to remove Forests, or make them invisible till i reach them?? bear in mind that these tests were made with view distance set to 500.

thanks!

[Master gamawa 0]

Try to download a smaller map form Armaholic or something.

Smaller maps are easier on your machine.

If those small maps play better maybe it just means that your computer doesn't have what it takes to play arma.

I have a Dual 3.2, 2 gigs of ram and a 8800GTX and I still play with view distance 1200 and all settings to normal to avoid frame rate drop (especially in north sahrani) and in busy combat situations.

Arma is pretty demanding. I don't think there is a pc out there that can play this game in maximum settings when there is major combat going on.

....at least a pc I could afford without having to sell a kidney.