ArmA2 / OA (low) performance issues

[[general nuisance] 0]

The fact that you basically have to overclock your cpu insanely (or buying a very expensive one and still have to overclock slightly) to get this game running properly is bothersome to me.

I don't like to whinge but it's pathetic to release a game when it still struggles to run on the highest performing graphics cards and processors. Surely they would have come across these "low perfomance" issues whilst testing the game? It seems ludicrous to sell a game when no system can run the game at the highest graphics settings.

My specifications are:

Asus Striker II NSE

Intel Core 2 Duo 3.16GHz

Geil 4GB RAM

Nvidia GeForce GTX 295

Western Digital 1 TB H.D.D.

Sound blaster X-fi Xtreme Gamer

Windows 7 64-bit

Is my processor too weak to handle this game? I know it meets the required and recommended specifications for the game. However, I experience as do many others severe F.P.S drops in dense urban areas such as Chernogorsk. I'll try tweaking the graphics setting but when I last played the game which was on its release. I didn't experience much success with it.

Edited April 26, 2010 by [General Nuisance]

[domokun 515]

@Gen. Nuisance : I agree with you but many games on PC are only playalable on low or medium settings for most mortals. Unfortunately BI have always been particulary bad at this (OFP, A1 & A2) but if you look at it another way you realease that they were shooting for the stars, not the masses.

Personally I don't think that's right because it hurts them in the short-term and in today's "I need everything, now" culture that REALLY hurting them.

Seeing as neither you, nor I are going to change BI's strategy, here are a few tips that should help you getting half decent framerates:

(in order of priority & ease)

1. get the latest official patch (v1.05)

2. try the latest beta patch (works wonders for some). Don't worry this can be safely installed in parallel to the official patch

3. try the tips I outlined above (post from 3 weeks ago)

4. try OC your CPU - increase your FSB gradually (5 MHz at a time?)

Let us know how you got on.

[Bulldogs 10]

What Domo said. I only ever had issues with city areas but the latest beta patch has gotten rid of it altogether for me.

[diveplane 0]

have to agree i have tried all the tweaks and visual settings to get this to run smooth all round, its a abortion , in terms of performance, sorry to sound harsh but its a fact.

really hope they have decent beta testers this time, that test frame rates in the next installment of this game , and future AA2 patches to address these issues.

Edited April 27, 2010 by diveplane

[[general nuisance] 0]

@Gen. Nuisance : I agree with you but many games on PC are only playalable on low or medium settings for most mortals. Unfortunately BI have always been particulary bad at this (OFP, A1 & A2) but if you look at it another way you realease that they were shooting for the stars, not the masses.

I don't think anyone is criticising the scope of their ambition since Bohemia Interactive have amassed a large and committed following since they gave us Operation Flashpoint. I think it's their implementation of the programming code and execution of the game which lets them and us down. Due to their long experience with this low performance issue, one would think they would have come upon a solution.

Personally I don't think that's right because it hurts them in the short-term and in today's "I need everything, now" culture that REALLY hurting them.

Still, taking a few years until a top-end system can run the game at full or near-full settings? It's a little silly.

1. get the latest official patch (v1.05)

2. try the latest beta patch (works wonders for some). Don't worry this can be safely installed in parallel to the official patch

3. try the tips I outlined above (post from 3 weeks ago)

4. try OC your CPU - increase your FSB gradually (5 MHz at a time?)

Thank you for the help.

I have installed the 1.05 patch but it hasn't made any difference. I also installed the beta patch but to no avail. I couldn't see any difference, if there was any, it was marginal. I also tried disabling "PhysX" in my Nvidia control panel since that can make things worse. I didn't see any change. There are settings one can change in the "manage 3D settings" within the same control panel which are outlined in another thread. I'll give them a go first. I've never overclocked my machine and I'm particularly wary of doing so. I think it's more to do with my graphics card. Since I do notice a change in the F.P.S. when I tweak the graphics settings. For instance if I drop settings to very low/low my F.P.S increases by 10 or so. If I play in an area such as Chernogorsk with low settings then my F.P.S is pretty good. However, the graphics look rather poor with such settings. It's a shame, when I choose high settings everything looks stunning. One last thing. I did try the vegetation tweak mod but I tried it in an urban area and it didn't do much. I guess it's designed for the outdoors?

