Sneakson

I agree overclocking is a dying thing of the 90s and overhyped by gamers today... 5% differences... Usually not worth it considering you will need cooling.

Check the recommended specs instead of the minimum specs next time.

Try playing another server, with fewer players or another mission. The server could be bad, the host could be bad, the other players could be causing lag somehow or the mission could be poorly scripted causing lag etc. etc. etc.

"Doesn't mind control" - except that’s by definition what they do. Steam has all sorts of achievements, statistics tracking and trading cards (what the hell!) designed to keep players using their service while bombarding them with sales, check this article out and you may share my cynicism: http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/07/the-psychology-behind-steams-summer-sale/ Steams sneaky attempts at worsening the consumer conditions and creating a market where none is needed isn’t what I dislike the most about Steam though. What’s worse is that for the last 10 years you’ve been able to walk into a store, buy a physical game and unless you download Steam, install Steam, start Steam, make a Steam account, log-in to Steam, memorize your Steam account details, update Steam, click through the mess of Steam windows that you need to in order to start something and then have Steam on in the background at all times while maintaining an internet connection* there is absolutely nothing you can do with the physical game you just bought. * There’s an offline mode… which you have to be online to activate. Back when Steam started it was the optional service where we wouldn’t need our CD/DVDs anymore and could download our games if we wanted. Cool, however since then they have taken a monopoly on computer gaming and today WE NEED the service to play. Travel back 20 years in time and ask any consumer if they would want to need an extra service to even be able to play their games and what would their answer be? That’s the sort of questions that consumers should be asking themselves. Why do I need Steam? If I could suddenly start ARMA3 completely without needing any Steam, what would I have lost? Nearly nothing, while I would have gained all sorts of convenience. Being able to download games again if you throw away the CD and automatic updates are about the only conveniences with Steam, I think. On a different topic: my biggest pet-peeve of ARMA3 is how damn slow and inaccurate the AI is with missile launchers. I always end up shooting the missile specialists on my team and taking their launchers.

Steam is a DRM service. At best it makes people pay for all sorts of junk they will never play or would otherwise download for free.

I would be interested in knowing actually. Haven’t seen anyone with such an imbalanced computer in terms of CPU to graphics card strength. ARMA3 is considered “CPU-heavy†however that’s usually an overstatement and I would be interested in seeing how much your CPU compensates for your graphics card. At worst: Medium settings (many settings on Ultra, because many settings don’t matter but the important settings will be Medium) with a 1600-something view distance similar to the old machine in my sig and at best… I have no idea. Other than the graphics card everything else is up to the modern hardcore gaming standard though. You should definitely be saving for a better graphics card (I’d say MSI 760 or MSI 770 with 2GB VRAM, unless you have an XHD monitor) next, then I would suggest buying an SSD of at least 128GB (the Samsung 840 Evo series is the best, then non-Evo).

Ahhh, DCS! I have got to try that some time.

Exactly. That's why AI is programmed only to be able to shoot you at 10.

30 fps is not unplayable. Most console games are only in 30 fps. Usually player performance does not drop significantly until below 20 fps.

Wrong. The ARMA3 AI can shoot you from a kilometre away. Crysis was criticized for super-sniping enemies that could hit you at 100 meters... in most games AI will mostly miss you at 10 meters. At least this is how it was last time I tried fighting some enemies with the highest AI settings at distance.

Hey guys, remember that your object detail caps object distance! Standard: 3000 meters. High: 5000 meters. Very high: 7000 meters. Ultra: 12000 meters? Standard 3000 m object distance: 40 fps. Standard 12000 m object distance: 20 fps, visually nearly the same as 3000 m object distance! Ultra 10000 m object distance: 20 fps, visually extremely much better than Standard 12000 m distance. The object detail and distance is the only settings I’ve changed and the view distance was always at 12000 m. Visual difference between Standard 12000 and Ultra 10000 (both at 20 fps): http://i.imgur.com/wjU61bG.jpg (354 kB) 1920x1200 http://i.imgur.com/u010O7k.jpg (368 kB) 1920x1200 Shows the importance of tweaking. ---------- Post added at 18:49 ---------- Previous post was at 18:43 ---------- 20-30% boost? :s Maybe it's only my computer then. In ARMA3 I only measured a 5% difference between 4.0 GHz and 4.4 GHz with 4770K and a 770 2GB.

