cjph

Any mirrors yet ?

The Combat Cardigan voted.

Hm, 570s are priced around £280 here in the UK, with 6870s available for £170, and £185 for 5870s. Is the performance between the two camps worth over £100 ? Wifey still has to decide on a Christmas present (and I'm not worth a 480 :-( ).

There are reference 6870 cards going in the UK for £169.99+p&p, and some 5870s the last time I looked for £179.99+p&p, unless you live near these stores. With a 4890 it is getting tempting as a Christmas present from the she-boss. And I have not had any problems with this first ATI card, and a fellow player commented on their 5870 looking more vivid after having an Nvidia 285. Like some I have a triple head setup, and cards can come in for a hammering with the extra estate to display.

I did that in Chernagorsk - 5 M1A1s and 10 varied squads vs 5 T90s and 10 eastern squads starting from different ends of the seafront, starting out of sight of each other and rolling into town. I sit as a civvie on one of the cranes above the action and watch fraps count down the fps . . . Cherno + many AI is quite taxing for a system.

+1 - exact same errors. And all versions are boxed (with BAF on Sprocket). Any ideas ?

I take it there is no issue with intalling full PMC over the 1.56 / Lite patch ? Used the wrong Paypal a/c and a world of grief to sort it so have to wait a week (damned eCheques).

+1 I use the Matrox analog adapter over three screens and the sides are always different, on either on Arma or other games.

@Ben Endless Same here - OA+BAF, latest patch(es) and nothing but "receiving" when I try to open the mode from there. Specs in my sig (so not limited to a specific GPU). Update - works fine for Arma2 vanilla without OA or BAF. Nice work ! One query, does everyone get flashing textures on Epicentre ?

Yep - the way things are going all the fleet will be left with are biplanes, so maybe BIS could adapt the camel to carry torpedoes ? Tally ho ginger ! :) /political flag off Loving the look of this by the way. cj

I think the question should be how many hours do you not spend playing OFP/Arma1-2-OA. Could be a smaller number. :D cj

Oops - getting a bit heavy for me - I only came to post that I now want an AA-12. Would sort out the moles in my garden in a jiffy. cj

Nice one - not d/led yet but will get time tonight. One Q - there is an internal hanger, but any other corridors or cabins ? I am interested in ship highjack missions and so on.

I wondered about the smoothness too - some of the scenes are clearly at a lower level of detail than most of us would want to accept in a game, so that could explain it. It would be interesting to know the specs of the system, resolution etc., though this is academic unless you have the deep pockets to join the VBS2 club.

I used to run the OS and game off an HDD and the game addons from a Kingston SDD. Worked a treat til it went wonky with a flat 3mb/s for all reads and writes. cj

Me getting one - 12th of never. :(

Caught some military documentary on TV in the week and immediately thought "I must check that location out on shezan's Fallujah map". Awesome piece of work m8.

No issue from me because £8 is a relatively small cost compared to the time and enjoyment the game provides, the ongoing support BIS provide through patches etc. is second to none, and PMCs are a part of the modern military experience so like them or hate them, inclusion in a game aiming to simulate modern combat is expected.

I suppose what is acceptable performance is subjective - I play on the system in my sig via a Matrox triplehead (analog version) on three screens at 1280x1024, so only 4m total pixels compared to a possible 7m on the bigger screens in your post. 100%, low AA, most settings high apart from terrain and texture detail, vd varies but I prefer and usually play at 2000m. FPS is typically mid 20 to 30s, though with a lot going on it can get down to the high teens. I am a happy camper though since my Q9650 and 4890 are both last generation hardware, and I think if I went for Eyefinity and three widescreens it would have to be at least a 5870 (or 6xxx) and would need to drop most settings to medium. A word or warning - once you get used to three screens you won't want to go back to one.

Really like the look of this, especially after the loss of the merchant ship from Sigma-6's vehicle pack. One question - any internal areas other than the landing craft bay, ie cabins or the bridge ? Keep up the good work !

Over 1.5Gb is probably not necessary, but maybe 1Gb+ might benefit anyone playing at 2560x1200 res and at the higher settings, or widescreen setups like my cheap and cheerful one below. :)

Does anyone have any experience of the effect of 1Gb versus 2Gb VRAM GPUs at higher resolutions ? Here is a link to a (2009 ?) Russian review which measured the memory use of various games (inc Arma2 benchmark 1) at various resolutions. http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.overclockers.ru%2Flab%2F36439%2FSkolko_videopamyati_nuzhno_dlya_sovremennyh_igr.html The article shows a VRAM memory usage of 1.1Gb (at pretty high settings, to be fair) at the highest res of 2560x1600, equivalent to 4.1m pixels. My modest triplescreen setup has a similar screen real estate to process, ie three 1280x1024 screens, or 3.9m pixels. As I have a 1Gb card I wonder if there is any impact due to any VRAM memory having to be swapped ? I do occasionally see blank textures for a few seconds (not really stutter, just slow loading), but since I have most of the addons stored on a RAMDrive / RAMDisk and never see CPU utilisation above 80% for any CPU I wonder is this is having an effect ? Posted here because the new ATI cards are due soon and I (like some others) might be tempted by these or older cheaper cards, possibly with a 2Gb limit. Or maybe this is where the 1.5Gb of the 480GTX wins.

Is a RAMDisk the answer to texture and LOD issues, even with the latest OA betas ? I'm up to my system's max RAM (8Gb) but have another mobo which can take more. I'd hate to re-build just to find no difference and still be with a 775 based system. I've tried SSDs and Gigabyte i-RAMs with varying success, but could raise enough money selling them to potentially increase to a 9Gb or higher RAMdisk. The most annoying thing for me is the trees and bushes changing when I zoom with weapon scopes.

Same thing happens here - if I leave it a while it does resolve itself after a few mintues, though in my case it is not related to particular beta but all recent patches, and as I use a Ramdisk etc (see below) I put it down to more of a system thing than an Arma problem.

I went for Revive as I tend to play small team coop and it suits the missions better. It really depends on players' thirst for reality, so my ideal would be staged treatment - for small wounds yourself/teammate can dress, larger wounds need a defined medic to heal (possibly only in a deployed MASH at an emergency RZ with the heap of backpacks etc), then finally a mortal wound/death where base respawn occurs. Maybe this could be modded to be selectable via slider at the game start - one extreme allowing arcadey 'instant healing', while the other end is instant death/welcome to life as a bird after taking a shot, and smaller wounds seriously impacting player ability. Doubt you will satisfy everyone, and to be honest sometimes I want to get back to the action quickly and sometimes am happy to see how things pan out without me in the squad.