Jacky60

I think that's extremely unlikely since a 560ti is utterly incapable of running Arma 2 at anything like highest settings. It's a bit like having a car which can't go 70mph and asking if it will be capable of reaching 120mph when the next Grand Prix is held.

I think it's an entirely fair comparison. Arma 2 makes enormous demands on the cpu so it should be more optimised for multi-core not less so than BF3. Arma3 will no doubt be much more demanding still so suggestions that because it's a different game engine it should somehow be forgiven for the inevitably poor performance and cpu scaling it will exhibit seems very odd. It should be coded from the ground up to properly use 4-8 cores fully then BIS would actually make a lot more money because a far bigger audience could play it without it looking shabby or running like a dog on even high end cpu's which I fully expect.

I'm pretty sure Arma 3 will cripple most modern PC's. Arma 2 doesn't run at max settings on even the fastest PC today and Arma 3 looks way more demanding. Comparing it to BF3 and assuming your PC will walk all over it is wishful thinking. IF (and it's a big IF) Bohemia can get all threads/cores working fully on the game then there's a chance high end modern PC's will be able to handle it but its taken three years for top of the range PC's to be just about able to run Arma 2 adequately so I'd say a top PC from 2015 should be able (hopefully) to give 60fps quite a lot of the time.

+1 You have a great modern cpu with an old os, not enough ram (as xp 32 can only use 3.2gb) and ancient drivers plus a graphics card that is nearly 3 years old. The system is unbalanced and while you may well be able to get better performance from a few tweaks you need a new and much much better card to take advantage of that cpu. You have a Porsche 911 cpu that has been coupled with a Hyundai lantra gearbox gpu hence crap performance. ---------- Post added at 02:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:27 PM ---------- Thats nonesense any card will handle the game but I suspect the op wants playable frame rates and the game to look good which it won't on a 285gtx. I went from one 4890 to 4890xfire to 5970/5870 trifire and then two 6990's and from a E8400 at 4ghz to i7 920 at 4ghz. Until I upgraded the cpu it was not much fun to play(either low fps or poor image quality) and until I got 2 6990's it was still sluggish with fps regularly dropping to 20's in cities during firefights. You need a top end CPU AND a top end graphics card or two to get the game running well with a decent amount of eye candy. Then it starts looking beautiful.

I had the same rig but with a 920 a 4ghz and it still lagged, I upgraded to 4890 crossfire and it still lagged so if you can overclock you cpu to 3.6 -4ghz you will see a big improvement BUT your gfx card is holding you back a lot. Set video memory to default. I'm running 2 6990's and my frame rate drops to 30fps occasionally so the comment about HAL 9000 and Skynet is appropriate.

I'd like fire extinguisher to put out burning vehicles that draw enemy attention. Also how about getting the game engine to use MEMORY effectively. Instead of loading GB of data from the HDD how about allowing some of the data textures to be stored in MEMORY-the lack of efficient memory usage is one of Arma 2's Most annoying features. I have two 6990's and an i7 920 at 4ghz plus 2 ssd's and still the fps slows to 30fps incherno when drawing losts of grass-I imagine because even with SSD everything is waiting for the textures etc to stream from the SSD rather than from memory (16gb and it barely gets used.

Pendragon you're right when I disable crossfire on ccc I get half the frme rate in unigine but in Arma2 the frame rate stays exactly the same and it looks exactly the same. Don't know what's going on. Please advise! Actually I'm sure crossfire is working as all the gpu's monitored in Afterburner are showing the same usage between 60% and 85%.

Get the 2500K unless you do a lot of video encoding. Get the K version not the standard as K allows overclocking. Don't say you don't want to overclock because you'll get a masive performance increase and 4.4ghz will be easy-if unsure go to anandtech.com and look up overclocking in forums. Unless you're going to overclcok theres not that much point going sandybridge. Also get a radeon 6950 2gb NOT the 560 as the 2gb video memory really helps in this game.

I'm running 2 x 6990's as in 2 seperate cards as I stated. I'm familiar with how to memory flush just wasn't sure if this event required one. I'm CPU limited as the cards rarely get above 60-70% usage but if I'm on Cherno and bump AA to SSAO in Catalyst then things start slowing down though this is probably my Intel 320 SSD slowing things down. Video memory is default. It's definitely using both cards as I noticed frame rate jump a lot after seconds card install, one card was slower than my previous setup. The game just recognises better hardware so draws grass and vegetation much further away (without any intervention on my part) meaning the hardware has to run faster just to stand still. It does look and play a lot better than it did on 5970/5870 trifire though but I still disable postprocessing and keep shadows/aa on high otherwise in forests on cherno things get choppy (choppy is of course relative in this context). I'm pretty sure I'm also limited by server -when lots of players have a lot of AI it seems to slow the server (WASP). Not sure about 100%fill rate never really adjusted it but will experiment now.

When playing multiplayer after an hour or so the screen will go black for a few seconds. This doesn't happen all the time but does so enough to be annoying. I'm running i7 920 4.2ghz and dual 6990's. Is this a memory 'flush' event or something else?

does deleting netcode and GLX pbos from zeus fix the black screens I encounter every so often where everything just stops for 5-10 seconds? Also should I deleteboth entries of each from zeus?

I'm currently using onboard sound with my Gb ud5 x58 and the cpu has to do all the sound work. Would adding a sound card help fps by taking load off the cpu. I run xfired 6990's on an i7 920 at 4.2ghz so I'm a bit cpu limited. If a sound card would help should i get one with 64mb on board memory?

Thanks for the replies that's what I thought. I actually have 2 ssd's-a vertex 2 with the OS and a Intel 320 120gb for Arma 2 and it really is vastly better than it was BUT after an hour or two of gameplay everything seems to slow down a bit. I suspect the server is the reason but many years ago playing wargasm ( again big maps for the time and lots of AI) the same would happen and additional memory solved the problem.

I use windows 7 64 bit and I'm considering upgrading to 12gb ram for arma 2. Will arma 2 use this memory (vs 6gb I have at moment) or is it a waste of money. I know on release it only used 2gb or thereabouts but since then it's supposedly become 'large address aware', will it now utilise more ram?

I think you're deluding yourself if you think you'll get a smooth gameplay experience from that setup. The reason as previously outlined is that when you're in game your hard drive needs to stream enormous quantities of data to give you a smooth experience. Anything short of a fast ssd setup will struggle. People say its smooth BUT either buy 2 or 3 SSD's OR setup a ram disk OR accept the annoying fact that your setup which will be fine for 99.5% of PC games can't cut the mustard with this one. A guy online went from 2 raided SSD's and still wasn't happy with the stuttering. Even with my setup and 2gb per gpu textures on distant trees are not fully rendered. It's just sheer volume of data. Your PC is trying to paint a picture and your HD is the paint pot. The paint pot is trickling out paint and you have a good quick painter always waiting for more paint but twiddling his thumbs as he waits. I personally intend to setup a ram disk inthe next week or two once I've sold my 5970 and 5870.