Richey79

The beta patch has sorted the game out for my system and it now runs smoothly in most situations. After a heavy defrag and optimization of the hard-disk, even Zargabad is mostly smooth somewhere between 2000-4000 vd, running DAC and with plenty going on. That's at 30 FPS, not 60, though. The thing with this game engine is that I couldn't get up to 60 in Zargabad with some things going on, even if I put my vd to 500. But the nature of Arma's game-play is such that it doesn't bother me at all - as long as it's smooth, it's immersive. That's why I still can't play with PP on. It ends up as the visual equivalent of an old cassette player that oscillates nauseatingly between playing music too fast and too slow. The Coltan Mine mission still feels a little 'lumpy' for me, even after this patch.

I really like it the way it is in the beta. I would be open to the suggestion of it being toned down 20% if I'm in the minority; the barrel settling in a more randomized position is an attractive proposition.

I've got the load spread between a 4870x2 and another 4870 with this beta renamed to arma2.exe, Cat 10.5 and 10.6 CrossFire profiles. What seemed to help my performance more than anything else was setting antialiasing to high, 3D reso to 150% and PP off. I've set Cat AI to 'standard'. Everything else is application set. Windows 7 x64, so making use of the largeaddressaware .exe. I would post Gpu Z results, but both that and EVGA Precision tell me I've got zero load on any of my GPUs (lol). Temperatures clearly show all three GPUs are handling load. Hope you get yours working.

Glad to hear it. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=101571&page=4 New beta patch is specifically for OA, and is LAA, plus some other good stuff.

Just had it on Zargabad, with M4A1 holo. Seems it happens each time the mission loads. Only one unit, and only in 3rd person perspective. Looked very amusing - like Johnny-No-Stars had been given a cardboard cut out gun to take into battle. LOD refused to change to 3D the whole time.

There's a workaround for Steam. Maruk posted it in another thread.

Might not be such a good idea to play MP against players on vanilla OA with this beta, though! -Cheers Connos. Heck, I didn't even realize you could set it higher than 32 (herp derp). I'll experiment with the settings and see what works best for me. Hmmm, 128 gets rid of the lag entirely. Does anyone have a definitive answer for whether A2/OA uses your sound card or CPU to process sound? I've seen it discussed in other threads, but nobody ever seems to be sure.

It feels about right to me for the weapons I've tested so far. It feels nice and physical, and you certainly have to re-aim after each shot. If you use a weapon on automatic fire setting, you have to take recoil into account when placing the first round of your burst. - I'm now getting large amounts of annoying mouse lag on most inventory windows. The degree of lag seems to be different on the inventory part of the screen and outside that box.

A great little change for TrackIR and Freetrack users I only just noticed: when you've highlighted some of your subordinates, the command reticule (go there, etc.) no longer follows the end of your gun's barrel, but where you look. So, you can give commands much more easily while still walking in the direction in which you were originally heading.

Try the beta patch. Fixed the problems with my 4870 x2. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?p=1667480#post1667480

If you've renamed your Arma2OA.exe to Arma2 for CF/Sli profiles, remember to re-rename, otherwise 'no install or OA corrupted...' LOL Many thanks, Bis. Yet to test. Edit: Seems to fix problems with x2 ATI cards. Happily experiencing SSAO now.

This is the reaction you need to avoid - I know it's easy to fall into with Arma 2. Have patience. Don't think about buying new hardware etc. Having a more powerful machine will not necessarily give you better performance until they implement the changes they made in Arma2 patch 1.07 into OA.exe, which is currently at a different stage of architecture. If it is getting that frustrating, leave OA for a month and come back and see what they have done to help. You can lose days trying to tweak for better performance which is caused entirely by the program.

Another vote for this. SSAO (and the other graphical effects on PP='high') doesn't seem to give me much of a performance hit at all, since it puts strain on the graphics card much more than the CPU. However, I will never use it while I am forced to combine it with rotational blur. It would be much better that Oktane does not have to spend his time keeping up with beta patches again this time around... .

T.S.C.Plage, I like your image. That face just rules, but it got me to thinking where I've seen it before in a Bis product. Anybody else thinking they re-captured the mercenary team leader from Queen's Gambit? Could this even be 'Dan' himself? Anyway, I think that's my favourite Bis face work yet, and the faces in OA are absolutely great.

4870x2 here, using Cat 10.5. After renaming the .exe to 'Arma2.exe' and setting Cat AI to 'high', I was still left with lots of artifacts and stutters, even though the second gpu was being used. Setting antialiasing to 'normal' or higher and setting 3D res to more than 100% seemed to help smooth things out. Setting VD a bit higher than you would for Chernarus also helps. The lack of clutter in the new maps seems to leave a graphics processing 'vacuum' which the cpu likes to be filled. Using ATI Tray Tools, flip queue 3 seemed best for a nice smooth experience. From what I've seen performance-wise, I don't think the .exe is able to thread texture loading yet, even though A2 .exe has been able to do so recently. For a really smooth ride, try setting textures to low combined with graphics memory to default (for ATI users at least) and object detail to normal or higher, if you can put up with horrid looking trees. I'm fairly confident Bis will be able to fix this for quad core users relatively quickly, since they already did so for the Arma2 .exe.

