Few questions to devs.

[FGM 10]

Few questions to developers.

Question 1

If ArmA2 perform so badly on so many machines with different configuration, how do you expect me to buy the game and get pissed off that I can't play it with proper settings?

Question 2

If the game performs so bad, for me it looks like you released a game on an engine that isn't finished neither compatible with broad range of specifications that are available on the market these days and that you expect me to do the testing for you. Why was it released before all the tweaking and tuning was done?

Question 3

I read a lot that the game performs better on Windows XP. How come you released the game that it's not compatible with up to date systems like Windows Vista and 7?

Question 4

How come the game supports only 2 GB of RAM and is so dependent on processor power?

Question 5

My system is a XPS M1730 Laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0 GHz + 4 GB RAM + SLI 8700M GT 256 MB (it's 512 MB in SLI) running Windows Vista 64. Will I be able to play the game on medium up to high settings?

[De_little_Bubi 1]

Question 6:

If you just try the demo, would you stop asking stupid questions and use the board search function and/or sticky threads (Q5) ?

[Guest]

Question 7:

Your a computer n00b who thinks that just because he spent loads of money on a pc, it's going to run any game maxed.

You got ripped off. Lap tops are not designed for gaming, no matter what anyone tries to say.

Gaming Laptop? Please...

[jasonnoguchi 11]

Laptop? errr.... won't even run ArmA1 properly in my case. you need a gaming desktop.

[Windexglow 10]

Question 7:

Your a computer n00b who thinks that just because he spent loads of money on a pc, it's going to run any game maxed.

You got ripped off. Lap tops are not designed for gaming, no matter what anyone tries to say.

Gaming Laptop? Please...

My brothers laptop has a gtx 260 in it. Thickest laptop I've ever seen, but it's still a laptop.

[Scrub 0]

You do realize that aside from the monster of a game that pushes current tech to the limit (a significant portion of Q's 1&2), Vista is shit -Win7 is ok to run on (#3). Latest betas makes #4 irrelevant. Good luck with your Laptop, you really need to understand what 'high settings' mean in this game (#5), Crysis is equivalent to Pong when looked objectively with Arma II content-wise. (the mere word Laptop already denotes less performance than comparable desktops 9/10 times).

In short - Demo (which is severely outdated now, from a performance and feature point of view), search forums - your questions have been asked and answered many times, and more completely. And hang out to see what the deal is. Welcome.

V what he said V Well done Total.

Edited December 2, 2009 by Scrub

[-Total- 0]

AMD 5200 Dual core

XFX nvidia 8600GT

2GB DDR2-800 memory

The above system was my rommates system until he got his quadcore built. It ran ArmA2 just fine at normal settings and maintained an average of 28-32 FPS well into the 1.04 patch.

I ran it with Windows 7 release client on my Intel Q9650 Quad core w/ 4GB DDR2-1066 and an 8800GTX 640MB card going thru a matrox triplhead2go on three 20" monitors. I ran normal to high settings and maintained 27-30 FPS (keep in mind that I run a 3072X768 resolution so that's a major FPS hit).

As far as your laptop, you need to remember that laptop hard drives are generally much slower than desktops and usually do not have the buffer size that a desktop drive does. ArmA2 is VERY dependent on data streaming from teh hard drive.

If you have a slower hard drive with a smaller buffer size, then the game will stutter like heck for you.

You may want to check out the following thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=88388

Also, next time you post a thread asking about a game, try not to hold the developers accountable for your lack of knowledge and lack of using the search function.

[ActionMan 10]

[1] What?? Every game has a minimum and a recommended spec. If your PC meets the spec the game will run. If your PC doesn't, then that's your problem!

[2] Who says the game performs badly? Why are you asking these stupid loaded questions?

Here's one: "If you're intent on asking silly questions, why don't you go away?"

[3] Newsflash: Most games run faster on XP than Vista or Win7!!

Go complain to Microsoft, not game developers.

[4] How come it's dependent on processor power? It processes things!!

What???

[5] Your CPU is a bit slow. You could probably play on decent settings as long as you don't increase the visibility distance too much.

[Colt45_GTO 10]

sounds like the OP has just fell out of the loft of some forum thats give bad reports on the game. and on his way down through the pages he picked up bits of stories/questions from other people and strung some silly thread together.

the game isn't hard on a computer. its the O/S thats hard on the computers resorces.

