ArmA2 / OA (low) performance issues

[Colt45_GTO 10]

I'm running a quad core 2.6ghz with dual 1gb graphics cards 4gb ram... still having probs.

This is a really buggy game, keeps crashing, poor AI at most times makes this a very frustrating experience. I have spoken to placebo about my frustrations and his answer was well if they are in the bug report and are escalated to a sufficiently high level the maybe something will be done to sort them out...

Not good enough for me really. It seems that Bohemia were way to keen to get this released before Dragon Rising to try and beat them to the market. I would have preferred them to wait and do a good job instead of a half assed attempt at what has the potential to be an excellent game with tonnes of depth... if only for the crappy AI and poor performance issues.

Laters.

easy there soldier.

you might need the sli patch from nvidia...

check this thread

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=76908

[dalemac 10]

you're miles off the mark there mate... It's a simple case of lack of updating from Bohemia...

My main issue is the poor AI, things like soldiers standing in the open without a care in the world while a hulking great T72 is bladdering them with machine guns from 20 ft away lol... not great adaptive AI like... being an ex squaddie, I wouldn't be so carefree whilst getting my ass shot off!! ... this has nothing to do with graphics.. soz mukka.

[Krout 10]

You can try to set AIs to the expert level (assuming you haven't done that yet). It should make them smarter, lol.

Just a suggestion...:)

[Colt45_GTO 10]

you're miles off the mark there mate... It's a simple case of lack of updating from Bohemia...

My main issue is the poor AI, things like soldiers standing in the open without a care in the world while a hulking great T72 is bladdering them with machine guns from 20 ft away lol... not great adaptive AI like... being an ex squaddie, I wouldn't be so carefree whilst getting my ass shot off!! ... this has nothing to do with graphics.. soz mukka.

its only a game mate, hell my tankees dunno their ass from their elbow but its still fun.

have you installed the latest beta? 60803?

[Placebo 29]

It seems that Bohemia were way to keen to get this released before Dragon Rising to try and beat them to the market

Err no, as stated countless times in countless places, publishers decide when a game is released, not the developer.

[kklownboy 43]

you're miles off the mark there mate... It's a simple case of lack of updating from Bohemia...

My main issue is the poor AI, things like soldiers standing in the open without a care in the world while a hulking great T72 is bladdering them with machine guns from 20 ft away lol... not great adaptive AI like... being an ex squaddie, I wouldn't be so carefree whilst getting my ass shot off!! ... this has nothing to do with graphics.. soz mukka.

they update quite frequently,there is a whole section about it, and the last few where all about AI...."Off the mark there mate..."

[Capt. Eduardo del Mango 10]

Just got ArmA2 last week and thought I'd add my $0.02 in.

Specs;

AMD 64 X2 4600+

4GB DDR2 PC2-5300

Radeon 4890 1GB

Windows XP

This exceeds all of the specs for the 'Optimal Requirements' on the back of the box, but with reduced settings (reduced visibility distance, post-processing off, shadows off, terrain detail low, objects detail very low) I can just about get through the simple 'Trial By Fire' mission at 20-25fps, which drops accordingly in the more complicated campaign missions.

Gives me the impression of being another superbly designed, terribly programmed BI game. I bought OFP and ArmA so you'd have thought I'd have learned by now. It's just particularly disappointing they weren't honest about the required specs beforehand. Still, I'm not giving up - I'm trawling through the forums trying to find any tweaks that'll help.

[dogz 10]

Just got ArmA2 last week and thought I'd add my $0.02 in.

Specs;

AMD 64 X2 4600+

4GB DDR2 PC2-5300

Radeon 4890 1GB

Windows XP

This exceeds all of the specs for the 'Optimal Requirements' on the back of the box, but with reduced settings (reduced visibility distance, post-processing off, shadows off, terrain detail low, objects detail very low) I can just about get through the simple 'Trial By Fire' mission at 20-25fps, which drops accordingly in the more complicated campaign missions.

Gives me the impression of being another superbly designed, terribly programmed BI game. I bought OFP and ArmA so you'd have thought I'd have learned by now. It's just particularly disappointing they weren't honest about the required specs beforehand. Still, I'm not giving up - I'm trawling through the forums trying to find any tweaks that'll help.

Your post and your post count tell me there is hope for you.... forget fps and look for smooth gameplay

spend some time looking thru the tweaks on this forum and run 803 as a start point and you will get a good game...