Hey again. I’ve been doing some cost-efficiency studies on overclocking, air-cooling and water-cooling. I’m not going to go into excruciating detail however I have concluded: • The 760 is cost efficient. • Saving for a 770 instead of a 760 is 90% cost-efficient. • CPU water-cooling is only 23% cost-efficient for 760 users, much less than a 770 upgrade (90%)! • CPU air-cooling is only 42% cost-efficient for 760 users, much less than a 770 upgrade (90%)! • Saving for a 780 instead of a 770 is 34% cost-efficient. • CPU water-cooling is only 29% efficient for 770 users, somewhat less than a 780 upgrade (34%). • CPU air-cooling is 59% cost-efficient for 770 users, actually much more than a 780 upgrade (34%)! • As such, water-cooling is not cost-efficient for 770 or 760 users. • Air-cooling however is cost-efficient for 770 users though not 760 users. All calculations based on current Tom’s Hardware data. With water-cooling I counted with a Corsair Hydro H110 which at $110 I assumed may boost your fps by 10%, based on absolutely nothing. With air-cooling I counted with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo which at $30 I assumed may boost your fps by 5%, based on nothing. Note: this assumes you are in a situation where you are saving up to buy a 700-series card but have not yet done so! By “upgrading†I only mean saving up for the next card and not selling your current 700-series card and buying the next one instead, which will always be cost-inefficient depending on how much you call sell your old card for. Note that a 5% boost usually means actually only 2-5 fps in the 30-60 fps area. As such buying an air-cooler or water-cooler and overclocking will never mean a very big improvement. The conclusion is that overclocking, air-cooling and water-cooling is usually not worth it! A 770 user may consider a Hyper 212 Evo which has a minimal cost but also delivers a minimal boost. This small study can be improved by checking more closely what the most cost-efficient water-cooler is (Corsair may not be) and by checking more closely what exact performance boost a Hydro H110 or Hyper 212 Evo is capable of delivering. The current values are based no hard measurements. The study is also concentrated on the 760 and 770 which are the two cards most users should be considering. Edit: I also tried doing some hyper-threading tests. Initially I did 5 measurements with and 5 measurements without which showed a few percent difference however statistically I believe this was insignificant and likely chance at work. I changed my settings to make the measurements more accurate and with the first measurement hyper-threading seemed to be significantly better however each measurement got worse and at 7 measurements there was no statistical difference at all. Not surprisingly because the final series with hyper-threading showed almost 8% difference between measurements... needs a sturdier benchmark. This was using some Altis benchmark over in the user missions area. A 4770K (which is more or less exactly a 4670K except with hyper-threading) is clearly not worth the extra $125-150 though.

Check my sig below for some inspiration on what settings work the best. I did a lot of benchmarking on both my machines so the settings are pretty well perfectly tweaked for about a 50 fps average. Tweaking is difficult though because you always have to balance good graphics with performance and some settings only make a small graphical difference but also a small performance difference so it’s hard to decide what to activate and what not. View distance doesn’t matter much but object distance is the heaviest setting of all. Decreasing shadows under 100 has no effect but increasing it over 100 does, in my experience anyways. Objects detail only matters in the ground and terrain detail only matters in the air (or the other way around) so you can tweak that to your personal preference. Picture-in-picture kills framerate in vehicles. Anyways I did all my benchmarking while measuring fps. Would be interesting to see if doing it while measuring frametimes instead would make a difference. Oh and all my benchmarking is done in singleplayer, because multiplayer depends on connection, server, scenario and so on and is generally quite unstable.

Many interesting choices here. I currently only have Afterburner installed since it measures fps, temps, graphs all of this, does screenshots and videos and more (overclocking) all in one. I’ll have to compare Afterburner, Bandicamp, Dxtory, Fraps and maybe some of the others (Evolve, Mirillis Action, Obs, Overwolf) some time. Shadowplay sounds boss. Too bad you apparently need GeForce Experience to use it though. I haven’t tried Experience but anything that wants me to have one extra program on at all times (Steam, Origin, and Uplay) is bad and Experience seems to be a Razer Game Booster (which doesn’t do shit naturally) copycat and when you’re copying Razer you know you’re bad.

No, I'm talking about statistical analysis actually... has nothing to do with marketing and it's vital for just about every branch of science there is besides philosophy. You don't have to measure all 300 million Americans to determine the average height quite accurately.

