Razorman

Laptops are not for gaming, thank you.

A lot of servers have a player menu that allows you to set your own view distance on the fly in game, look for a player menu, also never use a server with a ping more than 50. He means meters not kilometers above ;)

HDD & SSD tested before ram drive, ram drive much faster.

Yes, you need 16gb for this to work effectively, A3 uses all 8gb of the ram drive (nearly) & I like to leave 8gb for system. W7 uses 2gb just to stand still, then if you run other games you'll need more ram for those. Having said that if you only intend running A3 & W7 you should have enough.

@ Above, excellent & informative. I use a ram drive & load A3 into that before running it, I allocate 8gb of my 16gb system ram to the ram drive. The performance is lightning fast & is far faster than an ssd. The difference is night & day performance wise, 0 pop ups, no hdd thrashing which seriously affects all of the Arma series. If anyone has + 16GB of system memory it's well worth the effort & once setup is a breeze to use, see here for exactly how I set it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CKbbqOpeIE

I stand by my original statement, if you disagree fine, i know wtf i'm talking about, i do not wish to discuss further as knowledge appears to be wasted here, therefore i won't. Once last comment regarding the post above, A3 uses 2+GB of ram here, everything on very high @ 1920x1200.

Good post, appreciate the detail, your rig is not the same though, is your i5 @ 4.4ghz? Your memory is slower/less & gpu weaker? Overall i get the slowdowns with 30+ ai, everyone does but realistically knowing the engine & game as i do i'm very happy. Arma3 Mark score 7000+ whats yours? http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?151794-ArmA3Mark-Benchmark-your-ArmA-3 Utilization of the cores is not the magic bullet to fix performance.

How old is the card? I would RMA it if possible. To me it looks fubar/faulty card, install another set of drivers if it still does it send it back. You could also try downclocking the speed of the card to standard specs, that may help. The factory set o/c may be causing the issues.

PLEASE study a little more, Arma3 & ALL of it's predecessor's require massive cpu power to run well, this game(simulator) over the years has been the driving factor for my upgrades, the rig in my sig was put together only 3 weeks ago in readyness for this game. Sad but true for those running mid range cpu's in that you will never see great performance unless running very low res & even then you will be limited/bottlenecked by a slow cpu, study cpu's, it's NOT all about 6 cores & ghz, it's about l2/l3 cache sizes & bandwidth for memory (everyone forgets about memory/bus speeds it seems). I wish you could all have great performance so i could kill ya asses online ;) But sadly A3 is not the game for you if you are new to the series on a midrange rig/setup, hoping for change but not required here. Thanks for my 0.02c save some money & then upgrade/build a rig with the biggest baddest cpu possible for you. (allways Intel ;) )

OFPMark is 7011.21 Thanks!

OFPMark is 7011.21 Thanks!

Are you insane? 1600-2000 view distance is plenty, why would anyone go to 12000?

Once upon a time... Radeon was worth looking at, nowadays it's a pure waste of $ vs power, go Intel, go Nvidia, youre troubles are over, see sig for details, thank you.

Get 2400mhz ram, ditch the Radeon for a GTX670 & you're good to go!

I'm posting here so people can see that with the right pc specs A3 is not as fubar as most posters here would suggest, A2 requires horsepower as does A3, many factors depend on how well this game engine runs. Unfortunately it is not designed for low or mid range rigs, A LOT depends on specs.

50-120fps with everything on very high @ 1920x1200, rig in sig below. So far very happy with A3 performance, A2 reports at 99-100fps using in game benchmark with same settings.

He He, you know jack about rigs & need to research before you post nonsense.

There is no engine problem, the problem is this is a very demanding engine, it will eat weaksauce cpu's for breakfast, u need a rig like my sig to run it even close to well.

What?

The "Fundamental" issue is this engine requires heavy horse power in the cpu dept. I have it luckily & the game runs very well, A2/3 as well as the original OFP, all of them have used this game engine & variants of it since 2001, this game engine was developed originally as a mil sim for training in rl warfare. It calculates everything everywhere in real time, ballistics, leaves, shit u even can follow the same bird for miles & there are hundreds of them. If your cpu is weaksauce you will suffer, & it's not all about core clock mhz, research before shouting that my 4....ghz only get 30fps (which is good in A3 terms). There are tweaks that can be done by the user to improve performance but ultimately cpu is king in Arma series. Brilliant game, excellent devs.

OP is correct regarding high end/fast rigs required, i have 0 issues with performance in A3 or indeed A2, i have followed the dev team & progress of the Arma series for many years, this game engine will eat most rigs for breakfast because of the gazzillion calculations it's doing at any given moment, that's what makes it great ;)

If you are talking multiplayer the reason is the server controls all video settings not the client, so whatever you adjust will never impact the online experience. Oh btw, sorry but your rig is weaksauce & you won't ever see much of an improvement, poor cpu (for this game ) and very poor gpu.

Turn down textures or maybe it's your HDD thrashing while trying to load them?

Servers dictate your game settings, you have no control over the way it is set up, if your rig is weak or the server is slow u will lag.

Allways buy a souncard for your rig, prefferably soundblaster of a good spec, on board sound will slow everyone down unless it has it's own dedicated processor your cpu has to do the work = less performance.