Desparately want to get back into ARMA2 Please help with settings!

[izt_is 0]

Okay previously, when Arma 2 first came out I ran with this PC

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 3.2Ghz

GeForce 8800GTX then GTX 275 896mb

4gb DDR2 Ram 800Mhz

Creative X-Fi Fatility Pro

Windows Vista SP2 32Bit

Latest Nvidia Drivers and Game Updates

Res 1440x900

Tried to run with everything on Very High except Shadows and AA on Normal.

View Distance 2500.

The game was choppy, especially in heavily forested areas.

My New Com:

Intel Core i7 860 stock speed

GTX 275 896mb

4Gb DDR3 Ram 1600Mhz

Creative X-Fi Fatility Pro

Windows 7 Professional 64Bit

Lastest Nvidia Drivers and 1.05 Patch

Res 1360x768

Tried to run with everything on Very High except Shadows and AA on Normal.

View Distance 2009.

The game was choppy, especially in heavily forested areas, but abit less than previously. I switched everything to High except Shadows and AA on Normal again, and got the same FPS when I ran the Arma 2 Benchmark 1. Game was still choppy especially in the beginning forested area.

Can you guys help me with this, tell me What settings should I have Exactly, such that I can get the best visuals and still have above average smooth performance/gameplay?

I really don't know what I am doing wrong here. I would think that my PC would be able to run everything on very high with those specs. I really hope to fix this so I can really start playing the game I bought about 5 months ago. I've barely had the mood to finish the first 2 campaign missions due to the performance. The same thing happened with Arma 1 with my first PC. It can be quite disheartening and disappointing sometimes especially since I love BIS and OpFlash 1 / Arma so much.

All help is greatly appreciated!

Thanks guys.

[76 0]

Are you running anything like nortons AV or any other resource hog?

Try playing with setting in your NV control settings, higher/HW intensive setting sometimes runs games better (did with A1 for me) :|

If your MB uses Hyperthreading turn it off.

go to 'Device Manager' and properties of your HDD, 'Policies' tab and enable 'advanced performance'. Defrag might help alittle (though I'm sure you have):)

Turn off 'postprocessing'

Disable 'PhysX'

You've probably tried this and more... wish I could help but A2 has 'run' sweet as for me from day one :)

Asus Striker II Formula (latest BIOS)

E8600 OC@ 4GHz

Dominator 4GB DDR2 1066

Inno3D GTX260 (User OC) (latest drivers)

SB X-Fi Xtreme Audio (latest drivers)

Vista x64 SP2

1680x1050

I never go cheap on motherboards, if you building a gaming rig spend around $400aus ($250euro, $360us) imo :) give or take a hundred...

EDIT: My FPS range from 15min FPS (Chernogorsk) to 60max FPS

Edited December 31, 2009 by 76

[Nazul 10]

There was a problem with i7 and win7 together and disabling hyperthreading in your bios would fix this stuttering it caused. I think thats been fixed but try it anyway.

Also use these tweaks from kju http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=85739&highlight=proper

http://dev-heaven.net/wiki/proper-projects/Vegetation_Tweak_Visuals

http://dev-heaven.net/wiki/proper-projects/Buildings_Tweak_Visuals

You want to get the ones that remove the lower LODs on the trees and buildings, it gets rid of so much texture swapping, looks better and runs better.

Also try and reduce object detail in options, thats a big killer.

The goal with Arma2 is not high fps but smooth gameplay. if you get 30fps and its smooth be happy. This game will make you crazy if you start counting fps.

Edited December 31, 2009 by Nazul

[Dogtags 0]

I don't use i7 but had monumental problems until I switched to Win 7 then it all came amazingly good except for some stutter in forests.

Recently purchased more RAM taking me to 6GB and created a 3GB RAMDISK and placed 2.8GB of pbo files on the RAMDISK and I now get smoothe (mostly) with everything High to Very High and AA on Normal at 1680x1050 with a 4870 GFX card.

I really want 8+GB of RAM to get the most from RAMDISK but that will happen when I get my new PC in 12 months.

[izt_is 0]

Thanks guys. I'll try the fixes and get back to you.

Wouldn't disabling Hyper Threading defeat the purpose of spending so much on a Core i& rig?

[Vanten 10]

Disabling hyper threading did not affect performance on my I7 rig.

I've tried both with high graphical settings and low graphical settings, low and high draw distance, low resolution to high resolution and it does not affect my FPS at all in the benchmark tests. So my issue for low fps does not seems to be GPU bound. Processors are working but none of the cores are at 100% (one is 75%, rest is around 50%). Benchmark 02 gives 9 – 10 fps.

My other issue is the shuttering of texture loading, and in particular, Arma2s desire to release textures. Often it’s enough to alt-tab between the game and desktop to trigger the game to release textures. Once one alt-tab back into the game most of all textures are gone and has to be reloaded again. Why does Arma2 not keep these textures in memory even though they are not used at the moment, as a texture cache?

Last question; what is the difference between free and available memory in windows 7? Could arma2 request more memory from windows even though only “available memory†exists?

Specs:

I7 920

3gb ram (usually around 1 gb available while running arma2)

GTX260

Regular SATA 7200 harddrives in raid 1

// Vanten

[killswitch 19]

Here's a few tips:

• Keep view distance at the default 1600 m and work with Benchmark 1 from ArmA II 1.05 until you get "acceptable" performance for your particular graphics card and settings.
  
• Benchmark 2 is more of a system killer and seems to bottleneck all existing computers today.
  
• Put shadows to High or Very High - that way, the shadows are handled by the graphics card. (Normal and down are done on the CPU, and you don't want that)
  
• Video memory set to "Default" should make ArmA II auto-detect the amount of VRAM you have, but that doesn't work for everyone. A suitable fallback is High or Very High there.
  
• Turn off Antialiasing and see if that helps.
  
• As others have noted, disabling Hyperthreading in the BIOS may help, but as we can see from this thread and others, the results of doing that varies.
  
• Instead of disabling HTT on your Core i7's, try adding -cpuCount=4 to the ArmA II startup parameters.
  
• Defragment the hard drive that ArmA II is installed on. Technically skilled users can use the contig utility to defragment just the ArmA II installation folder.
  
• An Intel Core i7 processor overclocked to 4 GHz and beyond seems to be a good entry-level processor for ArmA II. :D

Edited December 31, 2009 by Killswitch