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

[Locksley 10]

Thanks for the reply.

I've already purchased the CPU, mobo and RAM.

CM690 II advanced case and seasonic m12d and 500gb caviar black is on it's way.

just deciding on the graphis card now.

I was originally going to get the GTX 460 as it is a flawless card by all accounts, but then I realised my CPU would bottleneck it so the GTS 450 suddenly became interesting.

Does anyone have a similar rig as mine and can report good performance with the aformentioned quality settings?

p.s I guess a better way of explaining what view distance I want would be percentage-wise. 70% view distance is what I would like to be able to play at.

[Leon86 13]

Thanks for the reply.

I've already purchased the CPU, mobo and RAM.

CM690 II advanced case and seasonic m12d and 500gb caviar black is on it's way.

just deciding on the graphis card now.

I was originally going to get the GTX 460 as it is a flawless card by all accounts, but then I realised my CPU would bottleneck it so the GTS 450 suddenly became interesting.

Does anyone have a similar rig as mine and can report good performance with the aformentioned quality settings?

p.s I guess a better way of explaining what view distance I want would be percentage-wise. 70% view distance is what I would like to be able to play at.

The cpu doesn't have to be a bottleneck for the gpu. If you want to stress the gpu just turn on anti-aliasing and turn up other gpu-intensive settings.

[Locksley 10]

Ok that's good to hear.

So do you reckon my rig will play ArmaII smoothly with the settings I stated before?

[SIXTWO 10]

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.60GHz Quadcore

2.00GB RAM

Nvidia Geforce GT 9800

Win7 ultimate 64bit OS

-----------------------------------------------------

video settings all on medium except:

Textures > low

Post pone > verylow (man thats burns ur eyes after a good hours play, gonna need glasses soon if i keap playing :S)

3D res > 75%

Veiw distance > the view distance bar is like half way

(^ And i think there is a few more settings on low, the rest is set to medium.)

Any way, all those settings just makes the game look soooooo horrible, but thats what they are set to to get a good 30fps,

BUT Fps drops to about 20-25 wen in fire fights with lots of enemys, in fast aircraft, near artillery barrages..... etc more.

And finaly, 15-20 Fps when recording with Fraps on lowest fps. (Which is so sad, since my favorite thing to do on games is movie making :( :@ big let down)

My main point on top of this all is:

WTF!!

Ive seen people with lower computers than me achieve beautiful fps, and also get good fps while recording with fraps

Just someone reading this, open up chernarus' change ur settings to what mine are set to.... -.- looks terrible right? i mean, get on top of the highest peak in cherarus' and look at how ugly, dull and unatractive it looks, im losing will to play this, all because BIS didn't make the game friendly to different hardware.

And i looovee this game, but sadly, i don't like to play it that much due to eyes watering, mind-grains... bla bla.

Ive tryed all the start up codes like winXP, ra ra ra every single one of them, yet i open up task manager, CPU seems to be only running 10-20%.

But RAM seems to be using 1.00GB to 1.20 GB.

Is there a way to turn it up? since i have Quadcores?

I was going to download latest drivers for my hardware, only to find that i have to wait 8 more days till i can download anything since my month bandwidth has gone over. But still latest drivers won't entirely make a hole lot difference.

Plus i have tryed to make changes to my Nvidia card settings in control pannel, only to open up my control pannel and not find the nvidia control panel (if you got all that :)/). ????

Please help, or i might have to sell this game. :( which i never intend on doing on a million years, :/ but there might be no choice soon.

[5133p39 12]

@SIXTWO:

Just my thoughts:

1.) 2GB RAM for W7 ultimate might be too little (but it also depends on your W7 settings, what services are you running, etc.)

2.) In my opinion, the FPS you are getting do match the performance of 9800 (i know because i have it in my old laptop - a mobile version, yes, but still the performance is almost the same as of a desktop 9800)

3.) Try to disable "Postprocess", maybe it will help a little.

4.) Try setting the "Shadows" to "High" (if i am not mistaken, lower settings makes the shadows being computed by the processor instead of by gfx card).

5.) Patch the game to the latest available version (you might get a small performance increase).

6.) If nothing helps, try lowering your "View distance"

[TheBlob 10]

I'm building a new PC to play this game.

I've got an Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366) and Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard which can take up to 24Gb of ram.

