ArmA2 / OA (low) performance issues

[Greg 0]

...What the hell is up with this game?! i've seen vids on youtube of this at full spec..i jizzed myself to say the least ..

Most of the youtubes I've seen from ordinary people, which show good frame rates, are running at low resolutions. You can't easily tell the resolution from the tiny tube vids. Other than that, people are overclocking their systems like crazy to make this game perform.

[bono_lv 10]

So... I'm back after patch 1.05 release.

I installed ACE 2 - little bugs, but awsome mod.

And game still runs like sh*t. Yeah, it's a bit better in towns now. But there is almost no difference overall. Yeah, I know - draw distance now matches view distance. But it still runs about 20fps most of the time.

I think I lost all my hopes to get any performance improvement in future. :(

Btw my system: Q9550 oc'ed to 3.4GHz, 4GB ram, HD4870x2, 2x7200rpm HDD Raid 0.

And yes, game still runs like crap. After 10 minutes gameplay my eyes are bleeding.

And yes, I tried to force vsync off with ATT. Doesn't help much, almost doesn't help at all.

Arma 2 is best game of 2009 for me, but it's performance is the worst of all games I ever played.

[Scaras 10]

Motherboard asus M4A78T-e

700 watt of quality power supply

AMD athlon II X4 620 2.61

Ati Radeon 4890 1GM RAM

4GB RAM

640 7200rpm WD Hard Disk

Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate

And Arma 2 demo runs slow like shit on low or medium, stutters all the time,fking slideshow.

All fresh drivers installed

Would really like to buy the game

[Misfit Leader 1]

To solve the performance issue i were force to apply -cpucount=4 in the ArmA II shortcut, after that all is working nicely. (got Win 7 64Bits)

[kklownboy 43]

Motherboard asus M4A78T-e

700 watt of quality power supply

AMD athlon II X4 620 2.61

Ati Radeon 4890 1GM RAM

4GB RAM

640 7200rpm WD Hard Disk

Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate

And Arma 2 demo runs slow like shit on low or medium, stutters all the time,fking slideshow.

All fresh drivers installed

Would really like to buy the game

Demo isnt the game, your settings must be to high, your HDD is fragmented to near death?

[Maurosso 10]

A wierd thing happend last night to my arma2...

Got it a week ago, after some tweeking i got it to work smoothly, just enough for me. I played some sp missions, and everything was great.

Last night after power-up and starting arma, there is a strange...glitch, every second or so. You can hear it in the sound effects too. It's like the game skipping a few frames or something. I tried lowering every thing to 0, the problem is still there. Going way over my system expectations and turing everything on high, it is still noticable (apart from the overall poor frame rate :))

I also tried shutting down all strange and unwanted services/processes. Everything that could randomly spike the cpu. Didn't help.

The game was patched to 1.05 after instaliing, newest vDrivers are installed.

What happend? I do recall I alt+F4 quit the day before, is there any chance that messed up something?

My specs don't matter this case, as i said before, the game was working well on "medium/low" i was getting 27fps on benchmark1 and am still geting around 26fps with this strange glitching. Thou it makes the game....very unplesant to play.

Core2duo 2.2@2.75

2gb ram

8600ge

[reconteam 19]

If you have an I7 series processor should you enter -cpucount=8 because there are 8 virtual cores? Or should you just use -cpucount=4 since that is the number of real cores.

[Yoma 0]

If you have an I7 series processor should you enter -cpucount=8 because there are 8 virtual cores? Or should you just use -cpucount=4 since that is the number of real cores.

cpucount=8 seems to give a lot of people very bad performance.

The best solution (for Arma2 and a lot of other programs) is to simply disable hyperthreading.

[reconteam 19]

cpucount=8 seems to give a lot of people very bad performance.

The best solution (for Arma2 and a lot of other programs) is to simply disable hyperthreading.

I'll see if it improves performance at all, but need to find a way to stop my game from crashing first. Perhaps it is the latest Nvidia drivers causing that.

I presume hyperthreading can be disabled in the BIOS?

[Scaras 10]

Demo isnt the game, your settings must be to high, your HDD is fragmented to near death?