I have lower spec and the game runs very well for me

[Herbal Influence 10]

The game needs good hardware not for no reason.

Check here.

To call it "terribly programmed" .... if I would be a developer from BIS I would really get angry about such posts.

[Colt45_GTO 10]

Just got ArmA2 last week and thought I'd add my $0.02 in.

Specs;

AMD 64 X2 4600+

4GB DDR2 PC2-5300

Radeon 4890 1GB

Windows XP

This exceeds all of the specs for the 'Optimal Requirements' on the back of the box, but with reduced settings (reduced visibility distance, post-processing off, shadows off, terrain detail low, objects detail very low) I can just about get through the simple 'Trial By Fire' mission at 20-25fps, which drops accordingly in the more complicated campaign missions.

Gives me the impression of being another superbly designed, terribly programmed BI game. I bought OFP and ArmA so you'd have thought I'd have learned by now. It's just particularly disappointing they weren't honest about the required specs beforehand. Still, I'm not giving up - I'm trawling through the forums trying to find any tweaks that'll help.

my FPS according to fraps is 19-21. but its as smooth as you like and it doesn't look like a flicker show. personally i doubt fraps is telling the truth.

i ONLY notice fps when i have fraps running. other than that, even at low fps my game play is fluid and smooth. so i dont know what all this problem with fps is?

turn fraps off and play the game, you'd be far better watching enemy than the fps digits. as long as the game is smooth then what difference does the frames per second do? answer....non! no difference what so ever!.

[-=seany=- 5]

my FPS according to fraps is 19-21. but its as smooth as you like and it doesn't look like a flicker show. personally i doubt fraps is telling the truth.

i ONLY notice fps when i have fraps running. other than that, even at low fps my game play is fluid and smooth. so i dont know what all this problem with fps is?

turn fraps off and play the game, you'd be far better watching enemy than the fps digits. as long as the game is smooth then what difference does the frames per second do? answer....non! no difference what so ever!.

well, your one of the lucky ones. I for example, from running FRAPS (which does not lie) have discovered that 30fps online and 30fps offline are, for some reason, two very different experiences. If I get less than 30fps online I get horrible stuttering while panning and moving. I don't think it is the hard disk, I believe its do with the server load affecting the client or something. I can run the exact same missions offline and get perfectly smooth movement all the way down to about 23fps

[Colt45_GTO 10]

i played briefly yesterday online and it was the same as SP. and i doubt my fps was any different.

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

im running the campaign "manhatten" on a average 21 fps,

with 3950mtr view distance no matter what i do.

turn graphics to low or very high its just 21 fps average

only anti aliassing and anisotrophic turned off

[RMPNCO 10]

Hi guys,

I've just bought ARMA2 which is my first PC game since OFP:CWC and I'm encountering a few problems. I'm trying to play the game however everything is slow and covered in very thick fog!

I suspect that my system may not have the power to the run the game, or do I need to do a little refinement?

My specs:

My system is AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60

RAM: 2.00Gb

32 bit operating system

Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce7150M/nForce 630M

I have no idea whether it's enough to run the game properly but guessed one of you clever peeps could help me out!

Any info, tips or pointers no matter how small or vague will be very gratefully appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any replies made.

[=kct=blackmamba 44]

http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA:_Startup_Parameters

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88632

[PeaceDoctor 10]

no no no! wait for patches and download the latest beta patches.

http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php

you can easily overclock your cpu to 3.8 Ghz with the intel stock cooler, just watch for temperature hike. If you can setup a RAID 0 "only for gaming then go for it" if not then look up on how to use RAMDISK in this forum. Turn AA off or low, terrain details to low, PP to low/off, put the rest on normal. Also experiment with overcloking your GPU which i don't know how because i own ATI.

Thanks for the answers. I'm running SATA HDDs.

I regularly update my drivers but no changes.

Also the beta patches don't work. I get an error message when launching the game with the beta (Error compiling pixel shader PSSSMSpecularAlpha:1). So I'll be waiting for the patch regarding the update or a new beta that might work.

[dogz 10]

To fix error you need to have your shortcut set to

"C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\beta\arma2.exe" -mod=beta

plus all other switches for maxmem cpu etc

and Start in set to

"C:\Program files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2"

[Lord Byte 0]

Ok here goes:

my observations as to the performance issues.

