Bravo_Two_Zeroq

To update your knowledge, that is in fact incorrect. Chernarus was largely inspired (read:95%) on a province in the Czech Repulibic while the names are from Yugoslavia I believe, check for example this area and see if you can find Chernagorsk and Elektro. This is the actual area in 3D, forget about anything to the south or east of the river and you have Chernarus including all hills, towns, castles and vegetation: Or a perspective from Chernagorsk facing Elektro in Google Earth: https://www.google.com/maps/place/3D+spol.+s+r.+o./@50.6666121,14.0574934,525a,35y,90h,78.26t/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x47099cc2c32da209:0xc616e408d32802de Utes is still unknown, probably this is one of the few imaginary islands in Arma. Takistan is, unsurprisingly, in the middle of Afghanistan, South-West of the Yakawlang district, North of Helmud. An overlay of the Arma map and the region is here: http://s10.postimg.org/j2auixma1/takistan_map_GE.jpg (193 kB) . Zargabad is largely inspired on Samarkand city including terrain, roads and rivers (and of course layout of entire town from mosque to airport) click here for Google maps. Although BIS doesn't like to put the proper names on the actual places for obvious reasons, it is apperantly much easier to reuse existing terrain with satellite data and get the realism of real-world terrain then to try to mimic an actual location.

Although I greatly appreciate the work and the initiative behind Six, I'm afraid this statement is ill-argumentated and one of the common misconceptions in the field of usability engineering. I don't feel like going into this matter now and here since a) it's beautiful weather b) I don't know you would care and c) nobody ever won an argument over the internet, but if you're interested you're always welcome to search for "usability analysis", "usability engineering" or "cognitive modelling". Just ask yourself this question: how do you think that Microsoft, Google or Apple design their UI and how much money do you think they spent on this (read: research and development time)? I'm not expecting a community initiative like Six has the resources (being time and/or knowledge) to develop the UI as a large software company would do, and I'm not saying the design is bad either, but there is room for improvement and there is more to it than just being a subjective matter of individuals.

@metsrule80 Laptop should be sufficient to play, but don't expect high settings or high frame rates. @Billz4money That will not work for Arma, you lack a graphics card so only the internal GPU can be used of the i7-3770.

Why does a laptop makes sense for college?

It's not a problem BIS can solve as it has to do with rules and regulations from the government. Without that screen, no website probably. So I guess Arma has always had the largest fan base of 100+ year old gamers.

GT 650M? No. Don't expect any laptop configuration to run Arma 3 fluently. It's doable to play Arma 3, but I wouldn't hope for more being either high settings or 60 fps.

Wow, how do you run that 5760*1080p resolution with a HD7770? Ultra-low settings and hope for 25 fps? Well, if you find it playable that's good for you of course, but I'm quite surprised as the HD7770 was never ment for gaming on 3 Full-HD screens.

Mmm... I was actually joking a tiny bit as 1980*1080 doesn't exist as resolution, you made a small typo as you meant 1920*1080 pixels (Full HD), hence the smiley :P. Lowering your resolution does work as the job for the graphic card becomes easier and as long as you stick to an aspect ratio of 16:9 which is the native ratio of your monitor, the image quality shouldn't be distorted too much, although you do lose detail of course in the image. I'm flabbergasted however that your GeForce GTX 560 Ti would have a low performance of 20 FPS in multiplayer, with everything on low. I have a Radeon HD 4890 (older and slower than your GTX 560 Ti) and run the game at 30 frames per second in multiplayer with every setting on high, even 4x AA (which wasn't even possible in Arma 2 for me). In singleplayer I get about the same frame rate, so hardly any difference for me between singleplayer and multiplayer. As you have MSI Afterburner, perhaps have a look at GPU load as well while playing the game... it would be shocking if the GTX 560 Ti would deliver 20 FPS with low settings while having a full load of 100%.