Haha! Nice work Bis... the building is the same, so I'll leave the pic up - might help someone.:dd:

I have exactly the same, and I'm fast coming to the conclusion that two things are to blame: the way the engine currently handles scripts (and specifically that the OA campaign scripts are 'inefficient') and the OA building models. (Poorly balanced) Load is being placed on the processors completely regardless of the graphics engine. Until they fix these issues, ignore them. Have fun in the editor, getting scenarios from Armaholic as they come through and playing the Arma2 missions - pretty well optimised at this stage. Edit: Would you believe, setting antialiasing to 'high', fillrate to 125%, both objects and textures to very high and vd to 4,500 seems to have helped smooth things out for my system (flip queue to 3 also seems to help)? I doubt this will be a solution for more hectic moments in the campaign, but seems to work for pretty much everything else I use A2 for. Maybe there's too little scenery on Takistan, in some ways? Of course, as soon as I go back to Chernarus, the clutter means these settings are wrong. They work fine with the grass set off, though.

I only say that below 60 it plays like crap now because in A2 1.07 I could be playing a heavy mission running at 25-30 fps and everything would be smooth and enjoyable. We've taken a big step back now for many users, in that the engine seems to wait to do all it's calculations at once. It tries its best to run smooth, but that means it makes the bad decision to run as smoothly as possible until it needs to do some work, at which point it stops processing the graphics at all for a tenth of a second. Even just saying that makes me wonder if this build includes the work they did (not that recently, surely) on making scripts wait for activation until such a time that a processor was ready to cope with them. So, instead of a smooth 30fps, you have a smooth 60fps for .9 seconds, then it stops entirely for .1 second. Rinse and repeat for an unplayable campaign. That's the last I'll say about it 'til we get another patch, because I know they're working on it. It's just frustrating that they finally fixed the performance of A2 so it ran great, and we only got to use it for 5 minutes before a new engine came out which included heaps of cool stuff.

Don't you need 15% free disk space to be able to defrag a drive? So, unless your drive is 80 gigs or smaller, you're not going to be able to do so with only 12 gigs of free space, unless I read your post wrong. However... interesting that with my install of OA, Windows defrag wouldn't touch the last 2% of the drive, and said it was still fragmented. Had to use Auslogic's Disk Defrag to finish it off, so Hitman's advice would definitely work.

I believe the game engine categorises weapons as either 'long barrelled' or 'short barrelled', with the long barrelled ones making it difficult to even turn around in a door-way. I agree with you that this system makes buildings more a hindrance than a help in a fire-fight, and is probably the thing that most kills CQB for the engine. Might be nice to simply make all weapons act as the short-barrelled ones do, in terms of collision detection.

I've had exactly the same experience as this. Honestly, the performance is like Arma 2 on 1.01 for me, rather than even 1.05. Frame rate is fine on empty maps, but as soon as you place a few men and start running a couple of scripts, everything becomes as stuttery as all hell. It's not even a case of comparing FPS and saying I get ten or fifteen less with OA; it's that it's pretty unpleasant the instant it drops under 60fps in this engine. Badly needs optimising. Those using CrossFire, quad cores and x64 systems seem to be suffering the worst at the moment.

In the editor, playing round with a handful of units performance is pretty good, as it also is in MP. However, once there are a few scripts running, I experience stutters and can't set the vd above 2,000 without it being unpleasant to play. Fire up Arma2 1.07, everything's perfectly smooth up to 5,000 vd and more, even with lots of AI doing their thing. I think I'm going back to 1.07 until the recent improvements are patched in. For now, OA gives that same feeling as A2 originally did: you can change the graphics settings from everything to high to all on very low and it makes zero difference to the weird unsmooth feeling affecting performance.

Honestly, with all the people in another thread unanimously swearing they get better performance with OA, I was starting to doubt my sanity / setup. Good to hear that we'll be back to the improvements of 1.07 soon.

I suppose they presumed people would want to use them in scenarios alongside the German and US units. Kind of strange to have, '3:Enemy man - front', '1:Kurwa, Czedaki!', '4:Changing mags!', '1:Wraca do formacja!', (apologies to Czech forum users for my ignorance :p). I think the Czech voices in English are some of the best voice-work in the game, too. Fully agree. This is one thing that is handled superbly in the latest builds of ACE, imo. Well, except for when your parachute bugs out... . Why do Bis insist on putting in 'missions' like City Life (tour of Zargabad in full GTA city-sim mode, nothing to do with the role-playing community)? It's Harvest Red all over again. I wonder what proportion of Arma2 players have a rig that could play this at any reasonable framerate - the engine just doesn't handle the scripts and bajillion AI well enough.