Settings are Low and HHD is defragmented using Defrag Optimizer, while Arma2 foldaer was moved to the edge of the disk making it faster available for reading.

The main problem for me is stuttering. I tried cpucount,max mem and other sh*t but it still stuttersm no matter what

No way i am buying the game until i make demo work.

Edited January 8, 2010 by Scaras

[Zynik 10]

If you have an usb-stick or a flashdrive at hand, try loading the biggest parts from the arma2 addon-folder onto that drive. Then add to the desktop-shortcut "-mod=X:" (x is your flashdrive). This helped me out on my machine. (Thanks to the forum.)

Not everyone has the cash to buy a new PC for this game. Still pissed off for spending weeks to get this thing run at low level. I mean what are recommended system requirements for, when you can´t trust em?

[enforcer1975 0]

If you have an usb-stick or a flashdrive at hand, try loading the biggest parts from the arma2 addon-folder onto that drive. Then add to the desktop-shortcut "-mod=X:" (x is your flashdrive). This helped me out on my machine. (Thanks to the forum.)

Not everyone has the cash to buy a new PC for this game. Still pissed off for spending weeks to get this thing run at low level. I mean what are recommended system requirements for, when you can´t trust em?

Is this some kind of makeshift solid state disc? If yes, don't the hdds have higher data transfer than usb?

[Zynik 10]

Is this some kind of makeshift solid state disc? If yes, don't the hdds have higher data transfer than usb?

Yes, hdds have. And its technically really strange why it works for many people, but it does.

With flashdrive it runs better than when loaded from my s-ata hdd. Arma2-Performance seems to have a life of its own.

Have a deeper look into this thread:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388&page=27

topic is mainly about ramdisk, but scan it for "flashdrive" and youll find some other gamers using this way as an alternative to get rid of the stuttering. They also discuss the reasons for this.

[Yoma 0]

Yes, hdds have. And its technically really strange why it works for many people, but it does.

With flashdrive it runs better than when loaded from my s-ata hdd. Arma2-Performance seems to have a life of its own.

Have a deeper look into this thread:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388&page=27

topic is mainly about ramdisk, but scan it for "flashdrive" and youll find some other gamers using this way as an alternative to get rid of the stuttering. They also discuss the reasons for this.

It's not strange, it's random access time. Your HD has to physically move stuff to find data, but the flashdrive doesn't have to move anything physical to get to the data. However for bigger files this logic won't work because it will find the files quicker, but take longer to actually read them.

I would advise a real ssd. (Intel x25m i personally love, it's not cheap but still affordable.)

[fooflinger 10]

I can barely run Arma 2 on normal-high settings...It laggs and gets around 18-25 frames. This is a brand new computer build and should definetly be able to run Arma 2 on high...

Specs:

Windows 7 64 bit

Intel Core I7-920

8 gigs of DDR3 1066mhz ram

ATI Radeon HD 5870

I've gotten the latest drivers for my card, so I'm really confused as to why its so choppy. I can run Crysis Warhead maxed with pefectly playable frames, so it doesen't make much sense as to why Arma 2s so choppy. I shouldnt have to settle for the lowest graphics for this game on a brand new rig.

Anyone got any suggestions? Thanks. :)

Edit:Also, I forgot to mention theirs a little big of flickering. It doesen't happen alot, but its worth mentioning.

Edited January 10, 2010 by fooflinger

[Wasdie 0]

Specs:

Windows 7 64bit

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40Ghz

4 gigs of DDR2 800 ram

ATR Radeon 4890

20fps. No graphic changes except view distance actually improve FPS. No AA, normal to high settings. Horrible texture pop-in, flickering, every bug under the sun.

It's sad when I want to go back to ArmA just to have decent FPS.

[demonlord89 10]

cpucount=8 seems to give a lot of people very bad performance.

The best solution (for Arma2 and a lot of other programs) is to simply disable hyperthreading.

I thought that was exactly the same thing as setting CPU count to 4?

[Misfit Leader 1]

The game isn't optimized for hyperthreading, so setting cpucount=8 does nothing. Hyperthreading tech cut down the performance of ArmA 2.

