Will my PC Run this? What CPU/GPU to get? What settings? System Specifications.

[Nordin 0]

what battery life :p

[koroush47 10]

ARMA 2 gets lower fps for me than crysis!

Man wtf.

[echo1 0]

That would make sense - Crysis is two years old and is on a much smaller scale than ArmA 2, whereas ArmA 2 is new off the shelf, quite graphically detailed and is on a much bigger scale than Crysis. I'd also assume that there's a good bit of pre-scripting in Crysis that makes it easier for it. I'm not saying that that justifies ArmA 2 being so resource heavy, just that you can't expect your computer to run everything based on the fact that it runs a two year old game.

Edited August 28, 2009 by echo1

[Johnny 3 Tears 10]

Will these PC's components even manage to handle ARMA 2 on medium or high?

AMD Athlon II X2 250 (3.0ghz)

4 GB RAM (DDR2)

500 GB HDD

NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT 1 GB

VISTA 64 Bit

The PC is rather cheap and im looking for a cheaper PC i am pretty sure the RAM, OS, HDD are ok however i have never gotten an AMD processor or the 9500 GT any help would be appreciated

Edited August 28, 2009 by Johnny 3 Tears

[Rhammstein 10]

Regardless what they say your cpu will do just fine, your video card is really gonna hurt. Very low memory bandwidth means you're gonna be stuck in a very low resolution. And with only a few shaders/alu's you'll not want any eye candy at all, no aa, no shadows, no effects, no hdr, blur, nothing of the sort, and maybe you'll manage, really hard to say. A 9600GT is actually a huge step up.. give a try for the demo, I haven't found any difference in performance.

Edit: I just noticed you'd asked for performance on medium or high, there's just absolutely no way it'll happen with that card. Nothing for bandwidth and nothing for shader power, both amount and speed.

Edited August 29, 2009 by Rhammstein

[-=seany=- 5]

Dont really know about AMD CPUs, but you wont be able to play with much enjoyment using that graphics card, it doubt it would be able to keep up with medium settings.

[wooly-back-jack 10]

I wouldn't say arma2 is that detailed, looks quite aged to me if you take away the anti-aliasing mask of high end cards, yeah it's a bigger envoironment though but nothing is that special, and the sound is terrible.

FarCry 2 is quite big too, as is oblivion and they have great graphics, even for 'older' games. And they have better foliage/weather and run great!

I have stopped playing Arma2 for the moment, I will return as I do like the game lots. It has just lost the excitement for me because I have spent too much time tweaking. I'd rather spend time at the PC playing, I'll wait until this is stable and we have an Arma3 forum with people crying about it not running as it should and I'll just stick to Arma2 until that release is sorted out. Once bitten twice shy.

[Rhammstein 10]

Using the settings I'm using atm it looks really good to me, I haven't tried turning things off to see if it gets really ugly but maxed out imo it's very nice. Plus I think this engine suits the game, the dunia engine would never work for an arma game, nor would anything from bethesda. The only other engine that could possibly work....maybe, would be the Xray engine, but even that, eh, I just dunno.

Edited August 29, 2009 by Rhammstein

[Landstriker 0]

I guess my dual 260 GTX's will never be able to run the game maxed out, when they even struggle at medium settings :(

[ComadeR 0]

phenom II 920 x4 3ghz

ati gigabyte 4850 1gb

4 gb ram

windows 7 rc 7100

what settings be? how much fps I can get in campaig?

[Rhammstein 10]

I guess my dual 260 GTX's will never be able to run the game maxed out, when they even struggle at medium settings :(

Strange, I did with 2 9800GTX+ cards. Could be a Cpu bottleneck or memory, maybe a setting you're using is hurting. I wouldn't bother with too much AA, and if you use it force it through the Nv control panel IMO. Be certain both cards are actually* working in-game and video memory set to highest setting, "very high". *(this is easy with a hardware monitor of some kind that left in the background, records temps) Maybe HWMonitor, http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php But I haven't used that on this system, been a bit, so I can't guarantee it will show every card, although it should, I'll try now. Great little app and always worth having for anyone regardless.

[Landstriker 0]

Strange, I did with 2 9800GTX+ cards. Could be a Cpu bottleneck or memory, maybe a setting you're using is hurting. I wouldn't bother with too much AA, and if you use it force it through the Nv control panel IMO. Be certain both cards are actually* working in-game and video memory set to highest setting, "very high". *(this is easy with a hardware monitor of some kind that left in the background, records temps) Maybe HWMonitor, http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php But I haven't used that on this system, been a bit, so I can't guarantee it will show every card, although it should, I'll try now. Great little app and always worth having for anyone regardless.

