Karhis

Previous poster (SINcere) did some research and turns out that the culprit was the leftover files from previous DLC installation in hidden folder c:\ProgramData. Personally I got the DLC installer working by deleting the folder "ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead DLC" in "C:\ProgramData". DO NOT delete any other files from ProgramData -folder (unless you know what you're doing) Kudos to SINcere!

Hi, I'm unable to install the BAF expansion, bought and downloaded from GamersGate. When I try to run the installer provided by GamersGate, it extracts some files, displays the BAF installer splash screen, and after that, returns to the GamersGate installer with the options to keep or remove installation files, or to reinstall. So it seems that BAF installer does nothing after the splash screen, just quits. I get no visible error messages. Things I have tried to no avail: 1) Redownloading the DLC from GamersGate 2) Running the installer as administrator 3) Running the installer from safe mode with networking (to avoid possible problems with antivirus) 4) Un- and Re-installing the Arma2 and Operation Arrowhead. At this point, I'm out of ideas. My Arma2 and OA are both retail copies, which I have merged to Combined Operations by installing the OA to the same directory with the vanilla Arma2 (as described in the readme-file of OA). I'd guess that this merging operation is the culprit, since BAF worked rather nicely previously when I had Arma2 and OA as stand-alone installations (installed in different folders). So, is there anything I can do (I'd really like to keep the Arma2 and OA merged)? UPDATE / SOLUTION (Courtesy of user SINcere): Turns out that the culprit was the leftover files from previous DLC installation in hidden folder c:\ProgramData. I got the DLC installer working properly by deleting the folder "ArmA 2 Operation Arrowhead DLC" in "C:\ProgramData". DO NOT delete any other folders in ProgramData.

Yeah, tried that as well before re-installing. First I ran the uninstaller, then manually deleted all the leftover folders, and even some Bohemia-related registry keys. Didn't help. I still think that the DLC is not recognizing my merged Combined Operations. I also sent email to GamersGate about this, let's see if they can answer :) Anyway, thank you for your help, much appreciated.

Yup, forgot to mention that. I ran the game once after installing the vanilla/orginal Arma2, and after I installed OA (before installing BAF).

Seems that the LOD (level of detail) switching is not working as intended with latest ATI drivers and particularly with Crossfire configurations. Many here have suggested to use 10.4 drivers to fix the problem - I haven't personally tried that. Maybe it is worth trying though - and you can temporarily enable the Crossfire functionality by renaming the "arma2oa.exe" to "arma2.exe". Other solution could be to install the 10.4 drivers and all the application profiles that have been released after that - dunno if that works though. Previous application profiles can be downloaded for example from here: http://www.rage3d.com/cap/ This seems more like a driver issue than an issue with the game, and since Arma2 isn't really that much of a "mainstream game", I'll doubt that ATI is going to fix it. But we'll see. Also remember to report the issue to AMD, using this form: http://www.amdsurveys.com/se.ashx?s=5A1E27D27E29B0E3 The more reports they get the more likely it is for the problem to get fixed in future driver revisions. The similiar problems are discussed also here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=106543

I have problems with LOD as well. To me it is most notable in trees, bushes and signs. http://img213.imageshack.us/i/lod1i.jpg/ http://img821.imageshack.us/i/lod2.jpg/ Screenshots are from BAF campaign mission 2, "Lancers". Arma2 OA version is 1.54, haven't tried betas yet. I'm using 4870x2 with Catalyst 10.8b hotfix drivers and Windows 7 64-bit. My graphic settings are as follows:

There are some issues with performance in some missions, even people with Core i7 processors are struggling to run some campaign missions properly. There are some tweaks you can try at ArmaHolic ArmA2 Optimization thread (but don't expect them to do any miracles): http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=73947 Whether the situation is improved in future patches, time will tell. btw. Nice thing to have sticky thread for perfomance issues instead of gazillion small ones. Thanks W0lle.

Have you tried reinstalling the game?

I can't help wondering why did they make campaign missions that nobody is able to run or require high end Core i7 processors. How did that pass beta testing? I would guess that there are group of players (myself included) who consider the campaign as the best part of the game and are not that keen on multiplayer and community made missions. And for those players, this game in its current state is not very enjoyable (if not unplayable)

Some of the stuff in the startup parameters Wiki are remnants from old ArmA1. Like -world=empty (for faster game loading.. no island and no menu animation loaded (1.05)) refers to old ArmA version 1.05, doesn't it? And -openal Use OpenAl sound. refers to OpenAL sound which is not used in ArmA2 according to moderator Dwarden in his first post in sticky thread " Missing xAudio2 file(s) & sound issues" This information seems to be copied and pasted from older information applicable to ArmA1 and therefore leaves us guessing what certain parameters do if anything.

