-=JackHorner=-

Hi everyone, I've been a huge fan of Bohemia Interactive since the beginning :) and have absolutely loved everything that they have done. That being said I have also had performance problems with their games since the beginning haha. When ArmA 2 came out I had just bought a brand new PC and was eager to spend hours tweaking the game ;). lol It literally took me weeks here and there to get this game running like butter, and it was a long process but I knew that the game could do it. Finally I got it running perfectly and I wanted to share with people exactly what I did to get this beautiful game working the way it should. I know that people have posted various threads on this subject here and there. If this needs to be moved for some reason, or consolidated into another thread that's alright. I just hope people that need help will see it, and I hope it helps in some way. Anyways, I am going to explain every single thing that I did. first, here are my system specs... Core i7 CPU 950 @ 3.07GHz 12 gigs DDR3 ram GeForce GTX 295 SAMSUNG SSD Hard Drive 256GB Vista 64 bit With my system I was getting very poor performance, and the frame rate was constantly in the low 20s. Unplayable. I was not mad though or bewildered, because I knew that that was just the nature of ArmA lol. First I installed the latest nvidia drivers, and I also installed the SLI patch from nvidia. Here are my settings in the nvidia control panel... I tested every single setting combination and this is what worked best. Also I disabled Physx... UPDATE: enable multi display performance mode as this will enable both GPUs on a gtx 295 to work in arma. This doubled my performance, you can see a screenshot on page two. After setting up the control panel I created a new shortcut for ArmA 2 on my desktop and I added these launch parameters to its properties.... "C:\Program Files\Bohemia Interactive\ArmA 2\arma2.exe" -nosplash -winxp -cpuCount=8 (I know that the cpucount set to 8 probably doesn't do anything but im just superstitious like that lol, plus it didn't hurt my performance at all.) here are my in-game settings... After testing every single setting every way I could I found these settings to be the best trade off for performance and graphics beauty for a wide range of missions. On some missions I can turn up my settings and resolution and still get great frame rates.. What I have come to understand though is that there is a great deal going on under the surface of this game. In most full scale war missions I have found that 15 fps or more will be taken away by the computer crunching all the AI code. Without anything going on I can turn everything to high at 2500 x 1600 and still get around 40 fps... So after I did all of this... I was still getting some lag in forests. What I found was the key to running this game perfectly... I installed this mod... http://www.armaholic.com/page.php?id=7252 Its the PROPER - Vegetation Tweak Visuals - Low mod and it did wonders and gave me a huge FPS boost. The game still looks pretty good too, and I hardly notice the reduced LODs on the trees and bushes. It really is so worth getting this mod. It gave me wonderful fluid performance. One final note, the SSD drive is absolutely amazing. There are zero hiccups or stutters in the game and textures load instantly. I think that if you really want to bump up your performance in this game... and your computer in general by a great deal.. try and get an SSD drive. You wont be sorry. Anyways I hope this helps some of you.

Nice!! Thank you! Ill play it tomorrow after work and let you know how it was. :)

luckiest man in the world to have a girlfriend who plays arma <3 lol

awesome missions, im enjoying playing on these arma 1 maps again :) I was checking out your repository, are all the missions in there compatible with arma2 via the CAA1 mod? thanks for this stuff man, its awesome.

you use a lot of snipers man lol I don't mind but my AI squad mates are becoming a real pain in the ass to keep alive. Other than that I am currently playing both seal team six campaigns and am really enjoying them. Nice work on this. Can't wait to play others by you.

properly identify memory on gfx cards, and fixing the 8 gig problem

still not a single mention of them fixing arma's inability to correctly identify the amount of ram on peoples gfx cards.... :(

this stick is the best there is for flight sims http://www.saitek.com/UK/prod/x52pro.htm http://www.saitek.com/UK/prod/x65f.htm but honestly armas flying is more along the lines of Tom Clancy's HAWX lol or worse so any old joystick or a gamepad would be fine for arma.

are you sure that you overclocked your 920 proc correctly? Have you tried arma with your proc set to stock speed and default mobo settings?

yeah you have to use the launch parameter -winxp

thats not what we are talking about I am fairly certain but it is also a problem none the less.

as long as you don't get less than 30 fps the game is playable, and enjoyable... everyone's frame rate is locked to 30 in the campaign and in large scale missions by design... You don't really need a high frame-rate as this game is not a run and gun fast paced shooter.

Ive seen this before too sometimes in single player. There will be times that I am looking through my scope and see enemies running around... but there is one who is acting very strange. Its as if his animation has no in-between frames, and he will jerk to different key frames. Like he will be prone, then instantly on his knee, then instantly standing... and so on. I was thinking it might be that there is too much going on and he is not being processed completely by the cpu at that point. I really have no idea why it does this but thats what I thought.

Even if you change it by hand to the correct amount it does not actually do anything. Those numbers you see are just the game saying "here is the amount I think you have" people have tried changing it to ridiculous numbers and there is no affect. Bi needs to correct the detection in the patch because there's nothing we can do.

you need to add -winxp the the games launch parameters...