Edited April 28, 2010 by [General Nuisance]

[domokun 515]

@diveplane: that does sound rather harsh. Please bear in mind that what might be fact for you might be fiction for others.

@Gen. Nuisance:

Due to their long experience with this low performance issue, one

would think they would have come upon a solution

I whole-heartedly agree. I was hoping for 3rd time lucky!

It's a little silly

Rather! However is also seems to be an increasing trend (Company of Heroes, Crysis, GTA4, etc.). To be honest I'd rather they publish some ambitious and slow, rather than something underwhelming and fast.

I'll give them a go first. I've never overclocked my machine and I'm particularly wary of doing so. I think it's more to do with my graphics card. Since I do notice a change in the F.P.S. when I tweak the graphics settings. For instance if I drop settings to very low/low my F.P.S increases by 10 or so.

You're right to be wary so if you don't know what you're doing, invite a friend of who does and/or take it in very small steps. As for the graphic settings, despite their name much of their performance is dictacted by your CPU. With your setup you should be able to play smoothly with most settings on Default. FYI here's a good guide to OC your video card. Whenb I have a bit more time, I'll dig out a similar guide to OC your CPU.

In the meantime, here is another tweak that might help:

1. Find your arma2.cfg file (under My Documents)

2. Make a copy of this file (if anything goes wrong, you can go back to this)

3. Search for these 2 parameters and change the values to "0"

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=0;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0;

This seemed to help me and others running Win7.

Oh and yes the vegetation tweak only really helps when the screen renders vegetation. So forests = good perf gains. City = little or none

[[general nuisance] 0]

1. Find your arma2.cfg file (under My Documents)

2. Make a copy of this file (if anything goes wrong, you can go back to this)

3. Search for these 2 parameters and change the values to "0"

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=0;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0;

Thank you again. I've also posted in the NVIDIA video card(s) owners read here! thread and I mentioned your settings adjustment since another guy gave a different value. However, regarding changes to the arma2.cfg file, shouldn't it be marked as "read-only" so that ArmA 2 doesn't overwrite it? As I mentioned in the aforementioned thread. I switched off V-sync and my F.P.S jumped from a '75-115' (although still fluctuating) in the main menu screen and in some sections of the game. However, in the centre of Chernogorsk my F.P.S. will still drop to '30' or so but it doesn't reach the '20' range.

One final thing. The Proper Vegetation Tweak addon link you provided. On the page there are two downloads. I only downloaded the 28MB version which is labelled "Vegetation_VeryLow". The one below it which is 102MB is labelled "Vegetation_Low_Visuals"; I know common sense suggests the former to provide greater performance gains but did I download the 'best' one and why is the second one a much bigger download?

Edited April 28, 2010 by [General Nuisance]

[seniecka 10]

Hello ARMA2 soldiers,

I heard about new alternative to Project Reality - Arma II game approximately 2 weeks ago. So I decided to try it. I installed it and even in practice course I have maybe 25 fps max (looking at the sky) basically i have maybe 7-10 fps. And I dont get it. Game automatically set up settings to normal, rezolution 1920x1080. I know, that my laptop maybe is bit weak for this rezolution, i set up to 1360x768 and fps is the same. Then i set up all settings to low, turning off effects and shadows and even I set rezolution to shameless 640x480 fps is the same 7-10 around :butbut:

So I am really depressed with this result and I dont know what to do. I was playing on 1.02 version, maybe 1.05 would help me at least?

My laptop's settings:

Cpu: Intel Duo Core P8400 2.26GHZ

Ram: 4GB DDR2

GPU: GeForce 9600GT m 512MB

OS: Vista 64-bit

Thanks in advance.