No artefact problems for me in Windows Vista and Windows 7 64-bit. However when I tested the game in Windows XP 32-bit, I could only play for about a minute before serious graphical glitches and shortly after them a crash to desktop. I thought it was some sort of issue with 4 GB memory installed and only 32-bit OS but now it seems it might have been some problem with ATI card.

Yes, VSYNC is on because I didn't have ATI Tray Tools installed and not sure if it even works in Windows 7. I've read that there might be a problem because 7 requires signed drivers.

I'd like to see link for that.

They are not, it was just humorous remark by Masterfragg what BIS response _could_ be :)

The performance varies depending on the mission. The one single player mission in the demo (Trial By Fire) run pretty smoothly for me but I'm having major struggle to get playable frame rates on some campaign missions. The game is CPU hungry as you possibly can figure out by checking some of the performance related threads here in the troubleshooting forums. Yes, it probably does. But I do not recommend to overclock your system if you don't know what you are doing.

Here are my results at different resolutions, using the settings specified in the first post. My rig is in my signature, with the exception of the operating system - Windows 7 Professional (Build 7600) was used here. Catalyst 9.8 drivers were used for the video card. ArmA2 Beta Build 1.03.58834. 1152x864: 1680x1050: 1900x1200: 1900x1200 (Catalyst AI disabled): Some conclusions: - Disabling Catalyst AI disables the Crossfire (and other ArmA2 optimizations in the ATI driver). Performance remains roughly the same at least in this particular scene with these particular settings, so no advantage from CF setup. - No difference (again in this particular scene) from going to 1680x1050 to 1900x1200. And btw. I don't think this test mission is very good for measuring CPU performance as there is no AI present. But still even this scene seems to be somehow CPU limited at least with my CPU since there is no difference from going from 1680x1050 to 1900x1200.

On what mission do you get this? I also get poor framerates with some campaign missions (even in Windows 7). Some missions in this game just seem to require a hell of an CPU.

Got Windows 7 Professional x64 (Build 7600) today from Microsoft Academic Alliance program and I installed it on my other hard drive to see whether ArmA2 performs better like many have stated on these forums. I once again briefly played the mission Razor Two and the FPS did increase about 5 fps. ArmaMark score went up 300 points. The game does feel smoother to play. I'm actually pretty happy with it. Of course this is a clean install of Windows 7 versus half-a-year old Vista installation, don't know how much that affects.

@Game__On, What is that software you are using to display SLI utilization/scaling? Is it some Nvidia specific?

This is a really good point, something I've considered myself as well. Maybe the CPU is bottlenecked in some parts and therefore unable to reach its full potential (100% CPU load in task manager graphs). And with multicore systems and applications it becomes even more complicated. But I guess this is where the optimization of applications should kick in to avoid such bottlenecks. To what extent it can be done, I don't know. I have sort of accepted that my CPU just isn't powerful enough for some missions in the game and there is nothing I can do about it but to wait for the performance to increase in future patches (hopefully).

Does this happen on all campaign missions or just on some specific ones? Large missions with lots of AI (like "Razor Two" I used as an example) require a LOT of CPU power. With my Quad Core Q9450 @ 3,2 GHz it is only barely playable. Played around with the editor today. It is easy way to see how much processing power this game potentially needs. Start by setting only yourself in the map and run the mission. It should run pretty fluidly. If not, adjust details and resolution. After that, add some AI squads and watch the FPS go down. I understand that with hundreds of AI soldiers this game brings any machine to its knees - and that is logical. But what I fail to understand is why the campaign (or some missions in it) is designed so that it is only barely playable with decent quad core processor (at least for me).

The way I understood it is that you _cannot_ force the vsync on or off using ATI Catalyst Control Center in Windows Vista / 7. The application always has the last word. Like I mentioned in my post, I used ATI tray tools which is a third party program that _can_ be used to force vsync on or off. Regardless, I don't think this poor performance on certain missions is vsync or graphic related at all. I think that even a decent quad core CPU can be limiting performance on certain missions although the CPU is not necessarily 100% utilized when you check it from task manager etc. Maybe there will be optimizations in future patches so the game utilizes multicore CPUs better. I'll try this. I don't see how you could increase the thread count without modifying the actual code. And even if you could create more threads, you would have to explicitly specify what sort of calculation you want to do there.

