ArmAII-Mark

[evilnate 0]

So... i'm sure alot of us are petting our piggy banks monitoring this thread wondering what the magic recipe is for getting maximum performance with A2.

To me it looks like:

Windows 7 64bit

i7 OC'd

4890

At least 6GB or ram.

Does this sound about right? To you i7 users getting >4Ghz, what cooling solution are you using?

[householddog 10]

So... i'm sure alot of us are petting our piggy banks monitoring this thread wondering what the magic recipe is for getting maximum performance with A2.

To me it looks like:

Windows 7 64bit

i7 OC'd

4890

At least 6GB or ram.

Does this sound about right? To you i7 users getting >4Ghz, what cooling solution are you using?

Sounds good.

Can you do me a favour?

Can you lower the clock on your memory and run the bench again? Just your ram not your cpu. I am wondering what effect ram speed has on performance.

Cheers.

[evilnate 0]

Sounds good.

Can you do me a favour?

Can you lower the clock on your memory and run the bench again? Just your ram not your cpu. I am wondering what effect ram speed has on performance.

Cheers.

I suppose I worded that wrong...

I have a system that doesn't run A2 as good as I want.

C2D e6600 (stock clock)

GTX260

2GB

Winxp 32bit

I want to buy the system that runs A2 the best, and i'm wondering if the "magic recipe" is buying the system I posted above.

[ahmedjbh 0]

EvilNate,

I have been studying it closely as well.

Seems to favour intel, clock speed seems to be directly proportional to performance.

Ram seems to be not issue past 2gig.

My real question is the OS, seems to vary all over the place, i cut it down to xp64 vs win7 64, but still not sure where the best performance lies.

[householddog 10]

EvilNate,

I have been studying it closely as well.

Seems to favour intel, clock speed seems to be directly proportional to performance.

Ram seems to be not issue past 2gig.

My real question is the OS, seems to vary all over the place, i cut it down to xp64 vs win7 64, but still not sure where the best performance lies.

Ahmed I think it might actually be ram speed that is the big determinant as well. The I7s all run 1300mhz+ ram speeds. There are a few people with poor specs but fast ram, that are getting good scores.

I also achieved my highest rating by using fast RAM. Because the dividers on my mobo don't support it though, I could not push it very far.

I got a 7% increase going from 800 - 940. I just need someone who can really declock their ram to test it better.

I upgraded my processor from a dual to a quad and only got a 10% increase in performance.

Sorry nate it was me, not you. Not reading straight tonight.

Edited June 12, 2009 by householddog

[ahmedjbh 0]

well i used the arma 2 mark spread sheet, and if you put them in descending order of high score, the person "blinkster" who has 2gig of ram scored 5217.72, one of the highest scores recorded.

Perhaps you are right about the speed of the ram, but as far as volume goes, I can not conclude that 4gig will improve upon 2gig. I maybe wrong, but the evidence we have so far, does not show us that.

What I have also noticed, is that there appears to be no significant difference between duo and quad processors of any brand.

[.kju 3244]

you may want to improve the mission with a2 ingame fps measurement commands

diag_fps

diag_fpsmin

diag_frameno

diag_log anything

diag_tickTime

[laggy 0]

@Laggy

sorry - forgot to attatch that critical detail!!

1065.03

Intel Core 2 Quad 6600 @ 2.4 Ghz

Nvidia Geforce 8500GT - not sure how much onboard RAM it has, but driver version is 185.85

4 Gig RAM

Vista Home 32 bit

Please...dear gods the humanity...haaaalp me....

Far from an expert on this stuff, but your GPU is only 256MB.

I would guess this is the problem.

Your CPU, RAM and OS is the same or better than mine and I find ArmA2 playable.