So all owner of core iX have to be sure their hyperthreading option is disable in BIOS if it is available.

Then don't forget to put cpucount=4 in your shortcut to get the maximum from your CPU if it is a quad-core.

[kklownboy 43]

I thought that was exactly the same thing as setting CPU count to 4?

no, it just means A2 will use 4 possible cores, BUT your GPU driver will still see 8 cores... and depending on the SW(looking at you NVDA) it can bork the threads/Cache etall. So cpu=4 will work only if the Driver sees that from the engine and feeds it accordingly.

[dogz 10]

Specs:

Windows 7 64bit

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40Ghz

4 gigs of DDR2 800 ram

ATR Radeon 4890

20fps. No graphic changes except view distance actually improve FPS. No AA, normal to high settings. Horrible texture pop-in, flickering, every bug under the sun.

It's sad when I want to go back to ArmA just to have decent FPS.

I find it really amusing that particularly in this type of thread... with all that has been proved about how important storage subsystem is. ie(HD/Ramdisk/Flash)

People still post "my A2 is slow" etc... but they dont say what HD etc that they have...

BTW Wasdie your CPU is very weak for A2

My Q6600 3.0Ghz runs at 70 -90% on all 4 cores most of the time.

if you can get at least 9 series quad and get it up near 3-3.5Ghz you will see big gains.

Edited January 11, 2010 by dogz

[tonedog12 2]

i had high for this latest patch improving the performance of this game but alas no, im still stuck on the same campaign mission.

its the one where a city is bein assaulted. i have all settings on normal which up until this certain mission hasnt causes any probs. on this mission however my fps drops to 15-20 which is horrible. even when i put all settings to lowest i barely make 20 fps!

i know people say why bother with sp, its mp that this game is all about, but when i buy a game i expect to be able to finish the campaign.

in the readme for this patch is said there would be big performance gains in built up areas, well not for me.

is there gonna be another patch or is this it?

[Wasdie 0]

I find it really amusing that particularly in this type of thread... with all that has been proved about how important storage subsystem is. ie(HD/Ramdisk/Flash)

People still post "my A2 is slow" etc... but they dont say what HD etc that they have...

BTW Wasdie your CPU is very weak for A2

My Q6600 3.0Ghz runs at 70 -90% on all 4 cores most of the time.

if you can get at least 9 series quad and get it up near 3-3.5Ghz you will see big gains.

I actually do plan on getting a Q9550 as I can't afford a new motherboard and powersupply.

I know the E6600 is a bit weak but offline I can pull in 40-50 fps but when I get online I get 20... A bit annoying. Also I turned down textures a bit because my 7200rpm HD is a bit slow for this game. I figured since it pulls so many textures from the HDD on the stream, it would be stupid to have it pulling the highest res. I wish it would do a better job of storeing textures in the 1 gig of video memory I have which is DDR 5...

[kklownboy 43]

Specs:

Windows 7 64bit

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.40Ghz

4 gigs of DDR2 800 ram

ATR Radeon 4890

20fps. No graphic changes except view distance actually improve FPS. No AA, normal to high settings. Horrible texture pop-in, flickering, every bug under the sun.

It's sad when I want to go back to ArmA just to have decent FPS.

20fps in what missions/game type? i didnt see your resolution? but if your more than 1600/1200(which is pushing it for your 4980) id expect it to run in the 20s. There are two ways to get more FPS, turn down your gfx to make up some FPS when on line(may get 5fps, or more with grass off,VD down) Or OC your CPU to 3.6/3.8.... . Texture pop happens... Kju( my all time community champ) did "proper_textures" its a must, and RAMDISK is awesome if you have the extra RAM. Want better game play? BUY IT.

[ultimateflashpoint 10]

Hey guys. I installed the 1.05 patch over my 1.04 steam install and the framrate now runs constantly at about 8 FPS where I normally got 30 before. I had steam redownload and install to patch 1.04 but I still have this issue in both vanilla and modded versions.

[ultimateflashpoint 10]

Never mind, I got it.