@Juutas It's your resolution of 1980*1080 pixels which is not yet properly supported :P. I think you're in the same situation as Sneakson where the processor might limit performance which becomes apparent in multiplayer sessions. If you would open task manager and look for your CPU load during an online session, you might get a more definitive answer there. Other than that, also consider that it's still Alpha and performance optimizations still have to take place. Your GTX 560 Ti should be able to give a higher frame rate, which indicates to me that something is limiting its performance. @Sneakson It's a bit early for me to say how much FPS exactly will A or B give, since nobody has properly benchmarked the game yet. A GTX 560 Ti Hawk is not a terrible gaming card, should offer more than decent performance. I myself consider 30 fps for Arma good enough although it has less to do with frame rates and more to do with frame times, which is recently becoming a hot issue (search for "frame times" and "techreport" if you want to have more background info on this). But anyway, a performance-value wise good investment for a new graphics card would atm be something around a GeForce GTX 650 Ti to a GeForce GTX 660 Ti, but you're coming from the GTX 560 Ti meaning there is not so much difference. In fact, the GTX 650 Ti is about as fast as your GTX 560 Ti, while the GTX 660 Ti does offer a more substantial improvement of roughly 30-60% depending on the game but is also quite more expensive. I suspect however that your processor may already be limiting the game as the architecture and design are already quite old. PCgamershardware did some processor testing of Arma 2, and if the results are anything to go by for Arma 3, it may be worthwhile to invest in a new processor. Unfortunately that also means new main board and new memory. With the graph below keep in mind that the top processor there, is currently being outperformed by mid-range processors such as the Intel Core i5 3570K. To see if it is a good choice for you, open "task manager" and look for "performance" of CPU. If the processor load is constantly high (almost 100%) and peaking while playing Arma 3, a processor upgrade is worth it.

Not worth it Lorenzo, the increase in frame rate would be marginal compared to your costs. Either invest in a substantial improvement, or wait longer. There is not much difference between HD 7770 and GTX 650 Ti and as for a processor upgrade, you would be looking at a new mainboard and processor which will also not yield absolutely shocking results, only marginal at best. If you do want to upgrade your system, a SSD is probably the best investment right now if you don't have one yet, while the other options would cost somewhere between $100-$250 for hardly noticeable differences.

My reply might have been a bit short, but for a comparison you can look here and here to get a rough idea of how it performs. When you compare it with the basic GPU found in modern Intel processors, it looks like this: For a gaming rig specialized for Arma with the goal of achieving higher settings with decent framerates I would think of anything around a GeForce GTX 650 Ti or faster (or AMD Radeon HD 7770). With slower graphic cards playing Arma 3 is still possible, although you will have to settle down on expectations. The Core i5 3330 is a decent quad core processor for a budget, motherboard doesn't matter as long as it has the features you like and 8 GB DDR3 is more than sufficient. The 600 watt power supply is a bit overkill however, for a GT 630 about 400 watt would be enough and for a GTX 650 Ti around 450-500 watt is sufficient, although I reckon the supply comes with the ATX case and having more power will not hurt your system (only lowers efficiency a bit).

Forget high settings with GeForce GT 630, it's bad.

System is unfortunately unbalanced. Processor is chosen 'too fast' (read: too expensive) to impress customers along with 16 GB DDR3 which are often specifications unknowing customers look at, while graphics card shouldn't be called graphics card in the first place (my AMD Radeon HD 4890 released in 2010 is faster which dates multiple generations back). Having said this, assembled systems are hard to beat in price if you also look at the additional software provided and services (fully installed and assembled system), although there are few balanced systems out there as it would mean turning down on processor and memory. If you invest into a GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost you've got a decent graphics card in a decent system, although it probably also requires a new power supply. On a budget I would recommend something more like this, should be available in assembled state for around 750 pounds: [table] [tr] [td]Amount[/td] [td]Product[/td] [td]Price[/td] [td]Subtotal[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Antec Three Hundred Two[/td] [td]£55.49[/td] [td]£55.49[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]ASRock Z77 Extreme4[/td] [td]£98.74[/td] [td]£98.74[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Cooler Master Hyper 412S[/td] [td]£25.81[/td] [td]£25.81[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB[/td] [td]£137.82[/td] [td]£137.82[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Intel Core i5 3570K[/td] [td]£164.00[/td] [td]£164.00[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Kingston ValueRam 8GB DDR3-1600 CL11[/td] [td]£43.84[/td] [td]£43.84[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]LG GH24NS95[/td] [td]£14.00[/td] [td]£14.00[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB[/td] [td]£64.33[/td] [td]£64.33[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]XFX Pro Series 550W Core Edition[/td] [td]£44.59[/td] [td]£44.59[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]9 products[/td] [td]Import as your own wish list[/td] [td]Total[/td] [td]£648.62[/td] [/tr] [/table]

