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

[Leon86 13]

Right, but i personally wouldn't rely on an Athlon in ArmA2. I can't nail it down with hard facts, but I guess the difference in ArmA2 will be higher then 20% - what puts the higher price into another perspective. What sucks is that the price for the Phenom II X4 965 has risen from 138 to 160 € now, only ~5€ less than a 970.

gut feeling says athlons must suck :D

First I thought lot's of cache was important for gaming but it turns out it isn't really. Sure, it helps, phenoms are always above athlons with the same clockspeed but in most of the gaming benchmarks it's really close.

Only scenario where phenoms really outmatch athlons is when you run a lot of programs at once, say playing a 1080p blueray with vlc, transcode another movie, run cinebench, while unpacking things with winrar. If everything starts competing for rescources it's handy to have a buffer I guess.

[flattermann 12]

gut feeling says athlons must suck :D

Well, I used to have an Athlon64 single core, I played ArmaI with it and it was running fine. On my side it's more than a gut feeling, I am building a new rig for myself by the end of January and an Athlon would perhaps be a bottleneck. I have zero experience with the AthlonII's but I wouldn't bother trying them out. I rather wait a couple of weeks longer to get the money for the fastest AMD quad core i can get. Plus I am not sure if any DDR3 higher than 1333 can be used with an AthlonII.

Edited January 6, 2011 by Flattermann

[Leon86 13]

If you get a decent gpu (gtx460 or higher) and run that on sensible settings your cpu will always be the bottleneck in fights with a lot going on, no matter how much you spend. The fastest amd quads get too close in price to the intel core's. If you want a fast cpu get the i5 2500K with a P67 chipset. That way you'll have a lot of room to overclock once you feel the cpu is holding you back.

Fast amd quads are clocked way closer to their maximum potential, that's why they consume much more power. The only reason to go amd is to save some money, that's why the PhenomII X4 955 BE is the cpu to get if you want an amd quad. The 970 isn't even 10% faster on stock and overclocked the difference will be even smaller (prob'ly 5%)

Athlon's aren't locked to a certain memory speed as far as I know. If they are then you can always raise the blck a bit (though that would be overclocking) and put the cpu multi lower. An atlhonII would benefit more from fast memory because of the missing L3 but memory speed is rarely a performance bottleneck with DDR3. Remember, the fastest core2quads only used ddr2-667 speed, and that didn't bottleneck performance, to be honest phenomII's aren't much faster than q9550 core2quads. 1333 is already twice as fast, why would it need 1600?

[duffbeeer 10]

Well ive bought the AthlonII x4 640 (3.0 Ghz) with 2x2gb 1333 DDR3. I must say im impressed. The CPU was 89 €. The next comparable Phenom was around 135 € (3.2 Ghz).

I can now run Harvest Red with 20 - 25 fps in Chenarusk with all settings maxed on 1680*1050.

dunno if the Phenom would gain me 2 -3 fps more but i guess it wont as my 4890 1 GB would start to show is age. Im quite happy with the results! thanks for the advice :D

Edited January 6, 2011 by duffbeeer

[flattermann 12]

Is the AthlonII X4 645 as easy to OC as the PhenomII by simply raising the multiplicator?

[Leon86 13]

Nope, there's no BE athlonII's as far as I know. You can still overclock by raising the blck of course, some say that causes strange stability problems, others say it works fine. You can always put it back on stock if you have problems of course. AthlonII x3's will more often than not unlock in athlon quads and be stable with (or without) a slightly higher voltage. An athlonII x3 will perform practically on par with a quad in arma2 by the way, probably because the render thread is so much more work than the others. The quad will still be faster with other things like rendering an image or transcoding a movie of course.

If you want a really easy overclock get the BE phenom, that's just raising the multiplier and vcore. You'll get the best performance amd has to offer still for a reasonable price. If you want the price/performance king the athlon's are the way to go.

@duffbeeer, glad it works out. could you maybe run the built in benchmark scenario's and post the results along with your settings? And what processor did you have before this one?

