shamb

Hmm. Looking at it further, it looks like some settings negate others and you don't notice this effect if you start high, but its obvious if you start low, because then the 'expensive' settings will start at zero, whereas the cheap settings will start high, and give you almost the same visuals. For example, If you have default DOF and Bloom, setting AA from off to x2 or x4 does very little on my 1080p 24" screen except for power lines and masts. Increasing the view distance beyond 3000 doesn't have that much effect either if the far distance is blurry (you just see a few more blurry hills in the distance, which is not much of a cost benefit when taking into account how much FPS drop you are introducing for the increased detail, especially when you are then immediately blurring that detail!). By starting low, I have deduced than view distance is quite expensive on my rig because it can quickly create a CPU bottleneck (even though I am running on an oc i7-980X, as ARMA3 doesn't touch most of the extra cores), but DOF, bloom, object detail and ultra textures are not expensive at all for my CPU, and my GTX770 doesn't lose FPS because of them. So let me change my advice: Don't use auto detect or start at anything above 'standard'. Set vertical synch off and start low/standard quality and tweak up based on in-game appearance (making sure the GPU loading stays high, so you know you are not CPU bottlenecking), and don't fall for vanity settings such as 'I have to have AA because its better than none, and I have a fast rig!'. Watch your FPS in realtime as you change settings, and keep it above 60, and re-enable sync when you are done (all assuming you have a 60Hz screen refresh). You might be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to get a good looking game running at a solid 60fps by making changes that are not even noticeable in-game. I am currently running at 60FPS and just compared screencaptures of my screen vs what I see on auto-detect (where I got 30-40fps), and I can honestly not see any difference: the individual 'slider' settings are at most 10% different, and all the dropdown settings that can be set to Ultra are all set on that!

I have found what might be a bug in the video settings. It certainly prevented me getting good FPS, so I thought I'd post my workaround... If you use the global setting to set Ultra (or Very high or high, or if auto detect sets them for you), the FPS is usually very low (30-40FPS). If you then drop a few settings to attempt to raise FPS it has very little effect. *However*, if you flick the global setting to a lower level, and then *individually* set all the settings up towards ultra, you get a very good fps *even if you end up with the same settings as ultra*. Here's what happened to me: I used auto detect settings (it chose Ultra) and my CPU (i7-980X) was @17-25% loading and my GPU (GTX770) @40-50% loading, giving me 30-40FPS. That was odd, because neither my CPU or GPU numbers looked as if they were the bottleneck limiting my FPS :confused: So I manually set Standard Global settings, giving me +100FPS (more like it!) and then went in and set the sliders up individually. Now here's the funny thing. If I set them to exactly the same as the settings that were giving me 30-40FPS, I was now easily getting 60FPS! I triple checked by taking screenshots of the two sets of settings.... everything the same! I then double checked against what my hardware was actually doing and I saw a CPU loading @35-40% and a GPU loading of @99%! That looks like what I would expect in an intensive game: the GPU is the bottleneck. More to the point, I now see a good 60FPS in game So if you see low FPS, and especially if it is far below what your hardware can handle, and your hardware doesn't look like it is being used much by the game, I suggest you select the lowest global graphics setting and then increase each individual setting manually. I bet you will get a much better FPS than using a global setting or auto-detecting.

Hi all Just noticed that my spaceNavigator is showing up as a controller in Arma2 1.3 *and* that Arma 2 is detecting all 6 axes (for those that dont know, a SpaceNavigator is a yoke that supports move around x-y-z as well as rotate around x-y-z, making its available degrees of movement similar to a track-ir)... but Im having trouble actually binding to the six axes. Has anyone managed it and got the associated config file to hand? NB - The fact that Arma 2 is detecting a spaceNavigator at all implies that arma2 is meant to work with it (a spaceNavigator is not a standard directX input device, so the application has to be specifically looking out for a spaceNavigator for it to actually be detected at all). Thanks Sham B