I got a Phenom II X 4 3.0Ghz cpu, 4 GB DDR2, 2X Radeon 4890 1gb each...

My game is installed on a mirrored set of HDD's and my windows 7 as well as my swapfile run on a solid state drive on.

Everything to get the highest and smoothest performance one would imagine. And indeed there STILL isn't a game out there that gets my FPS below 60... Except arma... But wait, the funnies thing is that it will not do that for half an hour... After +/- 30 mins my average fps will have dropped to around 40-30, another half an hour later and it will be around 18-24 fps... now it starts stuttering, I get freezes from up to a second, textures load very slow, just turning around makes textures disappear and reappear a while later. And it doesn't matter what I'm doing. I can be doing a nightmission in a town the entire evening, or zooming along in a highspeed dogfight or NOE flight with the cobra... I can set my clock to these issues, which clearly indicates a SEVERE memory leak issue...I have none of these problems in any other AAA game, and I got and play a shit-ton of them.

I would like these gone, as it is the only reason I'm not always playing Arma 2... They seriously limit my enjoyment of the game and are the reason I'm not playing it a whole lot more.

[dogz 10]

@ Lord you say you have mirrored drives... if you mean actual mirrored as in raid then I would think your images being updated is causing slow downs.

If they are not real mirrored drives that update the images then I think there is some other background task like scanning or updating/internet access or indexing at work.

Turn off all indexing and auto swap file management, try setting min and max swap file to the same OS recommended max.

I have not used 7 but Vista disk management and indexing is a joke.

[Bulldogs 10]

@Lord

Have you tried the latest beta patch?

Have you tried starting Arma 2 with -CPUcount=4 -winxp -maxmem=2048?

Can you monitor your page file to see if ArmA 2 is accessing it and how much it's using?

[memphisbelle 99]

@RMPNCO

Your specs are way to low for this Game. Your Graficscard is usually used for some office work. The CPU seems to be much to low as well. I have not that much expiriences with this, but what I´ve googled about it seems not to be the best solution for a Game like this.

If you want to play this Game in a better quality so you need to get a new PC. The S1 socket for your CPU does not support better cores. Same for the GFX Card. But whether or whether not upgrading is pretty much up to you.

[tonedog12 2]

hi,

title says it all really. ive been workin through the campaign with most settings on high and VD at 2000 with no issues, fps ranging between 25-40.

ive just hit the 4th mission where an assault on the capitial is takin place, fps has all of a sudden dropped to 15-20 which for me is unplayable.:o

i done a test with the same mission, i put all settings and VD to the lowest options and what fps do i get, 30!!

theres so much to like about this game but whats the point if the game engine blows so badly?

do these crap fps affect everyone on this campaign mission or missions in towns?

spec

core 2 duo 6750 oc'd to 3400ghz

4gb ram (1066mhz)

geeforce gtx 260 896mb

win7 64bit

and yes ive been usin arma2 latest betas + ive tried variuos different nvidia drivers

[Bulldogs 10]

They effect everyone with a slow CPU (yes a Core 2 duo 6750 is slow, even when OC'd)

ArmA 2 is the biggest CPU hog on the market, so without a quad core (and a good one at that) then you're unlikely to get very high fps in later campaign missions or scenarios with heavy AI and scripting. This is due to the fact that the ArmA AI is extremely complex. Although, your CPU isn't the end of it, slower hard drives also bottleneck very easily.

[jasonnoguchi 11]

My rig below returns an average of 25 to 30 fps in forests and cities too... does that means we all need i7s? (or is 25 to 30 fps, everything VH the norm??)

[reedii69 10]

They effect everyone with a slow CPU (yes a Core 2 duo 6750 is slow, even when OC'd)

ArmA 2 is the biggest CPU hog on the market, so without a quad core (and a good one at that) then you're unlikely to get very high fps in later campaign missions or scenarios with heavy AI and scripting. This is due to the fact that the ArmA AI is extremely complex. Although, your CPU isn't the end of it, slower hard drives also bottleneck very easily.

Sorry, Bulldogs, not necessarily true. I'm running an I7920 oc'd to 3.xx, with a GTX 295 and 8 gigs of DDR3 ram running at 1600mhz, Vista Ult. with two 7200 rpm hard drives w/32meg chache and I still get crap out of this game...Runs everything else just fine and dandy.

Edited December 13, 2009 by reedii69