I was trying to highlight the same key point ;-). Atm mods can be perfectly downloaded from one location, so who is talking about stressing game servers? One general server with 1 or 2 mirrors does the job (already) fine. But anyway, I hope something like an integrated Six Updater becomes a reality someday, it will surely help a lot of new players. When I first played Arma, I put it away after 2 days because I couldn't find decent servers. It was only after I learned about Armaholic that I managed to find and install all mods.

@FCK1T A budget of 2000 pounds ain't enough for a complete system to run Arma 3 on Ultra settings and view distance you describe. You would have to double or triple your budget at the very least before you can think of an Intel i7 3930K processor and Nvidia GTX Titan graphics card. However, if you settle for great performance with perhaps sometimes reducing object view distance and/or AA, a configuration with GTX 680 SLI is probably as best as it can get at this moment. Increasing the amount of graphic cards beyond two for triple- or quad-SLI is not only more expensive, but can even become slower than SLI/CrossfireX due to bad support. I would go for something like this, for which I go with an arguable choice for monitors. You can choose anything you prefer and depending on specific needs (if you edit photo's you might prefer monitors with an IPS screen for example), but I've selected a 29-inch monitor IPS at this moment with a resolution of 2560*1080 pixels. That basically means that the height is not increased, but instead of the 16:9 aspect ratio you get with Full HD, this screen has an aspect ratio of 21:9. Cinema screens have the same aspect ratio, as this ratio has been determined to be as close to equal to the natural aspect ratio we humans can perceive with our eyes. For the immersion it should be great and you can watch cinema movies without black borders (you'll have to adjust position of subtitles in movies however), but it's a bit of a controversy because for slightly more money you can also get 2560*1440 pixels which gives more vertical work space. Also, a normal 24" monitor with a Full HD resolution is also a good choice. As for the other peripherals, a mouse, speakers, headset and keyboard is up to your own preference, next to the CPU-cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 412S is a good all-rounder, but you can either go more quiet or for more cooling). [table] [tr] [td]Amount[/td] [td]Product[/td] [td]Price[/td] [td]Subtotal[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]ASRock Z77 Extreme4[/td] [td]£98.74[/td] [td]£98.74[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]ASUS GTX680-DC2T-2GD5[/td] [td]£403.52[/td] [td]£807.04[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Corsair Professional AX650 650W[/td] [td]£110.02[/td] [td]£110.02[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Dell UltraSharp U2913WM[/td] [td]£419.12[/td] [td]£419.12[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Intel Core i7 3770K[/td] [td]£234.73[/td] [td]£234.73[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Kingston HyperX 16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 XMP quad kit[/td] [td]£81.96[/td] [td]£81.96[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Lian Li PC-7HX[/td] [td]£82.99[/td] [td]£82.99[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Samsung 840 Series Pro 256GB[/td] [td]£171.50[/td] [td]£171.50[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]1[/td] [td]Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 2TB[/td] [td]£64.33[/td] [td]£64.33[/td] [/tr][tr] [td]9 products[/td] [td]Import as your own wish list[/td] [td]Total[/td] [td]£1,666.91[/td] [/tr] [/table] @averagejoe620 Some budget cards had a smaller memory bandwidth meaning the performance was limited by going to resolutions higher than 1920*1080 pixels or combining these cards in SLI, while Kepler had somewhat larger memory bandwidth for graphic cards in this segment (which is unnecessary in a budget segment) .

