Scorpio9

Man this is just too cool to complain about, when I ran into the problem i found this fix strait away..... Thanks A MILLION BI, this is and awesome game and I have gotten way more then my 50 bucks US for it. Cant wait until Operation Arrowhead is released. (P.S. dont up the price though LOL) www.armaman.com CPU: Intel i7 920 (C0/C1) @ 3.82GHz (1.30v) Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 PSU: Corsair 750W Memory: 6GB Corsair DDR3 @ 1392MHz GPU: EVGA GTX 280 1GB Monitor: Acer 22" LCD (1680x1050) HDD: 2x WD Black 500GB (OS + My Docs) OS: XP 32bit + Win7 64bit

Yeah BI gave me FreeTrack and a AH-64D for Christmas and I opened it early LOL...... works great..... just as good as the $150 dollar Track IR..... I do wish ArmA 2 would give us Roll Axis however, it helps in flying www.armaman.com CPU: Intel i7 920 (C0/C1) @ 3.82GHz (1.30v) Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 PSU: Corsair 750W Memory: 6GB Corsair DDR3 @ 1392MHz GPU: EVGA GTX 280 1GB Monitor: Acer 22" LCD (1680x1050) HDD: 2x WD Black 500GB (OS + My Docs) OS: XP 32bit + Win7 64bit

hello SickBoy Im operating a new ArmA 2 Fan Site and I have unlimited bandwidth @ armaman.com I would be happy to set up a http/ftp/ mirror for you.

I would say just bind a button to it. In FSX i dont have rudder peddles that also have toe brakes (where you press both peddles at ounce to brake) i use a button on my joystick. It works just fine. I guess I with all the Flight Sim experience i have I just haven't found a need for a brake in airplanes... in real life you taxi about as fast as you can walk..... so if you follow that advice you will find you don't get your self in situations that are hard to deal with. I fly the A-10 alot and it will almost turn on a dime if you are stopped and then ease your throttle forwarded and then turn sharp..... takes a little time but not to bad.... BTW what joystick do you have? www.armaman.com

My chopper never had brakes LOL, pull back on the stick untill your speed decrease's..... I set my analog throttle to increase throttle and ignored the brake since choppers don't have them, neither do airplanes in the sense of a analog break only full or none on fighter aircraft. Gliders and Airliners use spoilers that can be adjusted for drag there may be some eceptions to this rule but the aircraft in ArmA 2 do not seem to have functioning air brakes. www.armaman.com

Yes SFJackBauer your right sorry my mind got stuck on the view distance part of his question. So what does fill rate do for you.... from my observations it is rendering more pixels mostly on trees and grass and does have a bit of AA effect so I would say it does more to sharpen the scene then anything and mostly noticeable on trees in the distance, pretty but when your in the midst of a battle who is taking the time to look at how beautiful the trees are off in the distance. Antialasing sharpens the edges of the polygon edges of the model being rendered removing the stair stepping effect so it is a hard performance hit but dosent seem as hard of a hit as fill-rate has and adding AA on top of that you really got huge pile of work for your GPU to handle. The polygon trees are basically simply plans arranged in ways as too to add the texture that allows it to appear as a 3D model AA does nothing to sharpen this texture map that's where the fill-rate comes into play from my observations. The texture map is a 2 part texture with the texture and a alpha map for the cutout for the see through areas of the trees to add the illusion of leaves and branches to the trees. Increasing view distance is increasing the number of polygons plus with a fill-rate of 100% you will see a significant performance hit and increasing fill-rate is only going to compound this further dragging your FPS down. Post-process effects tend to blur the scene. One think i would like to see more then sharping the scene in general would be a slightly sharper shadow map. Thanks for the correction on that SFJackBauer www.armaman.com

The higher your fillrate the more polys you have to render, a 100% fillrate has a dramatic performance hit even for most of the top end video cards out there to-date, Antialiasing even at normal mode is a very heavy hitter as well as Postprocess Effects. At 100% fillrate and normal Antialiasing not only do you have to render the extra polys you have to Antialias them as well. If your card is not capable of achieving all settings set to the absolute highest settings then you will need to take the time and find the best balance for your system, which maybe a little time consuming but is worth the investment. I normally run a fill rate of 4000 which I find to be very satisfactory for my EVGA GTX 280. Its just a matter of balance. Im sure sometime by the 2nd quarter of next year we will see cards that will capable of achieving full settings for ArmA 2. You got to remember this is one of the most demanding game out there right now when it comes to system resources, not just for the GPU but the CPU as well. www.armaman.com