Ok, did some testing today, tried every possible trick that I found through light search over this troubleshoot forum. Again, testing was done in campaign mission "Razor Two" and performance was measured by using FRAPS. In ingame settings I have everything set to normal (except shadows on high and postprocess on low), view distance to 1600, both resolutions at 1900x1200. Performance in the aforementioned campaign mission is somewhere between 25 to 28 FPS with these settings. Setting everything on low, I gain maybe 1-2 fps. FPS seems capped at somewhere around 30, the similiar phenomenom that others have experienced as well as I quickly skimmed these boards. In editor, I get better FPS and the ingame detail settings actually have an effect to performance. Things I tried to improve campaign performance: Command line switches ================= -maxmem=2047 -winxp -noCB -cpuCount=2 -cpuCount=4 => No effect in campaign performance. Renamed .exes =========== -Crysis64.exe -fear2.exe -frustrated.exe => No effect in campaign performance. For those unfamiliar with this .exe -renaming thing, it is used to make the game use different driver profile and therefore might help with multi-GPU related problems (or cause more of them :)) Config Files ======== - Changed 3D_Performance to negative number - HDRPrecision 8 / 32 - SceneComplexity=300000 / 100000 => Very little to no effect in campaign performance. Setting SceneComplexity to 100000 helped to gain maybe 1 FPS. But this is really difficult to measure really. Other ==== - Forced vsync off using ATI Tray Tools - Changed Flip Queue Size to 3 / 5 / undefined - Tried the game with stock CPU speed (2,66 GHz) => Again, no effect in campaign. The 60 fps cap (caused by vsync) in the menu screen was removed after I forced vsync off, so it did work. However in campaign, 31 was the maximum I got even after I set everything to low, view distance to 500 and so on. So the "frame rate limit" in campaign is not caused by vsync. And yes, I restarted the game after I altered the ingame settings so vsync was off all the time. When I loaded the game with parameters -nosplash and -world=empty and all ingame settings low, I was able to get 500+ FPS in the menu screen. Underclocking the CPU from 3,2 GHz to 2,6 GHz also had no noticeable effect - this was the only thing that come as a surprise to me. I really though that my CPU just didn't have any horsepower to run the campaign properly, but if an 600 MHz overclock doesn't seem to have any difference I don't think that is the case anymore. So, conclusion: Based on my testing, I think the FPS in campaign is somewhat artificially limited. Minor CPU "underclocking" had no effect. Major changes in graphic settings and forcing vsync off only gained me 1 to 2 FPS. There is no other way I can explain this. But maybe some of you can, so if you have any ideas, feel free to tell me. Also if I missed some optimization tips, please fill me in :) Edit === Did one additional test using the editor as suggested in another thread. Adding many AI controlled groups brings the performance down to the same 30ish FPS as experienced in the campaign. So my conclusion of artificially limiting the FPS in campaign seems false. But where does this magic number 30 come from (it shouldn't be related to vsync since in my test the vsync was forced off)? Does the game somehow scale the AI so that the performance remains in acceptable levels? That would be the only logical conclusion I can think of. Edit2 ==== One more clarification. When I'm referring to "campaign performance" in this post, what I really mean is the performance during one particular campaign mission ("Razor Two"), not the entire campaign. The following mission for example runs pretty fine. Some missions in this game seem just to be too heavy for my CPU.

The thread count is interesting, I would have also expected that a game which takes advantage of multicore CPUs would use more threads. I checked it quickly and there were something like 17 threads being used, can't remember the exact amount though. Maybe this is the reason for relatively low CPU utilization on my quad core rig - that there is not enough parallelism going on. I might be wrong though - I'm and amateur programmer as well. (However I did took one course of parallel programming in school and I know what a pain in the ass it can be to do stuff in parallel instead of sequentially.) I _guess_ that this is where the age of this Real Virtuality engine shows. It was not designed for multicore CPUs in the first place. With multicore GPUs the situation is similiar. For example with my ATI 4870x2, the Crossfire is working (both GPUs are utilized) but in the campaign (again in mission "Razor Two" which I'm using as a reference) disabling one GPU (by disabling Catalyst AI in Catalyst Control Center) does not affect FPS at all. Yes, of course improvements have been made in the game engine over time, but I have a gut feeling that in order to get proper multicore (CPU and GPU) support the engine needs major overhaul or needs to be written from the scratch - which is too big of an operation to be released as a patch. I really hope that I'm wrong though :) (and that wouldn't be the first time) Well said. That is how it should be. But as Ethne stated, this sadly isn't the case with PC gaming anymore. In my opinion, Internet changed that since it's possible to easily distribute patches. Sorry about derailing :)

Improved performance gets my vote.