Optimization

[An Fiach 10]

So I finally downloaded the game on steam and ran some tests. The optimization is terrible. The only adjustments I found that made a real impact was fill rate but this only effected base fps and had no change (comparing 100% and 200%) once the shooting began. The game is only using about 40% of cpu and 30% of ram when compared to normal operation at desktop. (1.5% -40% and 34% -66%)

I found that explosions/ fireball effect caused the most drop in frame rates and the game crashed after lowering most of the settings to normal after starting at very high.

I ran my test in the editor placing 24 infantry squads, 6 attack helicopter squads and 4 tank squads.

q6600 2.4, 9800gtx 512, 4gb ram on vista ultimate service pack 2 32 bit. I had expected my older and slower cpu to be an issue but it is hardly being used. It doesn't appear to be a gfx issue either since the settings didn't have any real effect on performance. I will do more testing using one of the premade missions to see what happens.

[MPBR 10]

So I finally downloaded the game on steam and ran some tests. The optimization is terrible. The only adjustments I found that made a real impact was fill rate but this only effected base fps and had no change (comparing 100% and 200%) once the shooting began. The game is only using about 40% of cpu and 30% of ram when compared to normal operation at desktop. (1.5% -40% and 34% -66%)

I found that explosions/ fireball effect caused the most drop in frame rates and the game crashed after lowering most of the settings to normal after starting at very high.

I ran my test in the editor placing 24 infantry squads, 6 attack helicopter squads and 4 tank squads.

q6600 2.4, 9800gtx 512, 4gb ram on vista ultimate service pack 2 32 bit. I had expected my older and slower cpu to be an issue but it is hardly being used. It doesn't appear to be a gfx issue either since the settings didn't have any real effect on performance. I will do more testing using one of the premade missions to see what happens.

I had the exact same setup.. (save vista 64 - 32bit is waste with 4+GB RAM)

However, I found it very playable @ 1680 with 100% fill and most options on medium. and I monitored all cores working around 40-70% at all times. (Dual screen with monitor software + G15)

I do however have my CPU @ 3.3, I noticed improvments all the way from 2.7 - 3.4 (3.4 just a tad 2 hot even with 6 case fans ultra-120 Heatsink etc)

I made several large missions and engagments in the editor (20 + helis) (10 tanks) 20-30 inf + trasnport all with triggers etc and did not have any issues

Then for the hell of it I upgraded to a gtx295..+exe rename

Now running @ 1920 with 125% fill and 4K view distance with mst settings on High or very high. Smooth as.. just get a stutter when first loading map, but after that its dead smooth and very playable :D with lots of eye candy.

I kill all unneeded background services and tasks in vista prior to running as well.

[An Fiach 10]

64 bit is useless to me until there are more programs that make use of it and I know that extra 1G Ram is wasted bit it isn't really necessary anyway. Having a quad chip relatively means little apparently and I know the clock speed makes a difference, the 2 extra cores should make up that gap. SO far I can run with everything set to very high, fill rate 100% and have no issues with the first scenario mission, changing settings has little effect, it mostly shows in the armory. It plays fine unless I bump up the fill rate but then it goes in slow motion but not in a stuttering fashion which usually indicates a hardware bottleneck. Regardless of the system, changing the video options should effect performance predictably and significantly, but so far as I have discovered to this point, they do not. I am led to believe that it is a cpu optimization issue where regular missions contain many scripts, triggers and modules. Next I will go into the editor and spawn an aircraft and observe how performance changes as I add things to the map

[Heatseeker 0]

I think Arma II doesnt work well under Vista 32 :confused: .

The pic is small but you can see that the trees to the left didnt load fully, i get bad lods all the time (vegetation, buildings, vehicles, etc), i can decrease all the seetings to normal or low, its the same, rolling back the nvidia drivers to 182.06 helped alot but its still terrible. When i exit a mission or the editor the graphics in the cutscene take a while to load but some stuff remains in low detail LOD's.

Also even when the frame rate is ok (above 40 fps) the game feels sluggish and its hard to do a well placed shot. Chernogorsk and Elektrozavodsk are so bad in terms of performance that i actually miss Paraiso and Ortego, they were much more dense yet ran well (with higher view distance, high antialiasing, textures, etc).

I dont know why everyone is going crazy about the Arma II graphics and think they justify the future hardware requirements, there are some improvements over Arma 1 but the shadows, textures, models, shadders and lighting look about the same to me :confused: .

Me specs:

E6600, 4 GB DDR2, 8800 GTX 768 MB, Vista 32 SP2 (only using 3 GB of ram).

Im thinking about upgrading the CPU to a quad since its the obvious bottleneck but i still think there are memory issues with Arma 2, i hope future patches will bring much needed optimisation, after all the work tunning up Arma 1 i honestly expected Arma II to be a smooth ride from the go.

[An Fiach 10]

Yea I did some more testing, and while scene rendering obviously makes an impact (ie. barren land vs high density vegetation) I found the biggest performance hog to be the AI. Even with civilians that do absolutely nothing but stand there causes the frame rate to drop. The issue I have with this is that the CPU load isn't the problem because it isn't using the whole cpu and at the same time there is no behavioral decisions requiring faster calculations (e.g. higher processor speeds) like you would expect from opfor in combat.

That being said, the game runs so far perfectly smoothly even online. Fraps tells me I have low frame rates >20 but I have no issues with being able to play. There is definitely an issue with Vista, but that is true for all games. I too was hping ArmA would perform better than the A1 original release but I still rate this as a great game. They just need to address the optimization issues.

If you game feels sluggish it may be related to fill rate and post render effects, for me it goes into slow motion when I hit single digit frame rates (according to fraps) but reducing those solves the issue.

---------- Post added at 06:12 AM ---------- Previous post was at 04:38 AM ----------

Tested -winxp and -maxmem, actually decreased performance.

[Edgecrusher2112 10]

The performance is a real pain in the arse :-(