[That guy 10]

your processor is way too slow. this game requires a 2.8 ghz dual core or quad, you have a 2 ghz. you are going to be skimming by on min probably.

I played this game on a laptop with about the same specs as yours (but better GPU) and the game is chugging at min

[grub 10]

Search is up the top.

[NZXSHADOWS 0]

You can Locate the ARMA 2 Demo HERE.. I would really recommend you try that out to help you in considering to buy ARMA 2.

[johncage 30]

the recommended settings are a joke. my pc well exceeds it by a large margin, and well, the game runs like a snot. 15 fps, mate. crysis is zooming around at 60 fps on high, come on, arma 2 should do better than that.

[Colt45_GTO 10]

again someone els comparing and arcade game to this!

you really shouldn't compare it will wear you down and you will fight a never ending loosing battle. this is a sim on a totally different engine than the arcade game crysis. hell my old system with crappy vid card ran crysis on max.

60fps is almost triple what a movie plays at.

[-Total- 0]

While the Crytek engine is a great piece of work, it's definitely not the best engine for benchmarking (altho many do since the name is erronously synonomous with such a task).

The draw distances and rendering details (read polygon counts and shadings) in the ArmA2 engine are much more complex. Just because it doesn't look like bright, shiney plastic as the Crytek engine does, does not mean it's not a graphically intense engine.

You could also load X3: Terran Conflict and, at absolute max settings, use it as a benchmark as well (some of the smarter, more intuitive review sites use this as their benchmark).

[FGM 10]

I think almost all of you guys are full of bullshit.

Read the 140 pages of troubleshooting and you will see where I'm coming from.

The game engine is advanced, but.... not so advanced (it's only DX9 so year 2005 at most) it does not utilize 4+ GB RAM which is bad because it comes at a cost of loading most of the textures straight up from the hard drive and it's does not support a majority of graphic cards as well it's not utilizing the newest technologies and operating systems.

The engine code itself is fcuked that's why it utilizes so much of the processor.

My laptop which I briefly described at the beginning of this post is nothing comparing to the high end desktops that are at the market at the moment.

I never sad it is or whatsoever but from what the recommended setting says it's enough to run the game on medium details.

This machine managed to run with decent fps all of so called by you "arcade games" on high details in resolution 1440x900 which I find acceptable for a 17" screen.

I know ArmA2 is different I know it's a SIM.

Thou when I read comments of textures flickering on desktops better than my laptop while set to lowest resolution and lowest details than it's obvious it's not the hardware or the drivers but the game itself that dose the magic.

Some of you find yourself lucky enough to play this game without a problem and you go around this forum posting you silly opinions about which I don't really give a fcuk that's why my question was directed to dev.

Anyway there is only one or two replies in that big wall of bullshit you posted that really answers some of my questions.

Still the main one stays mystery.

Will I be able to play it with some decent details, because running around in a world of blurry textures and bear land or whatsoever is not really my thing.

I love the idea of ArmA and OF because that's what the games should really look like these days - as most realistic as possible but still....

P.S. 1 Scrub you say "Latest betas makes #4 irrelevant" does it means the game now supports more than 2 GB of ram?

P.S. 2 Don't tell me to go read the forum because that's what I did.

Edited December 2, 2009 by FGM

[Defunkt 431]

Whether your notebook is up to it or not is immaterial as it's very clear that you are not up to it.

[FGM 10]

Whether your notebook is up to it or not is immaterial as it's very clear that you are not up to it.

How's so?

You know what never mind. Just another silly opinion.

BTW just looked up your posts and most of them are fcuking stupid comments. Jesus no-lifes do you really live to post them.

Edited December 2, 2009 by FGM

[-Total- 0]

Many of the troubleshooting posts are repeats and due to failure of individuals to use the "Search This Forum" function.

For most any PC game, there's going to be a bundle of problems in the tech area. For the past four years of technology: take every chipset, CPU, GPU chipset, soundcard chipset, memory type, and motherboard chipset.

Now multiply all those number by each other and that's the total possible combinations of hardware.

There's more though. Take every version of every CPU, GPU, motherboard, and soundcard chipsets.

Now multiply all those number by each other and that's the total possible combinations of driver combinations.

There's still more. Add in every OS from Win XP on up and then add in every possible level of updates to each version of those OS's.

Add that in as well and you're going to start coming up with a staggering figure of both hardware and software architectures. And BIS was brave enough to tackle creating a military combat simulator utilizing an extremely large playing area?