I should be able to OC to 4GHz quite comfortably. I'm looking to get one of the high end ATI 5900 series GPU's once the new ones come out and the price of the 5900 series drops a bit.

Heres my question. I can get 4,6,8, or 12 Gb of ram either 1600MHz of 1333MHz but what amount of ram do I really need to run the game well and at what point would I have too much ram that the game would not utilise it?

[SIXTWO 10]

@SIXTWO:

Just my thoughts:

1.) 2GB RAM for W7 ultimate might be too little (but it also depends on your W7 settings, what services are you running, etc.)

2.) In my opinion, the FPS you are getting do match the performance of 9800 (i know because i have it in my old laptop - a mobile version, yes, but still the performance is almost the same as of a desktop 9800)

3.) Try to disable "Postprocess", maybe it will help a little.

4.) Try setting the "Shadows" to "High" (if i am not mistaken, lower settings makes the shadows being computed by the processor instead of by gfx card).

5.) Patch the game to the latest available version (you might get a small performance increase).

6.) If nothing helps, try lowering your "View distance"

Thanks for your ideas, i am going to try disable some settings on Win 7, to see ma fps turns out like, gonna wait till my bandwidth is back to normal speed and download updated divers.

I am currently using patch 1.07 with Combined ops.

Do not want to beta patch, i like to play mulitplayer sometimes.

And also i changed a few settings, some are on low still, but i upped a few and made some changes, and even though it doesn't look sparkle sparkle, im getting 40fps on average with small fire battles, and 25 with fraps, which is recordable.

Plus my mates said hes got a spare 3gb ram living in his closet, but i doupt it will be the right brand to fit my computer. :/

well thanks again for ur ideas.

[Leon86 13]

I'm building a new PC to play this game.

I've got an Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366) and Asus P6X58D-E Intel X58 (Socket 1366) DDR3 Motherboard which can take up to 24Gb of ram.

I should be able to OC to 4GHz quite comfortably. I'm looking to get one of the high end ATI 5900 series GPU's once the new ones come out and the price of the 5900 series drops a bit.

Heres my question. I can get 4,6,8, or 12 Gb of ram either 1600MHz of 1333MHz but what amount of ram do I really need to run the game well and at what point would I have too much ram that the game would not utilise it?

the 5900 series are crossfire-cards, doesn't work that well in arma 2. If you're going for an x58 build just get 6GB ram that's on the QVL of the mobo manufacturer. You dont need really fast ram for overclocks so 1333 or 1600 will be fast enough.

[SIXTWO 10]

Hey all, was also wandering what would be the best 8GB of RAM to buy, what brands, prices, etc. and would it run on my system:

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.60GHz Quadcore

2.00GB RAM

Nvidia Geforce GT 9800

Win7 ultimate 64bit OS

EDIT: Well not necessarily 8GB RAM, but im looking for somthing higher than my current (2GB) that will run ArmA 2 flat out on high settings.

Edited October 10, 2010 by SIXTWO

[5133p39 12]

the 5900 series are crossfire-cards, doesn't work that well in arma 2. ...

What do you mean "that well" ?

I have 5970 and it performs very well.

[nukey 10]

SIXTWO, your system specs are way to low to run arma2 at max settings,read through some of the posts here first. Your processor is weak, u want an i7 or the new amd 6 core,and a brand new top of the range graphics card. Plus ddr3 mother board and ram.

[Leon86 13]

Hey all, was also wandering what would be the best 8GB of RAM to buy, what brands, prices, etc. and would it run on my system:

AMD Phenom II X4 810 2.60GHz Quadcore

2.00GB RAM

Nvidia Geforce GT 9800

Win7 ultimate 64bit OS

EDIT: Well not necessarily 8GB RAM, but im looking for somthing higher than my current (2GB) that will run ArmA 2 flat out on high settings.

just buy 4GB, that should give you 6GB of ram, and that's more than you need. If the memory refuses to work with your current 2 GB, you'll still have 4, which is still slightly more than you need as long as you dont run much in the background.

If you want to improve your game experience you should try out some settings. If viewdistance, modeldetails and terrain detail have a high impact on fps you're probably on the limited by the processor. If resolution, anti-aliasing and postprocessing impact performance the most your gpu is limiting you.