[Desrat 0]

Fillrate 100%

Texture Detail - Normal

Anisotropic Filtering - Normal

Terrain Detail - Normal

Objects Detail - Normal

Shadow Detail - Normal

PostProcess Effects- Low

Tested at 1280x1024

MSI P35 FR Mainboard

Intel C2Duo E6600, 2700 MHz (9 x 300)

4GB DDR2-667 (reduced to 300 MHz with 1-1 devider due to cpu overclock)

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB driver 185.85

Windows 7 Beta x64 build 7000

3 passes done average score 2705

ArmAII right now is a mixed bag with varying performance I actually have to play on mostly low settings - hopefully future patches will improve that somewhat - however I have just ordered a Geforce 275 which should improve things somewhat..

[binkster 0]

Ram has alot to getting better score. I bought the new low voltage 1150mhz OCZ ram and put them in vs my corsair 1066. I was able to overclock alot more because of this ram plus the ram is higher. Now im scoring 5700 rather than 5200 what ahmedjbh was pointing out.

So higher clocks mixed with higher Ram = better score.

Overall I think everything is a must. High cpu, ram, video card basically is what I concluded. One will bottleneck the other.

[ahmedjbh 0]

^ thats interesting.

However I still can not understand the varying performance from apparently similar spec machines.

[binkster 0]

Operating systems! Same Specs on dual boot with vista was around 3500 or average FPS 35 to xp 5700 average fps 57. Not sure why but vista sucks. Win7 seems to be in some cases better than xp or the same.

Edit I also want to add that someone said because of how much ram vista uses. Well I went from 2gig of ram to 4gig of ram and score didnt change with vista. So basically its either vista or DRIVERS. All we can do is wait and see if decent nvidia drivers come out later that include some optimizations for ArmA.

[IceShade 0]

As per OP standard, everything normal, fillrate 100%, 1680x1050x32.

E6750 @ 2.66 GHz

GTX 275

2x 1GB DDR2 @ 667 MHz

XP32

1: 32.0527

2: 34.6025

3: 26.4819

4: 39.4348

5: 21.8608

Overall score: 3088.65

I decided to change something..

E6750 is now at 3.2 GHz

Memory is now at 800 MHz

.. That's a big difference.

[-DirTyDeeDs--Ziggy- 0]

you dont know how glad I am to see you get this score IceShade.

of all the computers I have seen benchmarked, yours is closest to what my computer will be after my planned upgrade. (e7400 and gtx 275)

dance of joy ! :dancehead:

[TurokGMT 0]

Far from an expert on this stuff, but your GPU is only 256MB.

I would guess this is the problem.

Your CPU, RAM and OS is the same or better than mine and I find ArmA2 playable.

Thanks for the reply laggy.

I do find it playable (just) - wooded areas are obviously a killer and I get the same LOD popping issues that others have reported...guess it's time to upgrade the graphics card on this rig. The trouble will be making sure I get a compatible card that doesn't require upgrading the damn PSU as well =]

[von_paulus 0]

Texture Detail - Normal

Anisotropic Filtering - Normal

Terrain Detail - Normal

Objects Detail - Normal

Shadow Detail - Normal

PostProcess Effects- Low

Cpu - E6420 @2.11ghz

Ram - Kingston 2x2GB DDR2 800

GPU - Asus G8800GTS (g92) 512MB

OS - XP (SP3)

Resolution - 1280 x 1024

Normal Score - 2623

Upgraded CPU to E8500 @3.16Ghz

Overall Score: 4509

[froggyluv 2136]

Big jump since my initial 2600! I sped up the timings on my memory and seems to have helped.

Specs again: 8500 oc'ed @3.8

4870 max oc on CCC

4 gigs 800 ram (can't seem to overclock the ram)

vista 64

[householddog 10]

Is the memory the only thing you changed froggyluv?

[froggyluv 2136]

Is the memory the only thing you changed froggyluv?

No sorry I can see how that seems misleading :o

The jumps came from a combination from OC'ing cpu from 3.1>3.8, Oc'ing gpu, the armaholic optimization, and the new gpu drivers and finally ram timings. Each tweak seemed to add 250-350 points respectively but I'm pretty happy with the result.