But how are mods currently being downloaded with Six Updater or from Armaholic by all these unique players monthly? I don't see problems currently, so why would there be problems by integrating SU functionality into game, not necessarily with advanced seeders/peers-sharing-systems which require extensive development efforts.

Read first post. OP means that files are downloaded from general server (just like Armoholic is currently linking to for mods), not from game server already stressed by players. As for some other points, it has been a while since we had 56k modems. People with fast internet connections are no exception. Torrents of 10+ GB are no problem to download for anyone. Problem would be that url is linked to only 1 server, although it is just as easy to share download among other users also downloading as peer-to-peer download. It has a reason Napster (predecessor of torrents) became popular, cloud-sharing isn't that difficult. But if we go back to original suggestion, just directing players to a link of mod and enabling automatic download is already much nicer than simply saying a bunch of files are missing and leaving new players behind in confusion.

The problem with Six Updater is that new players have to search and download Six Updater in the first place. Not exactly 'beginner-friendly' for most non-experienced computer users.

@Sneakson Wait until June (Intel Haswell generation) and upgrade your processor, mainboard and memory then. Although I have not big expectations of Intel Haswell processors, it should offer a performance improvement of at least somewhere around 10% over current Ivy Bridge models, which are already quite a lot faster than Yorkfield Core 2 Quad. You'll be fine for the next couple of years, at least platform wise.

Best bet would be to upgrade graphics indeed while on a budget, although you can also look for cards below $100 (HD 7750 for example) for an upgrade which is already substantially faster than your GeForce 9600GT. If you have the money, the GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost is currently good value for money and at the top of your budget.

That's about an Intel Ivy Bridge processor with a fully integrated GPU chip, although there are multiple models (from Core i3 to Core i7 desktop and laptop models) with the Intel HD Graphics 4000 chip so I can't give you an exact model number, my guess would be you're looking at an Intel Core i5-3570K processor. Although the increase over the older Intel HD Graphics 3000 chip is indeed substantial, the HD Graphics 4000 chip is designed to perform simple GPU tasks like viewing movies or playing not-so demanding games (The Sims 3, Simcity, old shooters and the like). It is unsufficient to play Arma 3 with a decent frame rate at a Full HD resolution of 1920*1080 pixels. Giving a full advice is difficult without knowing what your requirements are (or a budget). Also, don't fall for marketing. Fixed the description for you: @halisray Should be fine for high settings, although the memory is overkill (8 GB is more than you need the following 5 years unless you intend to make a RAM drive). For graphics card you can also look at the HD 7870 XT which is similar priced as the card you selected, but significantly faster as it doesn't use the Pitcairn GPU of HD 7850/7870 but the Tahiti chip of 7950.

Fortunately it is easy to make any improvement to the current fly model, so I stay hopefull. Although the offer of OP was in good faith, implementing quite drastic design changes is perhaps too much to hope for when the end date is already set, so hopefully the rotorlips can be adjusted (in future patches) once the full game is launched. I however do hope that the improved flight models dont just become some mod, but everyone is able to play. There is some good deal of history of the community lovingly fixing and improving the game, which only complicates the game further for beginners as they have to learn first about the community fixes before attempting to play the game. If the game is supposed to attract a large® audience, beginners should get the full package from the beginning and not having to wait for all the fixes made by the community, like a less irritating flight model being only one of them.