Your phenom is clocked at 2.6, the fastest phenom is clocked at 3.5, that's only 35% faster, therefore I wouldn't recommend upgrading that. Your gpu might be worth upgrading, check out this chart, every 3 rows performance roughly doubles. You can have a GTX 460 for about 150 euro's now, roughly twice the gpu performance, or wait for the ati 6xxx serie's that's due to be released very soon, also with cards in that have similar price points but hopefully with even better performance.

---------- Post added at 09:07 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:57 PM ----------

What do you mean "that well" ?

I have 5970 and it performs very well.

Dunno, I just take Bangtails' word for it. You'll have to ask him for details.

On almost all X58 boards an most P55's you can run regular crossfire or sli, a 5850x2 setup will give you similar performance with greater redundancy, for the same price, so if you want crossfire I'd go for that.

A couple of 460OC editions in sli will probably outperform it though.

[bangtail 0]

What do you mean "that well" ?

I have 5970 and it performs very well.

5970 is a weak performer in ArmA 2 - especially against comparable (or even lesser) SLI configurations.

That doesn't mean to say it doesn't perform at acceptable levels, it's just not the best choice if you are going multi GPU.

If you insist on CF, I'd go with 2 x 5870's or 2 x 6xxx's (coming soon). It's still not as good as SLI but it's better than the 5970. I've owned 2 5970s and I got rid of them fast. CF isn't that great in the first place but it's even worse on these '2 for 1' cards (and just for the sake of objectivity, I avoid Nvidia's 't00fer' cards as well).

Don't get me wrong, ATI make great cards as far as single GPU solutions go but when it comes to multi GPU, Nvidia is just better.

Edited October 11, 2010 by BangTail

[5133p39 12]

5970 is a weak performer in ArmA 2 - especially against comparable (or even lesser) SLI configurations. ...

A "weak performer"? I don't think so.

I have absolutely no problems with my 5970, and the performance is excelent, so don't tell me it is bad ;-)

It is true that 2x 5870 will perform slightly better than 1x 5970, BUT the cost of 2x 5870 is approximately 52% higher than cost of one 5970.

If someone have the money for 2x 5870, then i think he should add little more and buy 2x 5970 (but who knows how that would work ;-)

So it would be better to get 2x 460 which would be much cheaper than 2x 5870, but the cost would still be slightly higher than one 5970.

Right now, the 5970 have no competition in its price range (at least where i live).

Edited October 11, 2010 by 5133p39

[bangtail 0]

A "weak performer"? I don't think so.

I have absolutely no problems with my 5970, and the performance is excelent, so don't tell me it is bad ;-)

It is true that 2x 5870 will perform slightly better than 1x 5970, BUT the cost of 2x 5870 is approximately 52% higher than cost of one 5970.

If someone have the money for 2x 5870, then i think he should add little more and buy 2x 5970 (but who knows how that would work ;-)

So it would be better to get 2x 460 (which will also match 5970) instead of 2x 5870, but the cost would still be slightly higher.

Right now, the 5970 have no competition in its price range (at least where i live).

Arguments often begin because one party decides that they are going to put words into another party's mouth. I never said the 5970 was a 'bad' card, I said it wasn't a good choice for ArmA 2, and I stand by that statement.

I wouldn't touch them again (or any other 't00fer' card)

2 x 5970 is a total waste of money (CF scaling isn't that good with 2 GPUs and gets much worse with 4).

Nvidia seems to have skipped a 't00fer' version of the 480 (for whatever reason) which is fine with me, 2 x 480 (essentially a fair comparison to the 5970 performance wise) remains a much better choice.

As I said, CF does not scale well compared to SLI and ATI haven't made any great strides with regards to rectifying this via their rather lacklustre driver support (as of late).

PS : I've seen plenty of tests where the difference between 2 x 5870 and the 5970 is considerably more than 'slight' (in favour of the 5870s).

PPS : The price difference in North America is about $80.00 JFYI (Between the 5970 and 2 x 5870).

Edited October 11, 2010 by BangTail

[5133p39 12]

Ok, could you support your claims by some numbers or tests?

Because every test and gfx comparison chart i've seen, resulted in plain and simple "there is nothing better than 5970 for its current price".

btw. 2x 480 should be more than fair comparison to 5970, but the cost would be slightly more than twice the cost of 5970.

...seems like you are forgetting to account for the prices of each solution.

[bangtail 0]

Ok, could you support your claims by some numbers or tests?

