skulldragon

Signed. I confess that I had some doubts about the game for a while, but I'm now fully confident that, given time, Arma 3 will become by far my favourite and most played game (and I'm saying this with Rome 2 just around the corner)

I'm excited by how he says a few new features - getting just one out of deferred shading, the nice clouds, improved rain etc would be great, and it seems like we might get them all! Smurf, by double sun, do you mean this?

I'll just start by saying: Great Work! I was wondering whether this mod could be made to have different levels of severity based on the unit being suppressed. I know that all the units in game so far are regular troops, but it seems reasonable to me that guerillas/militia/untrained soldiers would suffer more under suppression and could possibly break down altogether (this could also happen for trained soldiers under enough stress). I feel that this would really help to make fighting regular and irregular troops quite different experiences.

True. For some reason, I was thinking of the new scopes as being fundamentally different from the aimpoints and such. With that in mind, I wonder what stopped BI from implementing 3D scopes earlier, like back in A2.

Well, I meant compared to the lack of gun drawing whatsoever currently whilst looking through a scope. But yeah, it shouldn't impact compared to not aiming down the sights at all. As to the FOV, good point, though again I can't see there being much of a difference.

I do wonder, though, about the marketing value of doing tank interiors. People who like tanks may be drawn to the game by the idea. That said, it may make no difference whatsoever.

As to the problem of people disabling PP to remove the blur around a zoomed in scope, surely BI can make this blur unaffected in such a way by the video settings?

Drawing the scope and gun in 3D as opposed to just a 2D image with a hole might cause a slight performance decrease. I can't see it being significant, though, and the trade off is more than worth it!

Thanks for the quick response, it cleared things up perfectly :)

Does anybody know if the default branch patches will simply be collections of all the dev branch patches, or will they include anything extra?

It was, but that 225 km2 included the sea, which wasn't really used much in Arma 2. The 270 km2 figure for Altis is just its landmass, I think it's supposed to be 900 km2 including the ocean.

I don't think Crossfire has been optimised much (at all?) yet, but I don't think that's the problem so much as that many people are getting poor performance. Its been reported many times, so I don't think you need to and it really ought to be fixed before released (they're working on it now, but I have no idea how much progress they're making.)

Starting with Arma 3 and then heading back will probably kill your enjoyment of the older titles quite a lot, as they're a lot 'clunkier' than Arma 3. I'd say start with the oldest and work forwards, that way your experience will keep improving and by the time you reach Arma 3, it should be more polished and have more content. You could just start with Arma 3 and stick with it - you'll have a lot of fun, but I'd imagine you want to play all the other games you've paid for. Quick warning - if you play the older titles and don't like them, don't give up with the series, just move on to the next game. Each new game brings quite a lot of improvements.

I'm currently using an HD 5770 and I can run it smoothly on mostly 'standard' settings, a couple on high, with a view distance of 2.5km. It looks very nice

This may be of use to people: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgamegpu.ru%2Faction-%2F-fps-%2F-tps%2Farma-iii-alpha-test-gpu.html&act=url (sorry if its already been posted). Admittedly, they don't seem to have Ivy Bridge CPUs on the CPU section, but I'd guess they'd be about 10% faster than their Sandy Bridge equivalents.

Done it, very good idea, but I noticed a couple of (presumably) typos which could affect responses. Firstly, the CPU speed question reads "What MhZ is your CPU?". I assumed that it meant GHz, and responded as such. Also, on the SSD/hard drive question, some capacities appeared in more than one group, for example '300GB-500GB' and '500GB-750GB', which could create some confusion as to which group a 500GB Hard Drive owner should select. Sorry if this sounds picky - as I said, its an excellent idea and is also very interesting to see the results

Nice link! Thanks for that Any idea which benchmarks they're running, though? 'Noc' and 'Wioska', mean 'Night' and 'Village' (or so Google Translate tells me), so I'm assuming the two Chernarus-based benchmarks. Sorry if these seems picky, its just I'd like an indication of the situations that those benchmarks represent.

I'd also say it's worth waiting, both because of the better hardware and, by the time it gets released, we should have at least got the alpha which will give us a good idea of how well different GPUs perform, whether the game runs better on nVidia/AMD etc.

