Patch 1.03 Satisfaction Survey

[Patch 1.03 Satisfaction Survey]

Regular CTDs now in multiplayer. No apparent reason for this.

Ruins the fact that it plays smoother now than previously.

Edit: Seems the August 'beta' Catalyst drivers were to blame. When I set AA and AF to 'Application Controlled' the problem seems to have gone away. The game is now playing more smoothly with higher settings for me.

So, thanks BIS (time to eat sum humbel piez...).

[ATI Catalyst 9.7 is here]

Multiplayer performance for me improved a great deal since I no longer have to use the -winxp command. Single player still gets really inconsistent fps which makes some missions unplayable. Hopefully an optimised Arma 2 patch 1.3 will sort this out to some extent. Still - count our blessings, would you rather play Arma 2 sp or mp?

[ArmA2 1.03 Impressions - ALL Impressions/Videos/Screenies Here]

Specs:

Mid-range quad core

HD 4870

8 Gigs

Vista Ultimate 64 bit

I'm trying to eliminate a horrid stuttering lag that seems to have developed since one of the patches (I got the original German edit. several weeks ago). Just tried disabling my Realtek HD audio driver in control panel - the stutter has completely gone. Textures still load in a counter-intuitive way ( example: buildings 2000 metres away load instantly, whereas my LMG has a white head for several seconds).

Not really a fix, though, as playing Arma2 without sound is pretty impossible! Looks like a driver clash.

I'll post if I make any progress. Incidently, Arma 1 doesn't have any such issues with my audio driver.

Cheers.

Edit: I went into contol panel and disabled two ATI sound drivers that Catalyst had installed. Reenabled the Realtek - stutters still gone. I'm using Catalyst AI set at 3/5 'balanced'. It strikes me that Arma 2 requires you to tweak your settings perfectly - more so than most other games. Having the settings marginally too low is just as bad for stability as too high.

I know this might be better in a technical thread, but several people in this thread have said they're perfectly happy with the game and are just very frustrated with this stutter. Also, it seems that patch 1.02 unbalanced the settings I had spent ages tweaking.

Personally, I don't really care about graphics in BIS games, but the interface has to be completely seamless to ensure total immersion. Also, any lag at all means you're likely to die! I just remember my experience with ArmA1 - I completely gave up on it in frustration, only to come back a year and a half later to be very happy with the engine. I want to play A2 now.

I've now got rid of the stutter, but with a lower draw distance than I'd like. I have no faith - at the moment - that upgrading my system will help this. I'd like to know how much of my system the engine is really using.

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Just thought I'd update this, as I saw someone referring to my earlier comment on another forum.

After all this, I did a clean install of Windows 7, and everything ran really smoothly for a while, and then started stuttering again. I don't claim to have any perfect fixes, but I've now got it running silky smooth again. It doesn't look great when the image is still, but most of the time I'm scanning and moving, so that doesn't matter to me. I've now got it running fast enough that I finally like the blur effect (not so much the HDR).

-Key tinker #1 = I'd messed with my .cfg file so much that everything had become confused. I wiped it and let ArmA2 create a new one.

-#2 = For ATI cards, crossfire works 'out of the box' for me under a 64 bit system without -winxp tweak.

-#3 = For ATI cards (at least mid-range ones), I'd recommend not only turning CCC AI off, but tweaking further in 'all settings'. Make sure you force VSynch off. Set Mipmapping to the second to lowest setting (the lowest causes glitches with 2d textures in the game). It helped me to force low on-card AA.

After fiddling like this, I finally found that lowering graphical settings using the in-game menus worked and made real FPS gains (previously, I'd lower settings and it would play worse). I found that lowering shadows and object detail actually made little difference to how good the game looked (I suppose because characters are now made up of lots of polygons).

After this, I found I got great FPS at all times, without stutter, and could control settings in game by simply changing the view distance (you don't need more than 2000 in Electrozavodsk IMHO, but in the countryside you can get up to 4000 after this tinkering, without a great quad-core).

Apart from this, lots of people are saying that XP x64 is the best system to play the game on. Some claim up to a 40% increase in performance for high-end CPUs. I'm happy now, though, and done messing about.

It's well worth persevering to get a good frame-rate: - you suddenly realize that the game's difficulty level is set just right, and not ridiculously hard. You actually have a second to react before that bullet 'perforates your head-gear'.

Happy tinkering!

[ArmA2 8GB RAM Problem]

Hi all.

I had this problem for a time. Seemed to be related to crossfire. When I had two cards in my mobo and selected crossfire off in Catalyst, the texture problem happened.

So, I come to upgrade my graphics card (all of these ATI), and for a time have only one card in (HD 4870). The texture problem came back, and I couldn't fix it without the -winxp fix. Now, with only a HD 4870 x2 in, Arma 2 works fine without the -winxp fix.

So, this probably doesn't suggest to anybody a fix; but somebody clever might be able to narrow down where the problem lies. I'm running Vista Ultimate x64 and have 8Gigs RAM, by the way.

Hope this helps someone.