Because every test and gfx comparison chart i've seen, resulted in plain and simple "there is nothing better than 5970 for its current price".

btw. 2x 480 should be more than fair comparison to 5970, but the cost would be slightly more than twice the cost of 5970.

...seems like you are forgetting to account for the prices of each solution.

Read what I said - I said performance wise, I never mentioned price. It was an intentional omission, the comparison is based purely on performance which is all that interests me.

2 x 480 blitzes the 5970 in some cases and then you have to factor in PhysX, CUDA, 3Dvision et al coupled with much better drivers and support (for the most part).

As I said, 2 x 5870 (or 2 x 5850 for that matter) are better than a 5970 for a start and SLI is far superior to CF in my extensive experience.

http://www.maingearforums.com/entry.php?24-So-You-Want-To-Buy-A-GeForce-Part-2

I can't be bothered to search for any more articles but that one shows the 5970 has some severe issues. It won't even run some of the tests and has trouble with high res/levels of AA/eye candy etc vs SLI.

At the end of the day, if you are happy with the 5970, does it really matter what I think?

Edited October 11, 2010 by BangTail

[PhillyB 10]

CPU: i5 760 (2.8ghz, 3.33 w/ turbo boost)

GPU: Nvidia geforce 9400 gt

RAM: 6gb 1333mhz

I have OA And Arma 2 on steam, and Currently playing on very low (going to upgrade gpu to a 5850 or a hd 6000). Sometimes in a game it will drop to about 20 fps when I come across a city or a forested area, is there some way to reduce this? Is it my CPU causing it or my GPU?

[bangtail 0]

CPU: i5 760 (2.8ghz, 3.33 w/ turbo boost)

GPU: Nvidia geforce 9400 gt

RAM: 6gb 1333mhz

I have OA And Arma 2 on steam, and Currently playing on very low (going to upgrade gpu to a 5850 or a hd 6000). Sometimes in a game it will drop to about 20 fps when I come across a city or a forested area, is there some way to reduce this? Is it my CPU causing it or my GPU?

Your video card is weak but cities (with significant AI activity) can drop the FPS no matter what you are running. I'd wait for ATI's 6xxx series in about ~10 days tbh.

A new card will speed things up but cities/AI are always going to be a CPU limitation (at least for the immediate future).

Edited October 11, 2010 by BangTail

[SIXTWO 10]

Your video card is weak but cities (with significant AI activity) can drop the FPS no matter what you are running. I'd wait for ATI's 6xxx series in about ~10 days tbh.

A new card will speed things up but cities/AI are always going to be a CPU limitation (at least for the immediate future).

thanks for the info, as u may notice im not the best with computers.

I will props upgrade in the near future when i start earning more money, :S.

But just curious, will an extra 4gb of RAM make any difference at all? i mean atm my ArmA 2 is runing with 67% 3D, terrain detail on low, post pone disabled, texture details on high, and everything else on medium.

And it doesnt look too good, well its enough to play on for now.

But will buy more RAM be worth it for the time being? or should i wait it out until the money comes in for some new full upgrades,

Oh and what is a good example of a really good graphics card? because i though gt9800 was good, :/ obviously not.

[bangtail 0]

thanks for the info, as u may notice im not the best with computers.

I will props upgrade in the near future when i start earning more money, :S.

But just curious, will an extra 4gb of RAM make any difference at all? i mean atm my ArmA 2 is runing with 67% 3D, terrain detail on low, post pone disabled, texture details on high, and everything else on medium.

And it doesnt look too good, well its enough to play on for now.

But will buy more RAM be worth it for the time being? or should i wait it out until the money comes in for some new full upgrades,

Oh and what is a good example of a really good graphics card? because i though gt9800 was good, :/ obviously not.

I'm assuming you already have 4GB of RAM so another 4 isn't going to help (unless you are using it for a RAMdrive).

There are great cards from both camps. Nvidia's 480 GTX is fantatstic as is the ATI 5870. If you were going to go ATI I would probably wait a little as they have a new line releasing in 9 days.

If you don't want to spend as much as that, the GTX 460 is an excellent card at a more reasonable price point.

[Leon86 13]

thanks for the info, as u may notice im not the best with computers.

I will props upgrade in the near future when i start earning more money, :S.