Yeah, fair point. Sorry. I just saw you had linked to the 7850's review and overlooked that it was to compare to the 7770. As for the performance gains, they were more around the 20-25% mark, which is still huge, I admit. However, Arma 2 seems to have benefited much more than other games, so perhaps the driver changes just happened to change something that had been a significant bottleneck in Arma.

The performance increase in RFT will, I'd imagine, be down to the fact that the Operation Arrowhead engine it runs on has been (and still is being) worked on and optimised beyond more than the original Arma 2 engine (which Arma 2 Free runs on). As for Arma 2 CO performance, the performance will theoretically be lower due to the higher resolution textures, but I really can't say how noticeable it would be. I don't think anything else will affect it. Hope this helps.

domokun - that benchmark is out of date. This one: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2012/06/22/amd-radeon-7970-3gb-ghz-edition-review/3 shows the performance of the 7850 after the performance boost it got from a driver update. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the 7770/7750 as comparatives (I assume they sped up in a similar way). Also, bit-tech has unfortunately stopped using OA as a benchmark. Does anybody know any other sites that do?

For $120, this may be of interest: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131477 If you're interested in how it compares to the GTS 450, then this may be of use: http://www.hwcompare.com/11909/geforce-gts-450-1gb-vs-radeon-hd-7770/ Those graphs by no means tell the whole story, but they're are decent indicator of such things. In terms of Arma 2 performance, this should be useful: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2012/02/15/amd-radeon-hd-7770-1gb-review/3 The GTS 450 would get lower performance than the GTX 550 Ti listed in the graphs. Also, at some time after that review, a driver update by AMD increased it's higher end 7000 series cards' performance in Arma 2 (and other games by) around 20%. Unfortunately, bit-tech never got around to retesting the 7770, and no longer use Arma 2 as a benchmark, but you'll be getting even better performance than that graph suggests, assuming you use the correct driver version. Also, don't worry about the low score the card gets in the review, that was before the driver update and based on it's original price of $189. Hope this is of use to you :) Edit: just saw the several posts made whilst I was typing this. At 1280x1024, you'll get more performance still! Don't know how much more, but it should be a decent amount. Another edit: It seems AMD recommends a 500W PSU for this GPU, which is odd, seeing as it uses less power than the GTS 450. Sorry if this is a problem.

I have no wish to add confusion to the matter, and I'm not claiming to be an expert here either, but seeing as a GTS 450 is 2 generations old now, I'd have thought you could get a card with equivalent performance for less money (or alternatively more performance for the same amount of money). You'd benefit from lower power usage as well. How much are you expecting to pay for the GTS 450? Also, what resolution do you intend to play at? As for the motherboard, yeah it will be fine. As for the PSU, it does meet nVidia's recommendation for that GPU, so now worries there, although you probably be limited in terms of overclocking.

I don't know much about PhysX, but it seems like it could possibly help facilitate more advanced building destruction, with not too much of a performance hit (I mean, as far as I can imagine, the necessary calculations need only be done when an explosive hits a building, and the implementation doesn't need to be 100% accurate to RL if doing so would cause significant performance drops). The AI could still be a problem though.

Now, I'm not advocating a blur effect, just improvements to how suppression affects the player in general, but as I said in an earlier post, people are different. What you may consider: someone else may consider "The mildly eyebrow-raising incidence of having a (not real) gun pointed in their direction in a game". I know that's a bit extreme (short of not caring whatsoever) and that most people (myself included) will feel at least some panic when having a gun pointed at them, but please remember that not everybody can get so deeply immersed in the game. As for the thing about the sounds, I 100% agree with you - the JSRS mod added immeasurably to the 'suppression experience'. I also feel the sway is currently implemented imperfectly, but I lack the RL experience to say. batto - you say: "...effect from suppressive fire" (which isn't really suppressive fire but me being dumb and not hitting my shots)." (the quote seems a bit out of context like that, sorry). Perhaps I'm misinterpreting what you're saying (I do such things quite often, so my apologies if it is the case), but you seem to be implying that the physical/psychological effects of a bullet just missing you is less noticeable because the shot wasn't intended as suppressive fire. Anyway, I may be wrong, but I always thought the idea behind suppressive fire was "Want to kill them, probably won't, but it will keep them down, which is pretty much just as good" and hence not all too different from simple missed shots anyway. Also, has anyone here been under suppresive fire and can tell us if you do experience any visual (or indeed any sensory) 'anomalies'.