[duffbeeer 10]

Ok ive played a bit around. These are my settings:

WarFX is also enabled. Im getting 31 fps on the OA Benchmark.

the rig is:

Athlon x4 640 (3.0 Ghz)

MB Asus M4a77T

4 Gb 1333 DDR 3 Corsair

Power Color Radeon 4890 1Gb non OC

1 TB WDC SATA2 64MB cache

Iv had an Athlon x2 5200+ with 4 Gb 800 DDR2 before. The performance boost was quite huge in my opinion. Before upgrading i couldnt even run in full resolution and had too disable some features like WarFX.

the whole things cost me about 250 € excluding the GFX Card and power supply. Good deal.

[sberla101 50]

OSP, sorry, bad post.

Edited January 7, 2011 by Sberla101

[spizone 10]

Wolfstriked 05-31-2010 11:44 PM

Quote:

Thanks

Might wanna try some overclocking of the CPU.Q9550 is said to be a great overclocker.

Hi Wolfstriked

How can i PM or get hold of you, want to discuss as per above please

Marc

[eisa01 0]

I'm pretty sure an SSD is the best investment for Arma. I just installed and played Arma 2 OA on a 2.4GHz C2D, ATI 4870, 4GB and with a new 120GB Intel SSD, and the performance was better than I remembered Arma 2 was without the SSD. Running on 1920*1200.

[Leon86 13]

That could also be because you're playing OA and not Arma 2. Please test it before you make such claims. You can test fairly easily by copying the AddOns folder to a directory on your normal harddrive and starting OA with -mod= and then the dir you have the AddOns folder in.

[johncage 30]

lol 300-500 dollars for 10-15 percent performance increase.

the best investment you can make is one of the new video cards. arma 2 came out when the most popular cards were 256-512gb. and now that the newer cards are 1gb-2gb, they have more muscle to run it, but still have performance problems. i would think until 3 gb cards come out with the corresponding increase in processing power, arma 2/oa will always run fairly poorly. the bottleneck is no longer the cpu these days. even 4 cores are not running this well.

[flattermann 12]

lol 300-500 dollars for 10-15 percent performance increase.

I got mine for €xxx off Amazon less then 200 dollars (120 GB Vertex II) though it yet remains to be built in and tried out :D

Edited January 7, 2011 by Flattermann

[ht-57 0]

I paid 200 usd 4 intel x-52 80 gig ssd. I use a pair of them one for the os, one for games, who knew that an ssd is only 100 times quicker than its mechanical counterpart. Did you know it doesn't need to be defragmented? It also consumes less power. These aren't claims they are facts.

[Tom1 10]

i have gigabyte 5670 1gb, amd 1090T (x6) @3.2Ghz 9mb cache and 4gb ram. I am running it on the max res (1920x something) and at the exact same 3d res (i dont have moniter i play on big tv) and all my settings are on normal and AA and AF are off and my vewi distance is at 2000 and post processing affects are on low. I really like WarFX blastcore and ace mod and my friends are running on simliar settings with the same mods on worse computers and are getting a whole lot beter perfromance. I have "-cpuCount=4 -exThreads=3" in my mod line and I dont know what else i could do to make my game run faster. I payed a lot of money for this computer and I am annoyed that high end stuff like this is not making ANY difference to my previous amd 255 dual core @ 3.2Ghz. Someone please help.

BTW I am running Combined Ops with BAF and PMC to clear things up.

____________________________________

NEVER MIND!

Although many people say arma only utilizes 4 cores and you should only ever write 7, 5, 3 or 1 threads, I did a lot more research on my chip, and it turns out arma2 gets a 5% increase when utilizing 6 cores, and seeing my chip has 6 threds I gave that a go and it runs great with WarFX Blastcore.

Edited January 8, 2011 by Tom1

[AnimalMother92 10]

Maybe try -exThreads=7 and remove cpuCount/set to 6. Just a guess.

[Tom1 10]

the sight i looked on said 6 threads = a score of 6550 (i dont know what out of it was just the highest one :D) and for 7 threads it was 6500. Il give it a try but I am extremely happy with performance now. When in a forest on lingor i have to put post processing effects to very low but that helps with gameplay in a forest too so im not worried:D

[bangtail 0]

Personally, I can't stand post, and it will incur a fairly big FPS hit if you have it set higher than 'low' due to DoF and AO.

[Tom1 10]

Normal PPE are in some ways realistic because of the blurred side vission but it is over done and therefore anything higher then low is UNPLAYABLE for me.

BTW nice rig.