But just curious, will an extra 4gb of RAM make any difference at all? i mean atm my ArmA 2 is runing with 67% 3D, terrain detail on low, post pone disabled, texture details on high, and everything else on medium.

And it doesnt look too good, well its enough to play on for now.

But will buy more RAM be worth it for the time being? or should i wait it out until the money comes in for some new full upgrades,

Oh and what is a good example of a really good graphics card? because i though gt9800 was good, :/ obviously not.

you're running 2GB now, getting up to 4GB will help overall system performance, the reason I advise to get 4 instead of another 2 is because 2 different kits are sometimes incompatible. If you can get exactly the same kit and it's tested in 4x1 dualchannel mode on the QVL of the motherboard manufacturer go for that, It'll be relatively cheap to do this and will be noticable in more than just arma.

The 9800 isn't such a bad card, it's just that it's a couple of years old now so there's a lot of cards that are more than twice as fast. Of course they cost a lot as well, my 8800gtx isn't much faster.

I run at really low settings to keep the fps and the responsiveness high. My settings are:

1600x1000 res

viewdistance: 1600

texture detail: normal

shadow detail: disabled

postprocessing: disabled

anti-aliasing:low

anisotropic filtering: low

terrain detail: low

object detail: low

I think the game still looks pretty good, I also don't really notice the lod switching on trees and other "bugs" or minor annoyances people often complain about. And because settings are so low there's plenty in "reserve" for when the enemy enters the screen and performance generally stays high in battle, even in cities.

The biggest shortcoming is that every time I get in a plane I have to put the viewdistance higher.

[cjph 0]

Does anyone have any experience of the effect of 1Gb versus 2Gb VRAM GPUs at higher resolutions ? Here is a link to a (2009 ?) Russian review which measured the memory use of various games (inc Arma2 benchmark 1) at various resolutions.

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overclockers.ru%2Flab%2F36439%2FSkolko_videopamyati_nuzhno_dlya_sovremennyh_igr.html

The article shows a VRAM memory usage of 1.1Gb (at pretty high settings, to be fair) at the highest res of 2560x1600, equivalent to 4.1m pixels. My modest triplescreen setup has a similar screen real estate to process, ie three 1280x1024 screens, or 3.9m pixels. As I have a 1Gb card I wonder if there is any impact due to any VRAM memory having to be swapped ? I do occasionally see blank textures for a few seconds (not really stutter, just slow loading), but since I have most of the addons stored on a RAMDrive / RAMDisk and never see CPU utilisation above 80% for any CPU I wonder is this is having an effect ?

Posted here because the new ATI cards are due soon and I (like some others) might be tempted by these or older cheaper cards, possibly with a 2Gb limit. Or maybe this is where the 1.5Gb of the 480GTX wins.

[bangtail 0]

Does anyone have any experience of the effect of 1Gb versus 2Gb VRAM GPUs at higher resolutions ? Here is a link to a (2009 ?) Russian review which measured the memory use of various games (inc Arma2 benchmark 1) at various resolutions.

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overclockers.ru%2Flab%2F36439%2FSkolko_videopamyati_nuzhno_dlya_sovremennyh_igr.html

The article shows a VRAM memory usage of 1.1Gb (at pretty high settings, to be fair) at the highest res of 2560x1600, equivalent to 4.1m pixels. My modest triplescreen setup has a similar screen real estate to process, ie three 1280x1024 screens, or 3.9m pixels. As I have a 1Gb card I wonder if there is any impact due to any VRAM memory having to be swapped ? I do occasionally see blank textures for a few seconds (not really stutter, just slow loading), but since I have most of the addons stored on a RAMDrive / RAMDisk and never see CPU utilisation above 80% for any CPU I wonder is this is having an effect ?

Posted here because the new ATI cards are due soon and I (like some others) might be tempted by these or older cheaper cards, possibly with a 2Gb limit. Or maybe this is where the 1.5Gb of the 480GTX wins.

Game dependant and it won't benefit ArmA 2 much (maybe at resolutions above 1080p).

That article is pretty conclusive in it's findings. With the exception of a couple of titles, 1.5 GB+ is not a necessity yet (unless you game @ 2560 x 1920).

[cjph 0]

Over 1.5Gb is probably not necessary, but maybe 1Gb+ might benefit anyone playing at 2560x1200 res and at the higher settings, or widescreen setups like my cheap and cheerful one below. :)