[TimRiceSE 10]

Youre running it on a laptop. Its a mobile CPU, even though its a dual core, its still a mobile processor designed for low power usage.

The 1.05 patch will probably give slightly better performance though.

[seniecka 10]

Youre running it on a laptop. Its a mobile CPU, even though its a dual core, its still a mobile processor designed for low power usage.

The 1.05 patch will probably give slightly better performance though.

Oh ok, understood. But it's still bit strange. Because my laptop is able to run Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on low settings and I can even get 40fps around in some places, but mainly 20-30 fps.

[TimRiceSE 10]

BC2 isnt very cpu intensive in my experience, youre probably limited there by your gfx chipset rather than CPU. ArmA2 is more CPU bound than GPU :)

[EDcase 87]

Welcom Seniecka

Check Nvidia settings and make sure V-Sync is OFF.

Make sure all settings in Nvidia control panel are set for best performance.

No filtering and all optimizations ON.

1.05 will help a bit I think.

You will have to put graphics settings quite low but it should be better than 7-10 fps. Lots of AI will be a big slow down as they use more CPU power.

Don't test in the Campaign missions as those are bad for everyone.

I use the "Village Sweep" mission to compare my settings.

[seniecka 10]

Thank you. I will try to follow your instructions. :)

[Herr_kalashnikov 10]

IMHO there are 2 performance aspects to ArmA2

Graphics

Purely handled by the GPU (besides lower setting shadows). On this area ArmA doesn't require to much. Sure to have all eye candy on HD resolutions u need a decent card but with lower settings mid end cards perform pretty decent. Test it by just opening a island in the editor with no AI etc.

General processing

Where ArmA differs from the average shooter is in CPU usage. The fact AIs aren't scripts but genuine routines and ballistic calculations have to done etc, requires the most of even the highest clocked CPU's. It seems these calculations results in big framerate drops, which in some way is weird i agree (as in it should result in slower reacting ai and that kind of stuff instead of framerate drops).

Think this is one of the downsides of the engine BIS is using for quite some time now.

But this is just based on my experience over the years, of course i could be mistaking here.

[Richey79 10]

Kalashnikov is right. Two things to add:

i) Get ready to lower the standard of graphics you are prepared to play at if you want a smooth experience in scenarios with lots of combatants (with any mid-end machine). Turn off aa, asf, post-processing and shadows. Switch 'terrain' and 'objects' to 'very low'. You can manage 'medium' or 'high' for graphics memory with 512MB without too much of a hit. You should be able to set the view distance to anything between 2,000 and 5,000 without too much trouble with such low settings. You might expect most of these game-elements to put load on only the graphics card, but they cumulatively put strain on the CPU. If you want to be able to play with lots of AI calculations going on (and have a smooth experience), you can't afford this load.

Make sure you defrag your hard-drive thoroughly after installing the 1.5 patch. Best not to have the HDD over-loaded, and check you have your page-file set up so that plenty of HDD room is given over to that, too. Use NVidia tools to set vsync off rather than doing so in game, and experiment with the flip-queue number that gives you the best performance (this is sometimes referred to as 'maximum number of pre-rendered frames'). In my experience, changing the render resolution in this game has little impact on performance.

Now the game should run super-smooth when you use the editor. Multi-player will be less so (check whether it's acceptable for you). Campaign missions like 'Harvest Red' and 'Manhattan' will probably still give you less than 30fps. If it's smooth, it will probably feel like more, though.

ii) The major CPU killer seems to be the scripts that are used within missions to make cool things happen. This is why you'll get smooth play on the scenario 'Take the village' (or whatever it's called) or 'First to fight'; but 'Harvest Red' tends to make the game a slide-show on most machines. Thankfully, in multi-player most of these will be running server-side, and I expect that the Project Realism team will optimise their map and use of scripts to keep down the CPU load for players.

It's also worth noting that online the server controls certain settings, such as view distance and terrain quality, so that there's a level playing field.