All settings normal;PP low; 100 fillrate;1440/900 resolution

Edited June 14, 2009 by froggyluv

[thepiespy 2]

Intel C2D E8400 @ 3.6gHz

eVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640mb

4GB DDR2-PC6400 G.Skill Ram

Running at 1680x1050

disappointing, to say the least

Edited June 16, 2009 by thepiespy

[Protegimus 0]

...

Tested at 1280x1024

MSI P35 FR Mainboard

Intel C2Duo E6600, 2700 MHz (9 x 300)

4GB DDR2-667 (reduced to 300 MHz with 1-1 devider due to cpu overclock)

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB driver 185.85

Windows 7 Beta x64 build 7000

3 passes done average score 2705

ArmAII right now is a mixed bag with varying performance I actually have to play on mostly low settings ...

Desrat, does your motherboard not offer a FSB:RAM multiplier that will allow you to increase RAM clk while keeping within its limits and maintaining high FSB? Your memory bandwidth (and probably your ArmA2 performance) is being crippled with your current configuration.

May also be worth testing the nvidia driver version 178.18 before you get your GTX 275, those with 8800GTS graphics cards have reported good increases.

Operating systems! Same Specs on dual boot with vista was around 3500 or average FPS 35 to xp 5700 average fps 57. Not sure why but vista sucks. Win7 seems to be in some cases better than xp or the same.

Edit I also want to add that someone said because of how much ram vista uses. Well I went from 2gig of ram to 4gig of ram and score didnt change with vista. So basically its either vista or DRIVERS. All we can do is wait and see if decent nvidia drivers come out later that include some optimizations for ArmA.

binkster, when conducting your original tests with vista I expect you were not using the -maxmem=2048 parameter (2GB RAM), did you use it when you upgraded to 4GB?

Nice work identifying memory bandwidth as another important criteria.

There is a fine line between tuning your system and seeing improvements in the benchmark and tuning it for best gameplay - if you have 3GB of RAM or over on XP 32bit you get much smoother gameplay by setting -maxmem=2048 as this substantially reduces disk access to load objects/textures.

If you're on XP 32bit and have 2GB you should still use -maxmem= as it still improves performance, but set the value to between -maxmem=1024 and -maxmem=1536 depending on what else you have running while you're playing ArmA2.

Make sure to disable all unecessary applications and services while you're gaming, anti-virus scanner, XP system restore, Windows update... simple to do and I've a batch file if anyone is interested.

Results spreadsheet is updated and available for download.

Note there are still a lot of guys running the test and posting results, but not with the specified settings - so results are not included.

Another suggestion for updating the benchmark - include a section that moves through a town such as Electro, as this is where the system seems to be taxed the most.

Another tip already mentioned but worth highlighting is for owners of graphics cards with large VRAM, set extended video graphic memory option to 'default' for gameplay.

[jumpinghubert 49]

:)

16xAF driver setting

[zoog 18]

Settings:

As requested in the first post

Specs:

AMD Phenom II x4 955BE (3.2Ghz)

4GB (2x2) Kingston 1333MHZ DDR3

Sapphire HD4890 1GB

MSI 790GX-G65 MOBO

Windows 7 64-bit

Res: 1440x900

First run:

One: 41.0163

Two: 48.202

Three: 33.7635

Four: 46.5838

Five: 18.9283

Total: 3769.88

Second run:

One: 43.3499

Two: 54.6503

Three: 38.6188

Four: 54.7445

Five: 30.8205

Total: 4443.68

Edited June 15, 2009 by zoog

[ahmedjbh 0]

^did you change anything between runs?

quite a difference. If there is that much variation between runs, then the test is almost useless.

[galzohar 31]

It's that the first run is usually slower because things load from the HDD. Better run 3 just to make sure that really is the case, though.