I am looking to buy a new gfx card after i can buy a monitor. Since I dont really see arma3 coming out anytime soon I will have no real extra expensise soooo I pretty much have an unlimited budget here (only limit is time for a 15 yo to save:D). I know this question is hard to answer (and please no fan boy comments) but what is better: ATI or NVidea? And not just in raw power, but other stuff (I am n00b please explain the major factors of what makes a gfx card "good", maybe in a pm if it is a little off topic for this thread) and what card you would reccomend. I have a crappy but MASSIVE case so size doesnt really matter for me and psu inst a problem because I will just upgrade if needed. I am leaning towards the new 6000 series of cards because i hear that ati are better overall BUT i also heard that Nvidea has more raw power. But as many of you may have noticed I have no idea what I am talking about so please go ahead and correct me If I am wrong.

Edited January 8, 2011 by Tom1

[bangtail 0]

BTW nice rig.

Tyvm :)

[maddog45 10]

could i run this with this set up?

AMD PHENOM X2 555 ( CORES UNLOCKED SO X4) AT 3.6

4 GBS RIPJAW RAM

GTX 465 SUPERCLOCKED

Edited January 8, 2011 by maddog45

[SeaVee 10]

lol 300-500 dollars for 10-15 percent performance increase.

the best investment you can make is one of the new video cards. arma 2 came out when the most popular cards were 256-512gb. and now that the newer cards are 1gb-2gb, they have more muscle to run it, but still have performance problems. i would think until 3 gb cards come out with the corresponding increase in processing power, arma 2/oa will always run fairly poorly. the bottleneck is no longer the cpu these days. even 4 cores are not running this well.

The CPU can STILL be a bottleneck - at least if you already have a pretty strong CPU at least with Arma2 or Arma2 OA.

My PC specs are in the sig.

I just upgraded from a pair of GTX260s in SLI to a pair of GTX570's. While going from the pair of GTX260s to a single GTX570 resulted in a +/- 18% to 20% increase in FPS, adding a SECOND GTX570 in SLI added basically zero to my FPS beyond the single GTX570 in the Arma2 benchmarks 1&2 - at least at a resolution of 1920X1080.

So even with my i7 920 CPU - stock speed 2.66GhZ - overclocked to 3.8GHZ, the bottleneck with a pair of GTX570s appears to be the cpu - again at least at resolutions of 1920X1080 or less....

3,251 view distance

Texture detail = very high

Video Memory = very high

Aniso Filtering = normal

Antialiasing = normal

Terrain detail = very high

Objects detail = very high

Shadow detail = normal

HDR quality = high

PP effects = very low

Vsync = enabled

Monitor resolution = 1920X1080

Arma2 BM1:

GTX260 SLI = avg FPS = 41

Single GTX 570 = avg FPS = 47

GTX 570 X2 in SLI = avg FPS = 47

Arma2 BM2:

GTX260 SLI = avg FPS = 19

Single GTX 570 = avg FPS = 20

GTX 570 X2 in SLI = avg FPS = 20

So unless your CPU is ALOT stronger than an i7 920 overclocked above 3.8GHZ and/or your monitor resolution is above 1920X1080 it makes little sense to get a card much stronger than a GTX570 - at least for Arma2 which remains very much processor dependent.

Edited January 8, 2011 by SeaVee

[-DirTyDeeDs--Ziggy- 0]

thanks for the post/analysis Seavee. It reinforces my thoughts that my SLI gtx 275s are near the top on my computers Arma2 performance. (1600x900).

:p

[SeaVee 10]

After some more testing I think I was premature on my initial assessment of the seemingly low increase in Arma2 performance going to the GTX570s in SLI versus the GTX260s.

I found I can increase some of the eye candy settings - for example I upped Anti-aliasing and aniso filtering to high from normal and also increases the draw distance (to 4,260+/- versus 3200+/-) and with the 570s get much less of an FPS drop than with the 260s. In BM1 it reamains in the upper 40s FPS, and before with the 260's doing that dropped me to the low40s.

And let me say that in other games that are less CPU intensive than Arma2 the added FPS with the two GTX570s over the two GTX206s is HUGE.

For example I play a little known game called Battle of Britain II Wings of Victory and its a very big difference - especially with inclement weather selected. Also in BFBC2 and Apache Air Assault its a big difference in FPS.

Edited January 8, 2011 by SeaVee

[bangtail 0]

Even when I went from 480s to 580s I noticed a difference (not so much in Arma 2, but elsewhere).