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Orwell

Question about stability?

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I am new to ARMA and milsim in general. I am quite interested in the idea. To be honest, the release of OFP: DR got me interested in the prospect.

HOWEVER, I've been reading the various forums associated with that game and I've come to the conclusion that it is going to be a major let down for everyone anticipating it. No dedicated servers, no leaning, no TIR support and a litany of other problems resulting from the fact that it was made for a console first, and ported to PC as an afterthought. Huge mistake.

Everyone keep referring to ARMA II as a great milsim and it has my interest. However, it seems that when ARMA II is brought up so are stability and engine-optimization issues. They appear to go hand in hand in the various threads I have come across.

Could any verterans to the series please give me the low-down on how optimization is coming along in this game as patches get released? I see ARMA II is up to Patch 1.03. Which seems to be a positive sign that:

A) the devs care about supporting their product post-release

B) the engine is being refined and bugs addressed

So, all of this has me looking seriously at purchasing ARMA II and thinking that I would definitly enjoy the game. I would just like a little bit of a run down as to the existing community's thoughts and opinions on the game as far as how it runs.

Ill just post some system info as well to help in your answering my question. I don't have a heavy-hitting machine by any means, but I think it is half way respectable. I am also willing to do some upgrading to facilitate my entry into a new gaming community I hope to be part of for quite some time. Here goes:

E6400 C2D @ 2.13GHZ (Non-OC'd Conroe which can me toyed with quite well if I need to)

BFG Nvidia 8800GTX 512MB

2 GB OCZ Ram, forget the timings but is PC6400 DDR

Onboard sound, meh..

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ArmA II should run atleast, the system requirements you can find here. The main bottleneck is the CPU, ArmA II relies more on the CPU than the GPU. With a mix of medium/low settings you should be able to play.

Stability, I for myself can say that A2 runs very stable. 2 days ago I had the first CTD after many weeks (except I and my lame scripting attempts are the reason for stability issues). :)

The actual version is 1.04 with betapatches for everyone to download.

I recommend you download the demo first and see how the performance is. It's not up to the latest version but atleast gives you an idea what to expect.

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I think the original Operation Flashpoint and Arma 2 rocks......but I am having serious stability issues with it. Arma 2 is just an amazing game and nothing is out there that is comparable. The game has a little bit of a learning curve, but once you learn how to play and learn its not a shoot em up game like Call of Duty , etc its a great game.

I would try and download the demo and see how it runs on your machine before making any decisions!

I agree on your huge mistake part that porting to PC is a bad idea. The gaming industry just keeps burying the PC and moving to consoles and I think that sucks. I would imagine its alot easier to write software for the Xbox and Playstation because the hardware is the same no matter what. PC's have so many different versions of hardware I can't imagine supporting it all. But it seems to have gotten alot worse over the years.

But to answer your question go to http://www.arma2.com/arma-2-demo_en.html and get the demo and try it out on your hardware then make your decision!!

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Patch 1.04 now, and several beta patches being tested.

Most important thing to note is that Arma 2 is a CPU hog, more than any other game, and this has 2 problematic effects.

1) Older CPU's suffer in Arma 2 with high AI scenarios and the main campaign.

2) Since there's so much pressure on the CPU then it tends to cause more instability with heavily overclocked CPU's. As an example I'll note that I'm using an E7300 with a basic overclock to 3.5Ghz and I run stable. That said, if I start going into advanced overclocking (Disabling C1E support, Forcing PCI=100, etc) then Arma 2 becomes unstable and crashes often, but if I don't then it runs without problems.

As for performance, because of my CPU I get around 28 fps in campaign under Windows 7, under XP I get around 34 fps. Outside of the campaign I get around 45fps with the limiting factor being my graphics card (9800gt) instead of the CPU which is the limiting factor in the campaign mode.

The main draw of the game is not the campaign (although the campaign is fun, if you can look past a few of the problems), but the main fun is multiplayer and user made missions.

A good thing to get you started is to create your own missions in the editor (very easy to create simple missions that last for hours, just youtube "Arma 2 editor tutorial"). One word of advice, try to be a member of a squad and not the squad leader though as the AI require you to put a lot of effort into controlling them (well, not that much, but it's very daunting to jump right into it)

Other than that, there's still some bugs that are being ironed out but it's definitely a step ahead of where it was on release and definitely a game worth playing if you like Milsims.