Same here and arma2 does not detect the correct amount.. Changing it by hand in the file does not do anything. Im just hoping they fix this in the patch as its the cause of a lot of peoples crash to desktop and artifacting.

its possible with a SSD drive, or a ram disk, and setting your gfx card memory to default in game helps if you have a lot of ram on the card. I have an SSD drive and I don't have any stutter. However when I set my game memory setting to very high I do get a little. I keep it at default though and everything is super smooth.

i fixed my crashes and artifacting problem by setting my memory in game to default, and my textures to High... The problem went away completely for me. It used to happen every ten minutes on large scale missions and 20 minutes or less on small scale missions.

I was getting constant crash's to the desktop, and a lot of artifacting recently after like ten minutes of game play. I fixed the problem by switching from default video memory usage in game to very high... no more crashes, no more artifacting... the only problem is that now I get the stuttering, and it takes a while to load textures... with default memory selected everything was silky smooth and everything loaded instantly at around 40 fps. my gfx card is a gtx 295 with two gpu's on the card and I think a total of 1792 megs of on card ram. I'm pretty sure each gpu has 896 megs, please correct me if im wrong. I'm running win vista 64, with 12 gigs ram and a 256 gig SSD drive. click to view this is my arma2.cfg... language="English"; adapter=-1; 3D_Performance=-4194304; Resolution_Bpp=32; Resolution_W=2560; Resolution_H=1600; refresh=60; Render_W=2560; Render_H=1600; FSAA=0; postFX=1; HDRPrecision=8; lastDeviceId=""; localVRAM=2137456640; nonlocalVRAM=2137456640; I'm curious if there is a way to tell ArmA2 exactly how much ram to use on my card? Because if I set it to default I am positive it tries to use more than I have, and then it artifacts and crashes. If I could just sort this out my game would be running beautiful and would be very enjoyable. So please if you have any suggestions I would be very very happy. I really don't want to have to run this game on the very high video memory setting :( thanks everyone!

alright thanks for the info, ill keep it in mind when bi fixes the memory settings or gives us an option of defining it manually. :) Also I got the game working again, Ive been playing all night without a single crash or an episode of artifacting. I turned my memory to default so that I get super smooth texture loading and just turned my texture details to high instead of very high. It doesn't look to bad, and it doesn't crash!!!! I'm pretty happy.

I had the same problem on my gtx 295, -winxp command fixed it completely.

Thanks for the help. I have tried all of those things unfortunately. :( As a last option I am thinking of rolling back my nvidia drivers to an earlier release. This artifacting / crashing problem didn't seem to happen as much with those. Yes that is true, the card runs the game at absolute max settings and resolution at around 40 fps and looks stunning on that setting. Are you sure? Everywhere I have looked they say that there are in fact two sets of 896 megs of ram on the card. 896 megs for each gpu.. It kind of makes sense considering no one would buy a high end card that only had 448 megs of ram when running two displays at once. I could be mistaken, but everywhere I have looked it says theres two sets of physical ram on the card for each gpu.

Thank you tcp for helping me. Unfortunately im still out of luck here :( It seems no matter what memory setting I change in the game (low, normal, high, very high, and default) my arma2.cfg file stays the same and shows... localVRAM=2137456640; nonlocalVRAM=2137456640; which means that any number I paste in the file has no impact on how arma2 uses my video memory. To test this I set my in game memory setting to very high... which never crashes or artifacts.... then I went to my cfg file and pasted the number you gave me (938475520) into it... I then set the file to read only... I went and played the game. I got the same stuttering and slow texture loading... the game never crashed... then I turned off read only and set my in game memory setting to default.... played the game and it artifacted and crashed. then I entered the number you gave me again, set the file to read only.... tried playing the game and it artifacted and crashed :( So this all tells me that I have no control on how the game uses my memory other than by changing the settings in game to low, normal, high, very high, and default... and default is detected incorrectly by the game :( I cant believe the game doesn't detect my card right, and that I have to use a lower memory option in game, with stuttering and slow loading gfx :( I really hope Bi is going to address this in the next patch. Anyway thanks for your help man, if you think of anything else I might be able to do let me know.

well I have tried it both ways, and I have also tried the game with hyper threading turned off. In arma mark I get about 200 more points with it set to 8 cores rather than 4. I also did not notice anything with hyper threading on or off. I didn't test it extensively though. My game still crashes alot with those graphical artifacts and ive been trying to sort them out to no success. I have been trying everything :( thats the only problem I have now, the game runs perfectly other than that at high frame rates

its absolutely something to do with memory, because everyone reports that if they enact the " shift - flush" command when the artifacts start the problem goes away until the memory fills up again. I think this game has a problem with flushing the memory on the fly as you play the game. It doesn't seem to get rid of stuff you aren't seeing anymore and just keeps everything in memory until it over flows. :(