Edited April 29, 2010 by Richey79

[seniecka 10]

Thank you guys for fast and wide responses. I have reinstalled game and setup up settings as you among said. And now I am pretty happy with the result. I tried my perfomance on "Village Sweep" and it went pretty well. :)

[johncage 30]

about the i7. lots have suggested to turn off hyper threading. i would, except windows7 crashes when i do that. i want a confirmation from people that say their i7 was running poorly with hyper threading turned on.

the game's still downloading for me right now. i uninstalled it twice after two failed attempts to get it running past 10fps.

this game ran twice as well on my old computer. is windows 7 the culprit here?

---------- Post added at 04:40 AM ---------- Previous post was at 03:49 AM ----------

-Ziggy-;1603140']heheheh' date=' you come here asking for help and tell the first person he is wrong?

dont expect much more help unless you are willing to accept new information.[/quote']

if he is wrong(and he is), which should he tell him he's right?

he has 2gb ram, which is the recommended setting, which 32 bit applications are limited to. therefore adding more ram is a waste of money. the symptoms he described also have nothing to do with low memory.

[ultimateflashpoint 10]

@zachanscom

Absolutley not! :) ArmA 2 on Win7 runs pretty well for me on a dated 9950 BE(2.6 ghz) except for alot of stuttering. I have about 15 or so FPS after I have placed about 50 men and a nice pile of other objects. The campaign on the other hand usually runs about 10-14 FPS for me because of all the scripts and other crap. :/

[johncage 30]

i'm quite worried here. i have several other games that run like silk. crysis, ntw, gta4, etc.

yet this game is really crawling along. i know my graphics option and i have the all turned down or off. something else is amiss here.

the download's at 89 percent. lets see if i can get it to run ok this time.

[ultimateflashpoint 10]

Take a screenshot of your graphical settings menu so we can see what everything is set at.

[johncage 30]

that won't be necessary because i am well aware of what those settings do and most of them are off. also, print screen doesn't work under windows 7 anymore.

however, forcing verticle sync on in my nvidia panel for this application took care of the sluggishness. i think it's because the fps is constantly jumping around.

but now i still have micro stuttering. i've increased the view distance cause some suggested it might be due to loading objects, but that's not it. because having it set to something like 3000 or my default 1600 doesn't change anything.

[InFireBaptize 0]

many people suffer from stutter. Defrag your hard drive, it makes a big difference. Use gamebooster and put your page file in different drive than your game. I have my game on RAID 0 and still notice stutter when i'm the gunner (air/ground vehicles) and zoomed in.

[johncage 30]

i'm sorry, i tried everything on this forum and to no avail. all i know is that the max frames ahead setting + vertical sync have great impacts on this game, but i just can't get the right combination. if i set it too high, the game will become stuttery, set it too low and it lags. set it to default and it's like a nightmare. i would really like an end-all-be-all solution here. not just a bunch of guesswork and personal preferences (ie, setting it to 2 seems to help me, etc) unfortunately is seems only bis can do this and they're not releasing any new patches anytime soon.

[ultimateflashpoint 10]

If you are just having problems with lag and stuttering, welcome to the club. :) Everyone is having these problems with ArmA 2 right now. The engine is poorly optimized. There are a few things you can do to mostly get rid of the lag. Read the I/O analysis thread in the main section.

[rowdied 44]

If you are just having problems with lag and stuttering, welcome to the club. :) Everyone is having these problems with ArmA 2 right now. The engine is poorly optimized. There are a few things you can do to mostly get rid of the lag. Read the I/O analysis thread in the main section.

Sorry to rain on your parade but I'm not having any of these problems on any of my systems and I run it on 5 other computers lanned.

While it is true this game could be better optimized, BIS always find a way to fix MOST of the bugs and performance problems in subsequent patches. It's just that these patches take time due to a number of reasons, such as small development team and the gazillion hardware combinations that exist in PC gaming.

If you stick with it, it will pay off. It always has for me.:D