My ArmA 2 settings. Texture Detail: Very High Video Memory: Very High Anisotropic Filtering: Very High Antialiasing: Normal Terrain detail: Normal Object detail: High Shadow detail: Very High Postprocess Effects: Disabled 3D resolution 1680X1050 I cant honestly answer that for you since I haven't bench marked Vista vs Windows 7. However in my benchmark of Windows XP Pro vs Windows 7 I saw a constant 9.62% decrease in performance. More then I expected however with a 20% increase in performance from my 3.82 Ghz Over Clock i was able to accept it a little better. But I do believe you will see a small increase in performance with Windows 7 based on what i have read probably along the lines of 2 – 4 % from what I have read. Other tweaks I have done and probably one of the most impotent, in Oct 5 2009 Nvidia released a new driver(191.07) that is optimized to ArmA 2 "Up to 12% performance increase in ARMA 2" my findings with my setup was more along the lines of 9% which is good so it puts me back to where i was at with XP Pro. Also I get about another 2-3 FPS by Over Clocking my Video Card from Core Clock @ 621Mhz, Shader Clock @ 1350 too Core Clock @ 666 Mhz Shader Clock 1447. Which I find to be a very stable OC and temps in the high 70's. Plus a 36% OC of my i7 920 from stock 2.66 Ghz too 3.82 Ghz which yielded a good 20% increase performance. Microsoft states only Windows XP users will have to do a clean install to upgrade to Windows 7. Windows Vista users can do a simple upgrade that should keep all there installed software intact... In theory that is, LOL.... always prepare for the worst. Backup your ArmA 2 folder found in your My Documents folder. If you have the steam version it is simple to back up your game and reinstall it. But all in all i would say your upgrade path to windows 7 is pretty simple. If it were me I would do it ASAP if not for any other reason just to get a smoother operation OS. Windows 7 is way smoother and faster when you compare it to Vista.... But compared to XP it is a bit slower. But I do believe you will see a small increase in performance with Windows 7 probably along the lines of 2 – 4 % from what I have read. One last note from my soap box When I do my bench marks I uncap my Vertical Sync ArmA 2 default is 60 FPS, bench marking with ArmAmark I can reach as much as 108 FPS but when playing the game I cap my V Sync back to 60 FPS since my monitor will only do 60 HZ.... when you unlock your V Sync and are running more FPS then your monitors V sync then you will get really noticeable tearing and you are losing your video fidelity. Its like having a friend who has a really nice high end stero pumping out 200 watts and some crappy little 100 watt speakers, playing his music really loud over driving his speakers and the music sounds distorted and cracks and pops..... and the GUY looks at you and says WOW ain't that loud and your like YEAH AND SOUNDS LIKE SHIT TOO. The same with your monitor.... people think they have to have ball busting FPS and they think there getting more because they are seeing high numbers.... but sadly that just is not the case if you see tearing. I have seen some of the new LCD's have a 75 Hz refresh rate so that would allow you to cleanly run 75 FPS with that monitor. When you see tearing you are seeing your monitors inability to keep up. So for the guy who is running 200 FPS.... sure his video card is putting it out that fast but unless he has a supper dupper monitor he just is not seeing it the true output of his GPU and in turn is destroying his Video Fidelity. www.armaman.com

demonlord I read that Windows preforms slightly better then Vista, however i dodged Vista like the plague do to its bugy and weak performance compared to Windows XP. I have broken down my FPS from lowest to highest by area due to different mixes in train and city's. Chernogorsk 35-48 FPS Nadezhdino Heavy forested and small village 30-40 Stary Sobor open rolling fields and medium sized village 28-43 Main Air Base 42-60 Flying 46-60 www.armaman.com

I have done extensive testing with Windows 7 64-bit RC 7100 and RTM on a i7 920, 6 gigs of ram, Nvidia GTX 280 GPU and it runs great on very high settings minus Post Processing, Stutter Free. You need to change a few settings. Such as kklownboy suggested turning off Hyper Threading. i7 Suggested Tweaks 1.Turn off Hyper Treading in BIOS 2.Edit ArmA 2 Short Cut and insert -maxmem=2048 3.Beta Patch [59842] Reduced town/village stutter (fixed streaming of textures used by Super shader.) This was a much welcomed improvement it really optimized performance for me in Chernogorsk which caused terrible frame drops when I would zoom in or turn abruptly when I was on the highest point in the city looking down. Plus there are tons of other fixes that has really improved game play. I have found the patches to be stable and they work with retail and Steam versions plus works with multiplayer as well, kudos too BI. The current Beta patch link http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php Dont for get to use the -mod=beta switch in your short cut. 4.Possible problem with AVG Anti Virus version 9.0 (When AVG upgraded from version 8.5 to 9.0 i began to see heavy too constant HDD access as if the Anti Virus was still scanning however AVG did not show a scan currently in progress... I uninstalled it from Win XP Pro and Win 7 this solved the constant access. A few days later I reinstalled in on Win 7 and have had no problem since. Hope this helps www.armaman.com

Im having the same problem jgdj19 I have also noticed it in the beta patches it is very iterating.

nyran125 dude how can you say a NVIDIA GTX295 co-op is already obsolete when it was released January 8, 2009 and the GTX 300 is not quite here yet.... I moved form a 8800GT and believe me I saw a difference in FPS. Alot of areas Im doing 127 FPS to 28 FPS and and with AA on Normal Im doing around 87 - 23 you have a 8800GTS nice card in its day and its not quite obsolete yet. Don't judge a card you don't have any Idea about until you have done some home work. Trust me the GTX 280 is just a over 1 year old. Trust me this card beats a 8800GTS any day and when the GTX300 gets here that card is going to be out of our reach for most of up but in a year after its release im sure it wont be obsolete.

