Hello I have some questions on performance!!

[DeclaredEvol 10]

Ok, back in september sometime i think maybe. I bought ArmA2. I've noticed over a long time of patches. It's been getting better in performance. As of now, I have been playing ArmA2 at VERY HIGH settings. A long with my Resolution 1700x1000 or something. And my Anti Aliasing at 8 or sometimes 4. Anyways, it runs pretty decent. But the truth is, my computer can not handle all the specs of grass... and any more than 16 soldiers. Or my PC goes totally ape. One, because I have a Dual Core. As I have noticed, since i used to play the game at 1600x1000. And AA8. My game was running a little better. But not completely. Concerning graphics, it was good enough for me. But its hard to see from far distances without a ultra high res.

Anyways, still whenever i get into some heavy combat. Any more than 16 soldiers. And its bombing on me. It gets between bad and very bad. Sometimes just horrible. But anyways... I was wondering if getting a AMD Phenom II would do the trick. From what i understand, a lot of games just use one of the extra cores for loading screens. Which is a waist of time. But my graphics card is strong. So, what I am thinking. Is that the thousands of grass, leaves, and a battle field of soldiers are not able to all load at once without hideous choppiness. So it has a black load to do with my processor being dual core and at 2.8 ghz. Anyways here are my specs.

::Current Specs::

Dell XPS 400 [All dell parts] [bAD o.o]

Intel Dual Core Clocking at 2.8 ghz [My mother board only supports DUAL CORE ATM]

PNY Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ [Factory Overclocked ONLY] [The + stands for two versions of the 9800 in one.]

2 Sticks of DDR2 memory [4gig] [i already have the other 2 gig but i have to reinstall it with my operating machine for it to work]

Rocket Fish Sound Card [i don't really know what it is]

Operating Machine Windows 7 RC

::Expected Specs::

Thermaltake - V9 Black Edition Mid-Tower Case [maybe]

AMD - Black Edition Deneb Phenomâ„¢ II X4 Processor 965 [3.4ghz]

PNY Nvidia GeForce 9800GTX+ [Factory Overclocked ONLY] [The + stands for two versions of the 9800 in one.]

4 Sticks of DDR2 memory [8gig] [i already have the other 2 gig but i have to reinstall it with my operating machine for it to work]

Rocket Fish Sound Card [i don't really know what is is]

Operating Machine Windows 7 Ultimate

Edited October 26, 2009 by DeclaredEvol

[Joseph Archer 10]

Turn some or all of the settings down to high?

[DeclaredEvol 10]

Turn some or all of the settings down to high?

As it may seem, the settings being turned down would actually change the performance. It does not completely. As much as I have seen it change, is within the gpu performance. But the cpu performance is just complete crap. I can't handle playing with too much ai. As I can see though, my graphics are absolutely amazing. I can go up to 1700x in resolution or more. Well any more and it takes a bit of time for it to load all the detail. But once its loaded it runs ok. ANYWAYS... the point I am making... Or the question I am asking is how well does a Quad or Multi core processor run with ArmA2. Is it not a big difference entirely... or does it really make it funner? I need a very educated response though.

[DeclaredEvol 10]

Ok, how about... would this game be really good with dual sli?

[Bulldogs 10]

Not really. The SLI mainly effects anti-aliasing.

Try this. Goto the editor and setup 6 groups (6 squads) on the map, 3 Bluefor, 3 Opfor all in close proximity to each other, and set yourself as a civilian somewhere far away from them (far out of sight). Play that mission and see how it runs. If it's running good, move yourself close to the groups (so you can see the action)

If it runs bad when you're far away from the groups and when you're close to the groups, then try lowering the amount of groups (down to one group per side) and run the test again, first far away, then close up.

If it runs good when you are far away, but bad when you are close up on the groups then it's likely your graphics card being effected and lowering video settings and view distance should help.

If you get poor performance with a lot of soldiers regardless of whether you are close or far away and you get better performance with less soldiers regardless of close or far away then it's likely your CPU or another bottleneck other than your graphics card (CPU or hard drive are the most likely)

[Aceinmypants 10]

Hi, new here, but I've been reading around.

About the extra ram, doesn't ARMA II use 2 gigs tops? (not that it ONLY needs 2 gigs, but the game itself can only utilize 2 gigs as of right now). If you don't intend to do anything fancy wiht the ram, particularly for ARMA II (IE RAMDISK), 4 gigs should be plenty.

What I mean by using RAMDISK is that as of right now, ARMA II tends to stutter even though your are running 40-50 fps at that very instant (usually while youre moving fast). The stuttering is caused by arma trying to load textures from the hard disk and don't seem to get precached. By placing either the whole ARMA II folder or a portion of the frequently accessed files in the game into your RAM via a RAMDISk program, you can reduce or even eliminate stuttering because reading and loading files from RAM is much much faster than reading from a HDD. More on that in this link: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388

In short, if you're for sure going to get 8 gigs of ram, I would suggest trying the RAMDISK method mentioned above (you don't have to put the whole game on RAM, just the critical textures mentioned in the thread above) . If you don't want to go through the trouble, 4 gigs is plenty. Note that it doesn't seem to work for all and I have yet have the time to try it, but alot of videos posted show a good amount of smoothing even though frames don't go up. Your call.

ABOUT VIDEO CARD:

here's a quick link to testing different video cards on ARMA II

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,685770/Armed-Assault-2-Graphics-card-benchmarks-and-visual-quality-compared/Practice/

it seems like the game prefers ati cards over nvidia, but suprisingly, the 9800gtx+ you have is doing rather poorly with respect to ARMA II. I think I would upgrade that unless you're doing something like playing FSX, where an older card like the 8800 and 9800 series cards are the best performing of the bunch.

ABOUT CPU:

I think this is a rather CPU intensive game, but between a quad and dual, you can PROBABLY beat out a lower clocked quad with a mcuh higher OC'ed dual core for less, though you definitely won't go wrong with a the one your're eyeing, especially if youre gunna overclock jsut a touch.

Edited October 27, 2009 by Aceinmypants

[DeclaredEvol 10]

Great information guys, well so i am going to try the tips tonight. Whenever i get home. I will post information about my results asap. Thank you :] Stay tuned for more replies.