It's only with ArmA 2 i get issues, no other game, like crysis, farcry 2. I won't bother, untill a few patches from now, if it's been better optimized.

[Rhammstein 10]

Waiting is an option, but I'm betting it's something fixable regardless of a patch. Certainly if there's no rush and you don't want to diagnose, it could be something a patch could take care of. I just wanted you to know you absolutely have the power to run this game maxed out at 60+ fps, no worries :)

[Njayjay 10]

I wanna run this game maxed out at 1680x1050 and I also want to turn up the view distance all the way or as much as possible. What card out there can do this? I have an 8800 ultra and it's not cutting it.

[Fudgeblood 10]

Just wait for the GTX 300 cards :P Imagine ArmA 2 with DX11..... *drool*

[Greg 0]

The card you seek has not been invented yet.

More accurately the CPU you need does not yet exist.

[Njayjay 10]

From pcgameshardware: " But even more important is the low performance: Even on overclcoked highest-end hardware (Core i7; 12 GiByte RAM and a GTX 285 with 2 GiByte VRAM) ArmA 2 becomes a slide show (less than 15 fps) running at 1,280 x 1,024 pixels with very high details."

If this is true the optimization is SHIT.

Edited September 1, 2009 by Njayjay

[nomdeplume 0]

Depends a bit what you're doing. The campaign missions are very taxing on the CPU. More simple scenarios run fine. I think it could make more aggressive use of memory, I've never seen it using more than about 1 gigabyte, and every time it pauses to load something I'm thinking why wasn't that preloaded???.

[flake 10]

More accurately the CPU you need does not yet exist.

it does indeed exist, but it costs $203945209345 and is currently in the space shuttle

[Beagle 684]

it does indeed exist, but it costs $203945209345 and is currently in the space shuttle

The Space Shuttle the ISS and the Hubble Space Telescope all do use Intel 486 Processors. There is nor need for faster CPUs up there.

[bangtail 0]

I wanna run this game maxed out at 1680x1050 and I also want to turn up the view distance all the way or as much as possible. What card out there can do this? I have an 8800 ultra and it's not cutting it.

I run it fine - everything maxed (@ 1920 x 1200, except post and only because I don't like it).

Before you bang on about my PC being top end and "obviously it will run well" etc, I run it on 2 other machines that are both single 285s and they run it at max as well (@ 1680x1050, post off).

TBH, you're probably better off waiting for the GT300. It's going to be about twice as fast as a 285.

Eth

[Beagle 684]

It deems me that ArmA2 does not "bottleneck" at the GPU.

I cant play it very well at 3600m viedistance and anything on high exept AA in 1680x1050

...and I still have a outdatet ATI HD3870 and a outdatet AMD Athlon X2 6000+

[MadCatChiken 10]

I run it fine - everything maxed (@ 1920 x 1200, except post and only because I don't like it).

Before you bang on about my PC being top end and "obviously it will run well" etc, I run it on 2 other machines that are both single 285s and they run it at max as well (@ 1680x1050, post off).

TBH, you're probably better off waiting for the GT300. It's going to be about twice as fast as a 285.

Eth

I run mine at 1680x1050 with about 24 fps at maxed out with a single GTX280, 8gb ram and a 3ghz AMD Phenom II X4. Atm the game is just poorly optimized, hopefully patches will fix this.

[geloxo 2]

Forget about the card. Just use Windows 7 and everything will run smoother, including Arma2 :) In my case, moving from Vista64 to Seven64 produced a 25% improvement in CPU and memory usage, and therefore big cities, for instance, load faster and gameplay is better with the same settings I used before.

Try to reduce shadows (more than "normal" is not needed) and use any FPS helper to decrease grass clutter. With that you could have the perfect solution to performace with an standard card without loosing too much quality.

Performance in MP is better cause AI calculations are made by server, not your PC (in Coop). Also the mission design itself is important (a big battle in a big city is a FPS killer for everybody). It´s not easy to get a gold configuration, so you better select one which works fine for you in most cases and lower/rise it depending on the type of mission you are playing.

In my opinion the key feature is the CPU speed (not even the number of cores) rather than the graphics card you have.

Cheers

Edited September 1, 2009 by geloxo

[sniper pilot 36]

The card you seek has not been invented yet.

More accurately the CPU you need does not yet exist.

I have finaly helped build a computer that is just shy of 3 settings to be at max(View distance 3600, Render Res at 100% vs 200%, and terrain detail at Normal.)

What you need is a dual core or higher with it's speed at 3.2ghz or higher. I'm running this game with a GTX280, 3GB of Ram, and a fast Hard Drive. I'm running winxp 32.

It doesn't require a super computer.