Vegetation kills fps

[laukejas 10]

Hello, people,

I'm having problems with ARMA's performance. My computer is laptop, Dell Studio 1555. With medium settings I get 30-60 fps in most situations. The problem is vegetation. When I'm in forest, or looking through optic sights to the forest, fps drops a lot, to about 15-20, sometimes lower.

With the lowest possible settings, I can get constant 20 fps in forests, but neither the performance, neither the visual quallity satisfies my. It looks like trees are fps killers.

Is it possible to lower vegetation textures without lowering the rest of textures? Or make ARMA automatically switch to lower textures if fps are low? Or download some lower quallity textures, which would increase performance?

All drivers are up to date. My OS is Windows XP PRO SP3.

I would appreciate any help. With my laptop, game runs smoothly in mid settings, but forests make game unplayable.

[Beagle 684]

I had to google for the specs of your notebook, and make it short...it does not even reach the minimum requirements of ArmA II. Thats why I cant make you any hope that you will ever get a good performance with it. Biggest problem is the low 2Ghz clock of the processor and the very low end ATI HD 4570 GPU.

Edited February 12, 2010 by Beagle

[laukejas 10]

Man, I'm running ARMA. Not ARMA II.

[Pain-less 0]

Have you tried this?? http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=63703&highlight=grass+fix

[laukejas 10]

Just tried - man, that works perfectly. My fps have increased at least 5. Thank you very much!

I just noticed, that shadows eats my fps even more than vegetation! If I disable shadows at all, I have constant 40 fps. With shadows set to low, normal or high I have same 20-25 fps. And I love the high settings shadows so much :( Is there any way to get shadows without such drop in fps?

Edited February 12, 2010 by laukejas

[Pain-less 0]

Doubtful...shadows are frame killers in everything. Even sim racing, where I'm usually found.

[HotShot 0]

If you want to increase FPS even more than the Low Plants fix already suggested does, try the PROPER vegetation. Its become invaluable to me on my crappy laptop.

[laukejas 10]

Well, I don't have any more problems with vegetation, but thanks :)

But the shadows... Even with them set to low, fps drops about 20. While in OFP, for example, it dropped only about 2-3 when enabled. Why such difference?

One more thing: I played OFP2, which seemed to me to have much better graphics than ARMA, with dynamic shadows, lightning, and so on, and I had constant 40 fps. What's so wrong with ARMA?

[Pain-less 0]

As graphic technology moves forward, so does shadows, but at a price, horsepower. ARMA is not alone with poor performing shadows, it's the nature of the beast. As for OFP2, I don't know anything about how that game is put together. They could have cut something from somewhere else to help out with the shadows. Did you ever play Soldner? Great game but the maps were so huge everything came to a crawl because of its total destructible landscape. It was murder pushing all the data upstream to the other online clients playing the game. If a bridge was destroyed somewhere on the map, everybody was getting the data, whether you were anywhere near the bridge or not. You may have never known it was ever there.

[laukejas 10]

No, I've never played that... Still, is it possible to reduce shadow LODs or something, like it was possible in OFP?

[leondus 0]

try using "command -dxlevel 8"