One thing I would note. You should consider upgrading the CPU (as mentioned, Arma 2 is a CPU hog), graphics card could use an upgrade too, but as long as you're not planning to run on very high resolutions or max settings then the CPU is the bottleneck.

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Interesting. I am DLing the demo via STEAM now. 94% ATM.

I myself was most concerned with my CPU running this game. the 8800 is a sort of middle of the road card by now (was awesome when I bought it! Argh, progress marches on!). I am looking into getting a bit of an upgrade for christmas anyway. I would like an i7 setup. Should improve things significantly.

Thanks for the posts guys.

If anyone has anything else to add, I would appreciate it!

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Don't get dissapointed by the online community or AI in singleplayer game. What you want to look for to truely experience ARMA2 in all its glory are the various semi-closed clans that run periodic coop or adversarial scenarios.

Arma2 is a beautiful game, it has many features, but also many errors that have carried over through each edition of the game. To enjoy arma2, concentrate on the stuff that works, and let the pink happy mist of alcohol/nostalgy cover everything else.

- K

edit: Not unlike wolle I had my first Arma2 crash earlier today and I bought it at relase-day. It was in multiplayer and I put it down to server scripts or whatnots.

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Make sure you build a better system than I did.....see specs below. I am about 30fps but stability for me is horrible and I am unable to find the issue. Only thing I haven't replaced is the CPU to test.

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  Orwell said:
Interesting. I am DLing the demo via STEAM now. 94% ATM.

I myself was most concerned with my CPU running this game. the 8800 is a sort of middle of the road card by now (was awesome when I bought it! Argh, progress marches on!). I am looking into getting a bit of an upgrade for christmas anyway. I would like an i7 setup. Should improve things significantly.

Thanks for the posts guys.

If anyone has anything else to add, I would appreciate it!

I would be careful with the i7, a lot of people have problems with that combination. If you look around in the troubleshooting forum there are a lot of posts from people with i7 setups. Hopefully they get fixed asap.

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My specs aren't that different to yours, E6400 standard 2.13, 8800GTX (768mb) and 4 gig ram. I run arma 2 at medium to high settings (mostly high) and it has never crashed on me yet (apart form when using the occasional mod). Like you, I see many threads about performance issues/ stability etc.., but from my point of view I have had no such problems. Since the release of the 1.04 I don't even get lag in larger towns anymore. Admittedly I'm not a fps junkie, however I don't like to play a game that doesn't give me a smooth framerate. I get a smooth framerate with Arma2. See how you go with the demo.

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Oh, and don't enable anti-aliasing. With the 88xx and 98xx series it seems to cause some jerky mouse movement problems.

Also, if you start getting low fps and feel that the movement is too blurry, disable post processing, and make sure that your 3dresolution (aka fillrate) is at 100% ( same resolution as your main resolution)

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  W0lle said:
I would be careful with the i7, a lot of people have problems with that combination. If you look around in the troubleshooting forum there are a lot of posts from people with i7 setups. Hopefully they get fixed asap.

Mmm...maybe. I personnaly got an i7920 together with an ATI HD4870x2 and ArmA2 works flawlessly.

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Tuning and overclocking a system:

Its almost the same with every game... Be carefull with that in general, else instability will knock on your door.

Better let the system "as it is" and enjoy a stable game.

Only if some games runs stable on an overclocked system it doesn't mean the system is stable at all. Thats what I learned in the past.

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  W0lle said:
I would be careful with the i7, a lot of people have problems with that combination. If you look around in the troubleshooting forum there are a lot of posts from people with i7 setups. Hopefully they get fixed asap.

I have i7 920 CPU, 8GB ram and a GTX 285 card and i have never had any problems with it, it's working flawlessly without any tweaking besides the settings in the game :D

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Yea I'd like to know what the issue is.....I'm wondering if its the Asus board, HD or CPU. Something is faulty, it doesn't make any sense on roughly the same hardware one person the game is fine and the next its not.

I have fresh OS installs with latest drivers and only Arma 2 installed and have had issues in WinXP, Vista and Win7.

Something isn't liked, but not sure at this point what! I don't think its video, ram, or power supply I have swapped out all of those.

I guess I could try an HD, I'm using 2 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drives. But I can't see how that would cause issues with the game. I'm thinking its the CPU or Asus board or drivers. But I have seen others on here with Asus boards and things are fine. So I'm wondering if its a faulty CPU.

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