Why can I have 10000 view distance, but not...

[mon_diesle 10]

have any antialiasing, or fillrate at all without extreme stutter?

I can use high settings at full view distance w/o AA and 100% fillrate. I can drop the view distance down to 500 and it is still choppy if I add 125% or low AA. WTF?

[PogMoThoin 10]

Without giving any stats thats impossible to answer

[Scorpio9 10]

The higher your fillrate the more polys you have to render, a 100% fillrate has a dramatic performance hit even for most of the top end video cards out there to-date, Antialiasing even at normal mode is a very heavy hitter as well as Postprocess Effects. At 100% fillrate and normal Antialiasing not only do you have to render the extra polys you have to Antialias them as well. If your card is not capable of achieving all settings set to the absolute highest settings then you will need to take the time and find the best balance for your system, which maybe a little time consuming but is worth the investment. I normally run a fill rate of 4000 which I find to be very satisfactory for my EVGA GTX 280. Its just a matter of balance. Im sure sometime by the 2nd quarter of next year we will see cards that will capable of achieving full settings for ArmA 2. You got to remember this is one of the most demanding game out there right now when it comes to system resources, not just for the GPU but the CPU as well.

www.armaman.com

CPU: Intel i7 920 (C0/C1) @ 3.82GHz (1.30v)

Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2

PSU: Corsair 750W

Memory: 6GB Corsair DDR3 @ 1392MHz

GPU: EVGA GTX 280 1GB

Monitor: Acer 22" LCD (1680x1050)

HDD: 2x WD Black 500GB (OS + My Docs)

OS: XP 32bit + Win7 64bit

[SFJackBauer 10]

Higher fillrate = more pixels. Polygons quantity is modified by terrain and object detail, and distance. So fillrate does not change polygons, just pixels.

Now depends on which resolution you are running. I have a 24" LCD 1920x1200 native, and a GTX285. In Chernarus I have to left fillrate at 100% to get fluid. No AA either. However in some places with low vegetation, or in Utes, I can bump it 150% with no hit.

[Flash Thunder 10]

Fillrate/3D Res is just increasing the pixels, not polygons.

For me Anti-Aliasing takes off 15 FPS just on Low setting, its not very optimized, and if you have alot of objects in your view thats alot of calculation by your GPU.

AA only makes a big difference if you have it on HIGH settings anyways.

Viewdistance at 10Km is easier on your system because at around 6Km the quality of the textures, objects being rendered are almost nothing to resources, notice how trees are 2D even at around 4Km.

I don't put it above 4800 for me because when I tried 6800 I had a CTD.

[Scorpio9 10]

SFJackBauer

Higher fillrate = more pixels. Polygons quantity is modified by terrain and object detail, and distance. So fillrate does not change polygons, just pixels.

Now depends on which resolution you are running. I have a 24" LCD 1920x1200 native, and a GTX285. In Chernarus I have to left fillrate at 100% to get fluid. No AA either. However in some places with low vegetation, or in Utes, I can bump it 150% with no hit.

Yes SFJackBauer your right sorry my mind got stuck on the view distance part of his question. So what does fill rate do for you.... from my observations it is rendering more pixels mostly on trees and grass and does have a bit of AA effect so I would say it does more to sharpen the scene then anything and mostly noticeable on trees in the distance, pretty but when your in the midst of a battle who is taking the time to look at how beautiful the trees are off in the distance. Antialasing sharpens the edges of the polygon edges of the model being rendered removing the stair stepping effect so it is a hard performance hit but dosent seem as hard of a hit as fill-rate has and adding AA on top of that you really got huge pile of work for your GPU to handle. The polygon trees are basically simply plans arranged in ways as too to add the texture that allows it to appear as a 3D model AA does nothing to sharpen this texture map that's where the fill-rate comes into play from my observations. The texture map is a 2 part texture with the texture and a alpha map for the cutout for the see through areas of the trees to add the illusion of leaves and branches to the trees.

Increasing view distance is increasing the number of polygons plus with a fill-rate of 100% you will see a significant performance hit and increasing fill-rate is only going to compound this further dragging your FPS down.

Post-process effects tend to blur the scene.

One think i would like to see more then sharping the scene in general would be a slightly sharper shadow map.

Thanks for the correction on that SFJackBauer

www.armaman.com

CPU: Intel i7 920 (C0/C1) @ 3.82GHz (1.30v)

Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2

PSU: Corsair 750W

Memory: 6GB Corsair DDR3 @ 1392MHz

GPU: EVGA GTX 280 1GB

Monitor: Acer 22" LCD (1680x1050)

HDD: 2x WD Black 500GB (OS + My Docs)

OS: XP 32bit + Win7 64bit

[mon_diesle 10]

Thanks guys. I actually noticed that beyond 6000 no more objects are rendered anyway, just terrain. But for the guy who wanted stats:

CPU: Athlon 64x2 5200+

GPU: ASUS 9600GSO G94 512MB

RAM: 4GB DDR2 800

I run this setup on my 720P HDTV, so not very high resolution.

[no use for a name 0]

Thanks guys. I actually noticed that beyond 6000 no more objects are rendered anyway, just terrain. But for the guy who wanted stats:

CPU: Athlon 64x2 5200+

GPU: ASUS 9600GSO G94 512MB

RAM: 4GB DDR2 800

I run this setup on my 720P HDTV, so not very high resolution.

where there's your problem

[SFJackBauer 10]

...

Indeed, image quality seems better with higher fillrate than AA because of those 2D rendered trees.

However AA is worst because shadows dont work with it (at least for me). And lack of shadows is a huge hit on immersion (at least for me).

So lately I gave up on both, as the FPS are more important when aiming a rifle.

[randir14 10]

In my case AA doesn't cause too much of a performance drop until I'm around those red/orange trees, then it feels like playing in slow motion.

[Alex72 1]

I have a 8800GTS 320MB and i play with NORMAL - HIGH AA without any problems. The 3D resolution you should not ever touch with that video card. Its not powerfull enough. But im sure you CAN use AA. What you cant do is the mix of AA+10000VD with that videocard.

How about go down to 2500VD and NORMAL AA? I think my system is slightly better than yours so i would maybe say 1500-2000VD and NORMAL AA. I would test around there anyway.

10000VD is for computers that can handle it. Its not many that play with 10000VD. At times when i do smaller wars in the editor i go 6000VD with smooth gameplay. But you have to set it accordingly. Thats why we have an ingame slider. ;)

[pj[cz] 2]

Your card is simply not able to handle antialiasing/high resolutions.

The 3D res thing (fillrate) does simply multiplies your resolution (1024x768@100% = 1024x768 pixels, while 1024x768@200% = 2048x1536 pixels which is FOUR times more), this makes it kinda usable only for SLI users because i dont think a single card can handle 2000+ resolutions and zou can see that even 1024x768 with fillrate is over that.

Anti-Aliasing / Post processing is another thing quite dependant on the resolution because antialias needs to find those edges to smooth out and while there is more pixels rendered there is more to antialias and postprocessing simply has more pixels to alter.

The bottom line is while draw-distance is a CPU/GPU thing, PP/AA/FR are heavy graphic card dependant and you really need good cards in SLI to push them to very high in Arma2...