Wow zaira I didnt even relize pricewatch.com was still around lol. I used to use them all the time untill i discovered Newegg. I only have 6 GB at the moment plus the program Richey79 suggested only allows a 4GB RAMDISK and as we know we need 8 gigs to load ArmA II. Using the a RAMDISK as a paging file will not achieve what we are looking for It would work quit nicely Im sure to load ArmA II into a RAMDISK but who wants to wait for the 8 gigs to copy on the RAM disk lol... however it would be a cool experiment. But in reality its much more simple to set up a RAID 0 and if you really want some spunk installing a SDD would surely solve the stutter issues plus make windows pop like crazy when you went to load something... like I said i believe soon windows performance issues will become transparent to us again just as XP did just keep upgrading your Rigs. Its like in the old days, and now Im really dating myself... lol we used to program in the low level language assembly because it was super fast and more efficient used less memory but required great attention to detail and was really difficult to debug. Shortly after we got past the 4K of ram we started using high-level languages such as Basic, Pascale and then to faster high-level languages like C, C++ to current more verbose languages that we use today that are much easier to use and understand and the penalty that we pay to run them as opposed to assembly becomes transparent to us due to CPU power. RAMDISK were cool and had a place back when we used floppy's slow MFM and RLL hard drives. But its pretty much been replaced with the L1 and L2 cache and lots of RAM and with 64-bit OS's more ram then you can pile on your plate just think our CPU's have more memory on them then my first HDD which was just a mere 5MB. Keep your day job we will be playing the upgrade game for the rest of our lives. www.armaman.com

Hi Richey79 I benchmarked this for you with ArmA II Mark and there is no difference in load time nor cached time my ArmA II Scores are listed below. Cached Time being the 2nd run of the ArmA II Mark where you see the maps have been cached. ---------------Load Score------Cached Score RAM DISK------4371.39---------5260.66 No RAM DISK---4379.70---------5260.42 As you can see there is no change in performance. RAM DISK would most likely improve ArmA II performance if you load the full ArmA program into the RAM DISK how ever you would have to wait for it to load the full 8GB of ArmA into the RAM DISK and thus requiring more then 8GB of system RAM. Probably better just to set up a RAID 0 or install a SDD.

Hi mlenser as my results show a 9.62% difference between XP and Win 7 which im willing to let go of the 10% difference since I use my system for much more then ArmA II. Also with my OC it still will put me 10% over XP at stock clock on the i7 920. Also as Placebo states in his ARMA II Community Update post concerning patch 1.04 Im really hoping for a 5 -10 % increase in performance which I believe they will be able to achieve, on top of that for NVIDIA owners (I dont know about ATI maybe someone can answer that question) I know NVIDIA is very good to optimize their drivers for new games as they come along. I have seen driver optimization yielded 5 - 30% increase in performance. Visually faster, no a loss is a loss however I believe what your really getting at here is if it is smoother and my answer as of patch 1.03 is no. Short of a more optimized ArmA II a Raid 0 or SDD should really smooth game play out. I still see alot of stutter in ArmA II when it has to goto the HDD when moving, turning and flying across the map to load additional scene elements and also when Objects Detail is set to very high even with hyper threading turned off. Also the more you Benchmark with ArmA Mark you see the score fall off which i believe is due to poor memory utilization or caching. So I will move to Windows 7 64-bit to get at all of my system resources. Looks like it will be up to the hardware guys to over come the performance issues in Windows Vista and Windows 7, we will just have to get used to it. We gave up performance in the DOS days to move to Windows 3.1 an 3.11 which piggy backed DOS up too when MS brought XP to market and introduced the NT Kernel to the consumer market. Hardware caught up and started meeting the demands of XP thus windows performance became transparent to us and we moved our focus to the demands the games placed our systems, which for many years now has fallen to the GPU makers. When MS brought Vista to market we all saw a huge drop in performance so most of us stuck to XP now that Windows 7 is arriving alot of us now have better systems and it looks like maybe MS has done a bit of optimization to Win 7 so i believe soon the OS will become transparent to us again and the focus will shift back to the hardware vendors, either way we will always be investing wads of cash just to play our games be it PC's Consoles or even iPhones.