Not sure if you're having your own joke on 1st of April or if you are serious Andersson. Assuming you may very well be and I happen to work for one international website specialized in testing consumer electronics (especially computer hardware), let me elaborate. It's an ancient mistake to simply compare processors the clock speed in GHz of processors (or graphics card for that matter). The speed of a processor -how fast can a processor do it's tasks- does not only depend on clock frequency, but especially on other matters such as architecture of the processor as well design decisions (how does the processor communicate with other parts, how much and how fast is the cache memory and are there any special designs to speed up calculations by changing the hardware design). If you look at Intel for example, they currently employ a "tick-tock"-strategy meaning during a "tock" they update the complete architecture of processors, while during a "tick" they make transistors in processors smaller (die-shrink) to allow more chips per square inch, meaning a processor of the same dimensions has more transistors and can therefore calculate your things faster. There are very few people who can predict performance by only looking at specifications of a processor, so that's where reviewers come in to actually review performance of products and compare different products. This is done on test systems with standardized hardware to allow for comparisons. There are multiple benchmark tools available fortenately enough, for example for graphics cards this is done by testing a lot of games (at least 10 games at different resolutions and settings), next to some synthetic benchmarks. Synthetic benchmarks, like Futuremark publishes, try to test performance of various components like processors, graphics cards, memory and even hard drives (/SSD's), by creating a standardized benchmark which ought to capture real-life performance. Although synthetic benchmarks are not real-life benchmarks people will experience day-by-day, the scenario's are specifically designed to be as representative as possible, and although I use to look at entire tables full of numbers before I can say if product X is faster than product Y, the PCMark scores often offer a good identification of what to expect. The company I work for uses an almost scientific approach to testing hardware in a standardized environment from routers and monitors to simply processors and memory, although there are plenty of other sites capable of running extensive tests in standardized environments to compare consumer electronics in a reliable way. So please never again compare Intel and AMD (nor ARM processors) by looking only at GHz, this only applies if the architecture is the same as well as other characteristics such as L3-cache memory, controllers and amount of cores which per definition is different for the two manufacturers. It is not even possible to say that a processor with four cores with a higher frequency is faster than a processor with two cores with a lower frequency, as architectural changes have been significant in the past few years as well. To give an example, our current test methodology for testing only graphics cards is: "We tested the <<graphics card>> on our graphics card testing platform, which consists of an Intel Core i7 3960X, 16 GB DDR3-1600 memory, a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB hard disk, a Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W PSU and Windows 7 x64. We tested the card in 1920x1080 Full HD resolution. We tested games on "normal" settings and also on the best possible settings (highest/ extreme/ ultra). We enabled 4x AA for the test on the highest settings, when possible. The <<graphics card>> is not powerful enough for three monitors, so we didn't include the scores in the article, but you can find them on the page with all the specs and scores. In a number of benchmarks we also looked at the render times of individual frames, and calculated the 99th percentile score. You can read an in-depth article about our frametime test here. We used GeForce driver version 314.21. On the product page for each of the other GPUs you can see the driver version we used at the time. The <<graphics card> is blue in the charts, existing Nvidia cards are green and AMD cards are red. " Naturally to say, after each test the entire system is reïnstalled with exactly the same programs (done by copying a mirror to the hard drive in the test system). It is also important to note that performance of specific hardware components is dependent on the specific configuration of a system. For example, combining a very fast graphics card with a very low processor will not give you enough performance to play a game, while tests would have indicated the graphics card would be sufficient for the task. So although the performance may differ from your own system and the most test systems which are state-of-the-art, the test systems do enable relative comparisons between hardware as only one part of the system is changed at a time. So for a graphics card test, all other components would remain constant, and are also of course chosen in such a way that they limit the component tested as little as possible (so no slow processors are used which bottleneck performance of the fastest graphics cards).

Since beta patch 94945 the editor no longer works. I have about 40% of all units and vehicles available to me. I can edit a mission with these units, but as soon as I try to load I get a DirectX 9 error and screen stays in middle of map. I can play every other mission just fine as well as multiplayer, just not the editor. Is it a problem with 1.62 RC or did some of the beta patches screw up my editor installation and do I have to go for a reinstall?

A correction factor of around 1.36 appears to be right, that's what you suggest with changing the discretefov, perhaps it can be patched. I doubt modified parameters work for multiplayer, so I guess your discretefov solution only works for singleplayer. Good find nevertheless.