Performance woes - 1920x1200 with 9600GT

[bhaz 0]

ArmA 1 had pretty decent framerate gains after every patch release (for me anyway). The only real solution I see is to wait for future patches (knowing BIS, they usually include tons of optimizations), or buy a new card.

I'm using a 9600GT and Q9400 at the moment and I'm not really expecting to run on any more than Medium, and that's at 1280x1024.

What exactly is Arma2 doing more, graphics-wise, that justifies the double demand on Hardware?

Compared to other games, the scale is kinda bigger. I'd be giving the devs credit for the amount of FPS they pulled off for such a quick release. Honestly my expectations were a lot less.

[GhostNThaMachine 10]

Ethne, Heatseeker - do you think I'm a tech noobie or something?

I run modern games with modern graphic engines like Stalker:CS, Fallout3 at 40+ FPS on everthing high detail at that resolution, with 4x FSAA. The 9600GT is an AWESOME card for the money, and absolutely capable of 1920x1200 resolutions. You can't tell me Fallout3 or Stalker with max view distance and max objects looks any worse or are more "dated" games than Arma2. Fact is that even A1 ran very much slower for most people than any other graphic-intense game, and the A2 engine has the same low performance.

So much for "unrealistic expectations" or "expecting too much".

Ethne, the RECOMMENDED SPECS are not the MINIMUM SPECS. Recommended is what BIS wrote on the box, a 8800GT, and RECOMMENDED should mean to be able and play the game at high details on average resolution (1280x1024) or low details at high resolution.

Recommended used to be what you needed to really enjoy a game, these days Marketing seems to dictate that Recommended is what you need to barely play. I don't even want to know how A2 would play on Minimum listed.

Panthe, you are right that the sluggish feel never entirely goes away, even in scenes with 40+ FPS (open field). It's like the movement is stuck at first, then accelerates to normal speed, compared to the direct, even movement speed you get in normal shooters where mouse movement and screen movement seem utterly directly related. Not so with BIS engines.

If you haven't, you might want to try the 185 Drivers for the 8800GTS - they gave me 10% free performance coming from the 182. On WinXP they work very well, I heard problems for Vista Users however.

Centipede, I'm on WinXP. But thanks for thinking out of the box.

I understand completely what this person is saying. This game won't even run on a machine that meets "minimum requirements." I'm aware that the demo is a little harder on a PC than the regular game. But I loaded it on a computer that was well above the "minimum system requirements" and got nothing but complete and total lag and an almost completely white screen. I'm downloading the full version atm on a PC with a 3.3ghz processor, 500gig HDD, and an Asus 9600GT. I'll let you know how it goes.