Yes. They know it takes patches to fix compatibility issues that's not possible to find during QA testing. Yet another reason for public beta testing of patches. They did the same in ArmA. The 1.14 patch in ArmA was voted "Patch Of The Year" by IGN. No patch for any other game compared to the amount of fixes and improvements in that patch. Was it that way at release? Nope. They have to rely on community feedback in order to know what compatibility issues need to be fixed.

ArmA2 runs fine for many of us, great for others. It runs poorly for a number of people and some still can't get it to install. BIS is keenly aware of each of each issue posted and reported. They always have been and address the most critical first.

As far as being DX9, most of us have no problem with that. Once the SDK for DX10 was released, it was realized that it wasnt quite as much of the bomb as originally touted. In reality, DX10 can run under XP 32 ;)

Vista was a nightmare. Windows 7 is Vista un-buggered. It only took the largest software company in the world how many years to fix their software?

There's folks who still can't get MW2 to install or run (of course IW doesn't have a dedicated tech support forum, they prefer those threads get buried)

If you haven't bought ArmA2, then you have no idea if you will run it well or not on your laptop. Coming in here with bashes and insults before you even try it, then you have to expect to get some heat from the community. It's not that everyone here are fanboys, your first post was just outright rude as your subsequent posts have been.

There's plenty of people here willing to help you out if you need it. But there's absolutely no need to come into these forums on your first post as if you're the god of all things computer gaming.

Stop being so rude and you might get some decent responses.

[dm 9]

The engine code itself is fcuked that's why it utilizes so much of the processor.

Ahahahahahaha, seriously?

<- theres the door, dont let it hit you on the way out... (I dont want dents in it)

[maddogx 13]

Few questions to developers.

Question 1

If ArmA2 perform so badly on so many machines with different configuration, how do you expect me to buy the game and get pissed off that I can't play it with proper settings?

Question 2

If the game performs so bad, for me it looks like you released a game on an engine that isn't finished neither compatible with broad range of specifications that are available on the market these days and that you expect me to do the testing for you. Why was it released before all the tweaking and tuning was done?

Question 3

I read a lot that the game performs better on Windows XP. How come you released the game that it's not compatible with up to date systems like Windows Vista and 7?

Question 4

How come the game supports only 2 GB of RAM and is so dependent on processor power?

Question 5

My system is a XPS M1730 Laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0 GHz + 4 GB RAM + SLI 8700M GT 256 MB (it's 512 MB in SLI) running Windows Vista 64. Will I be able to play the game on medium up to high settings?

1: Nobody expects you to buy the game. If you decide it's not worth spending your money on it, don't.

2: No one knows.

3: I think you'll find pretty much every game performs best on XP, then on 7 and last on Vista.

4: It's a 32 bit application, so 2GB is the limit. The game is very processor dependent because it is designed to use multiple cores and there is a lot of processor intensive stuff going on (multicore rendering, AI etc.).

5: Unlikely, especially on Vista. You may be able to hit medium, but don't expect to use antialiasing. Also, be aware that SLI systems only effectively use the VRAM of one gfx card, so your 256+256=512MB assertion is wrong. Look here.

[Colt45_GTO 10]

I think almost all of you guys are full of bullshit.

Read the 140 pages of troubleshooting and you will see where I'm coming from.

The game engine is advanced, but.... not so advanced (it's only DX9 so year 2005 at most) it does not utilize 4+ GB RAM which is bad because it comes at a cost of loading most of the textures straight up from the hard drive and it's does not support a majority of graphic cards as well it's not utilizing the newest technologies and operating systems.

The engine code itself is fcuked that's why it utilizes so much of the processor.

My laptop which I briefly described at the beginning of this post is nothing comparing to the high end desktops that are at the market at the moment.

I never sad it is or whatsoever but from what the recommended setting says it's enough to run the game on medium details.

This machine managed to run with decent fps all of so called by you "arcade games" on high details in resolution 1440x900 which I find acceptable for a 17" screen.

I know ArmA2 is different I know it's a SIM.

Thou when I read comments of textures flickering on desktops better than my laptop while set to lowest resolution and lowest details than it's obvious it's not the hardware or the drivers but the game itself that dose the magic.

Some of you find yourself lucky enough to play this game without a problem and you go around this forum posting you silly opinions about which I don't really give a fcuk that's why my question was directed to dev.

Anyway there is only one or two replies in that big wall of bullshit you posted that really answers some of my questions.

