ForthRight

I don't understand what you are saying. I'm not arguing that the game should use CPU power/cores better - it clearly should, and my post was aimed at people with low GPU usage as well as low CPU use. Even if you have low CPU usage it seems that lowering CPU dependant settings can help a lot with framerates, and then you can increase GPU dependant settings. It's not perfect of course. I was simply posting my findings so far since we're all trying to get this thing to run better, and figure out how to get the best combination of image quality and performance.

Sorry if this has already been said, but if you are only getting 50% GPU usage (or around that) you should try lowering settings which are CPU dependant as your CPU is probably limiting your GPU usage (even if you have a modern Sandy or Ivy Bridge processor). Lowering settings such as Object Detail, Terrain Detail and View Distance should stop this bottleneck and allow your GPU to run at 90-100%. Doing this should also increase your framerates, and if you have a strong GPU you can probably then increase GPU dependant settings (such as AA, Texture Detail, Shadows, post-processing) without too much of a framerate hit.

Strangely I just set the game to 'High' detail instead of 'Ultra' (using the overall detail setting that changes everything else for you) and now I am getting 90-100% use of each card - SLI is working properly. Maybe with Ultra settings the game is limited by the CPU, but I have a 2500k running at 4.6Ghz so I would've hoped it wasn't a bottleneck. Maybe the Ultra View Distances were causing the problem. Plus i've noticed that changing Object Detail and Terrain Detail from High to Ultra has a massive affect on the framerate.

There is already an Arma 3 profile in Nvidia Inspector on my computer, and the game already has an SLI compatibility mode set in this profile. Unfortunately it isn't actually improving performance at all - I get the same framerate with my 690 even if I disable SLI altogether, and the framerate isn't good.

Thank you very much for all the replies. :-) I'm going to get the new CPU and motherboard instead of the 6990. One particular point that stood out was about the 6990 being a dual-GPU card - i actually hadn't thought about that. If ATI crossfire is bad for Arma 2 i'd expect that card to cause the same kind of problems, and since Arma 2 is my main reason for upgrading it could be very bad. Thanks again.

I need help with upgrading my PC, mainly for Arma 2. I don't overclock so please keep that in mind (everything running at stock speeds). I currently have, Intel Q8300 2.5 GHz CPU 4GB DDR2 RAM ATI 5870 GPU Vista 32bit I was considering getting a new motherboard with a i5 2500 CPU / 8GB DDR3 RAM /Win 7 64bit - would this make much difference to the framerate in Arma 2? My graphics card is still very good (i think), but someone on a different forum said to forget the new mobo/CPU etc and just upgrade to the new 6990 GPU for raw graphics power. I can only afford one or the other - the new mobo/CPU/RAM combo or the new 6990 card. Which would give the best performance increase in this game? As a side note - i've never known a game need this much power before, in order to look it's best. :eek: Thank you for any advice you can offer.