Karhis

Yep, this is something I also find very hard to comprehend. Resolution and view distance have hardly no effect at all in campaign missions. (Well, View distance does have effect when it is being adjusted in large steps). Did some testing and posted my findings in another thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1397866&postcount=15 Today I did some minor additional testing in campaign mission "Razor Two". I was running on the road in front of Elektrozavodsk power plant and measured fps with fraps. It was somewhere between 23 to 30 using normal details (except shadows high and postfx low), view distance 1600 and resolution 1900x1200. Lowering the settings as low as they go (all low/disabled, view distance 500) and resolution 1400x900, I gained max. 5 fps. So no matter how low I set the graphics options, I can only barely get 30 FPS in campaign with Quad Core processor and 4870x2 video card. Very frustrating.

Just installed Windows XP to my primary gaming rig today to see out if ArmA2 performs better under XP. And yes, the frame rate _seems_ to be a tad higher but on the other hand the game is unplayable because of crashes to desktop. Before the crash, the graphics go crazy in a similiar manner depicted in the "Graphic bugs with ATI 4800" -series thread. This never happened with Windows Vista. Might be a problem of 4 Gb of memory and 32-bit edition of Windows XP though.

Masterfragg, I have similiar problems as well. The game runs poorly, somewhere between 20 and 30 fps and ingame settings seem to have very little effect to the performance. Also CPU and GPU are not fully utilized. For more detail, you might want to check my post in another thread: http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1397866&postcount=15

I'm also very puzzled with the way this game is performing... Let's start with my system specs: -------------------------------- Intel Core 2 Quad @ 3,2 GHz (Overclocked) 4 Gb Corsair XMS DDR2 @ 800 MHz (5-5-5-18) ASUS P5E (BIOS rev. 1201 - latest) Western Digital Velociraptor 300Gb Club3D ATI Radeon 4870x2 (Catalyst 9.7) Creative X-Fi ExtremeMusic (2.18.0013) Corsair HX620 Power supply (620W) Windows Vista SP2 64-bit All the latest drivers installed that I am aware of, as well as the latest DirectX. Hard drive is defragged with Perfectdisk 10. ArmA2 version 1.03. My ingame settings: ------------------- Visibility: 1600 Interface resolution: 1900x1200 (my native LCD screen resolution) 3D resolution: 1900x1200 Texture detail: Normal Video memory: Default Anisotropic filtering: Normal Antialiasing: Normal Terrain detail: Normal Objects detail: Normal Shadow detail: High Post-process effects: Disabled And the performance: --------------------- I roughly measured the performance using FRAPS in campaign mission "Razor Two" by randomly running around the US base in Elektrozavodsk. Frame rate was between 21-28. That was not the frame rate I expected from a system with a second fastest single card GPU solution available at the moment and a decent quad core CPU. Moreover, tinkering with the settings seemed to have very little effect on the performance. For example, I lowered the resolution to 1440x900 (both the interface resolution and 3D) and the frame rate stayed the same, between 21-28. So at this point I would come to the conclusion that I'm bottlenecked by the CPU. I took a couple of screenshots showing the CPU and GPU load (sorry for the finnish texts): http://jumi.lut.fi/~rauta/1900x1200.jpg You can clearly see the point where I alt-tabbed back to the game and CPU and GPU started working. But as you can see, the CPU usage is not very high, 50 to 70ish. And the GPU load, well, its hard to see it from the screenshot but it was around 40%. Maximum of 1 Gb memory used. Based on these figures, it seems that I'm not limited by CPU, not limited by GPU and not limited by memory. So where is the bottleneck? Beats me. And the same figures with 1440x900 resolution: http://jumi.lut.fi/~rauta/1440x900.jpg I know this game doesn't like Windows Vista a bit yet a byte, but I had similiar problems with my other rig running Windows XP and NVIDIA hardware. The conclusion -------------- At least for me the game behaves illogically. It is running poorly, yet it is not using the full potential of CPU, GPU and memory. Ingame-settings also do very little to improve performance. I would expect that a drop in resolution from 1900x1200 to 1400x900 would give me some FPS but it doesn't. I guess the only thing to do is wait for the upcoming patches to improve performance.

Check the FiringSquad test of GPU's if you haven't already: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ARMAII_gpu_performance/ Considering just this game, I would buy the 285 since apparently this game doesn't scale with multi-GPU solutions very well at the moment. Although this might change in the future, I have my doubts - the Virtual Reality engine used by the game just doesn't seem to be build for multiple GPU's, which is a shame really. And I guess it would take a major engine overhaul to overcome this problem, not just a simple patch or driver profile. But then again, you never know - some people in this board have had luck with multi-GPU -solutions. But expect a lot of tinkering to get it work properly :) P.S. For those interested in CrossFire technology, check out the AMD's "Programming for CrossFire" -document. It explains the common "pitfalls" of CrossFire solutions. I think it mostly applies to NVIDIAs SLI technology as well. http://developer.amd.com/media/gpu_assets/Programming_for_CrossFire.pdf

I didn't get the Crossfire to work correctly in the demo. Without launch flags, the GPU-Z showed 0% utilization of 2nd GPU. With -winxp flag there was about equal loads on both GPUs (Crossfire seemed to work), but the performance actually got worse. System Specs: CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad 9450 @ 3.2 GHz GPU: ATI Radeon HD4870X2 RAM: 4 GB Corsair @ 800 MHz OS: Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64bit