Still the main one stays mystery.

Will I be able to play it with some decent details, because running around in a world of blurry textures and bear land or whatsoever is not really my thing.

I love the idea of ArmA and OF because that's what the games should really look like these days - as most realistic as possible but still....

P.S. 1 Scrub you say "Latest betas makes #4 irrelevant" does it means the game now supports more than 2 GB of ram?

P.S. 2 Don't tell me to go read the forum because that's what I did.

ktnxby

go buy MW2. bye

[Jennik 0]

Few questions to developers.

Question 1

If ArmA2 perform so badly on so many machines with different configuration, how do you expect me to buy the game and get pissed off that I can't play it with proper settings?

Question 2

If the game performs so bad, for me it looks like you released a game on an engine that isn't finished neither compatible with broad range of specifications that are available on the market these days and that you expect me to do the testing for you. Why was it released before all the tweaking and tuning was done?

Question 3

I read a lot that the game performs better on Windows XP. How come you released the game that it's not compatible with up to date systems like Windows Vista and 7?

Question 4

How come the game supports only 2 GB of RAM and is so dependent on processor power?

Question 5

My system is a XPS M1730 Laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 2.0 GHz + 4 GB RAM + SLI 8700M GT 256 MB (it's 512 MB in SLI) running Windows Vista 64. Will I be able to play the game on medium up to high settings?

Question 1

• I don't think ARMA 2 goes so badly. However, it's easy to drop down FPS significantly by wrong graphic settings which might be the most common issue people have.
  
• Please, do try ARMA 2 demo which contains the benchmark mission to test your hardware.
  

Question 2

• Real Virtuality 3 is definitely the most advanced engine for a military sim game ever made. It's being constantly developed and enhanced for last 10 years.
  
• Learn more about Real Virtuality 3.
  

Question 3

• ARMA 2 is fully compatible with Windows XP, Vista 32/64 and Windows 7 (with the latest beta patch)
  
• Please, check the ARMA 2 Beta Patch download page.
  

Question 4

• ARMA 2 supports 2+ GB RAM on 64bit systems. For Widows 7 install the latest beta patch.
  
• Please, check the ARMA 2 Beta Patch download page.
  

Question 5

• Most probably the limit of your computer is the processor. I recomend at least core 2 duo 3ghz and GF8800 for fluent gameplay on standard settings.
  

[An Fiach 10]

Your biggest mistake is thinking you have significant knowledge about how software works and how a game should perform given its features and content. Your questions demonstrate otherwise and your attitude, rather harsh and insulting.

It is good to be skeptical, I understand that, I've been burned a time or two, even after the community convinced me the game that I was buying was great. However, you need to be mature about it or be ignored as a troll. ArmA 2 is unique. There are people that think it is another FPS like COD and others that expect it to be an in depth sim like DCS-Blackshark and both groups are disappointed because this game strives to give you the full experience without being too complicated or being a simple arcade game. The engine also allows for nearly no boundaries on customization. All of that comes at a cost.

A lot of people have issues with performance because they have unrealistic expectations as well as refusing to believe that issues are not on their end. Most have always played the same type of games and thus do not have experience with how different game engines can behave differently on their computers. Just because a manufacturer puts out a new driver does not mean that the driver is good or works well with all games. Sometimes older drivers work better, sometimes people fail to realize conflicts or limitations on their systems that result in poor performance. This is not to defend BIS where their product is lacking but to point out that you cannot have a system that is perfectly compatible with every game or more accurately, every game cannot be compatible with every system. Other developers try to hide issues with their products while BIS tries to take on those issues and improve their product while also allowing for a wealth of information for current and potential customers to decide if they can run this on their systems or how to fix any issues that they might have. You will see these threads here because they do not lock, delete or ban in order to keep everything positive on their forums.

[-DirTyDeeDs--Ziggy- 0]

wow, high marks for a member of the dev team to respond to this post. This community is often defensive when responding to newcomers who attack the game and the developer without putting much effort into the game first. However, you wont find a more helpful, creative, or supportive group anywhere.

You will see these threads here because they do not lock, delete or ban in order to keep everything positive on their forums.

yeah, the developer uses this forum for feedback and actually participates in thread discussion here, as you can see from Jenniks response. Hard to do that effectively if they erase the negative issue threads. I credit the forum Moderators for doing their part in support of this community.

Edited December 2, 2009 by [DirTyDeeDs]-Ziggy-