You're adding in too much. Player perception of fps variations depend on psychology, not physiology or cultural differences. Unless you are saying a friend telling you that 60 fps is way cooler changes your physiology on the spot, eh? ;) You’re also using the term “cultural differences†wrong. It’s used to differentiate between the general populations of different countries or heritages and not individuals. Psychology does matter though. However that’s absolutely not all that matters. Different visual techniques such as motion blur can increase the perception of smoothness by decreasing temporal aliasing and uneven framerate drops such as micro-stuttering are more noticeable (sub-second framerate drops that a framerate meter wouldn’t always notice). The way in which you usually notice a stable low framerate is thanks to input lag. It varies between different games and different media. I’ve never been bothered by console games usually having only 30 fps and in many current console games such as GTA V the framerate is consistently much lower than 30 fps and unstable but it still doesn’t bother me much. In Quake on a PC playing in 20 fps would probably drive me nuts though! All movies (except for the damn Hobbit) are shot in only 24 fps. Still you never notice a movie stuttering, do you, because of motion blur decreasing temporal aliasing. Also you said "papers on limited groups not really [being] representative of a given population"... and that's all wrong ;) All of science is based around the fact that you can randomly select 100 people out of a much bigger population and have those 100 people be representative of the general population. This is true because quantative human traits with a genetic basis are randomly distributed in populations. Video game skill is barely genetic and is not homogenously distributed across the world (South Korea vs Africa for example) or ages (younger players are usually better) however the study probably used a selection of already experienced Quake players that would be highly representative of any other group of skilled gamers. At worst the study may not hold entirely true for completely inexperienced gamers.

Actually a small SSD, 60 or 120GB is highly recommendable. I've heard it cuts your boot time quite a lot and makes the OS quicker though I've never really seen any concrete benchmarks about it really. Think about this though: if you can cut down 1 second on every load time on everything you do on your computer, every day, all year that eventually adds up not to mention a computer even being marginally quicker when it comes to things like opening documents makes for a big difference in user experience. When I upgraded to Windows 8 and bought an SSD at the same time my boot time went from 32 to 16 seconds and when I upgraded to Windows 8.1 it increased to 17 seconds because there’s a new log-on screen that takes a moment to wait through… and that’s a massive difference. The days of going to have snacks while your computer is starting are over. But I’ve never really compared an HDD to SSD directly… if I open a folder with lots of images on my SSD compared to my HDD the thumbnails seem to load nearly instantaneously, that’s about all the testing I’ve done.

Do you have any benchmark to back up that statement? How is the fps improved and how/when is the load time improved? I'm thinking SSDs are primarily good for boot times... they are definitely over-hyped for other uses. Never heard of SSDs making much of a difference in games. I'm not quite sure what to have on my SSD actually. Currently I have the OS, all docs, programs and a few games which is basically everything I have except for downloads.

There was a voting thread. As I remember only 2-5% were against women of any sort. If I don't remember incorrectly the tracker vote is only about women in combat roles. Also don't: • Claim that 65% is low. It's a majority. • Try saying some of the yes-voters voted yes only because it would be "nice to have". You have absolutely zero data to back up how important the voters think the feature is. Conversely I may say this: women in the game wouldn't break it for anyone. The no-voters are insignificant because if women were implemented they would simply have to play on servers without women. Also, how does "those who don't give a damn" not voting on the issue change anything? Those who don’t give a damn SHOULDN’T vote on a yes-no question. It doesn’t change anything. Actually there has been a good deal of complaining about Battlefield 4 not having women. Call of Duty now has women as of Ghosts.

Yes, DPI is to mice what megapixel was for cellphones/smartphones 5 years ago. However it’s worth mentioning that the DPI you need depends on your monitor too. With a 3840x2160 monitor you’re going to need twice the DPI compared to a 1920x1080 monitor to move your mouse the same centimetre distance diagonally across the screen using the same centimetre hand movement while maintaining perfect pixel precision assuming the monitors are the same size in centimetres. The alternative would be staying on 800 DPI and buying a quad size mouse pad. Doing so would tire out your arms quite quickly methinks.

Well, those videos were way below my level actually.

This discussion is still going? Basically, we want women. I think voting has shown that more than 90% of all users want women in ARMA3 in one way or another. However based on the discussion I’ve heard modding it would be to difficult so only BIS can do it and unfortunately BIS are currently very, very busy since one of their games came out six months ago and still doesn’t have a complete campaign even which is disastrous. Until BIS have time to spare to start developing brand new things there’s really no meaning to argue about this because it’s quite obvious that BIS are going to do it whenever they can which is after they are done with whatever they currently consider more important… and until then there’s nothing we can do about it, other than argue which is meaningless.

I missed this one. I remember playing Crysis in about 20 fps average when it was new. In some games that DOES work however 30 is so much better and so is 40, 50 or 60. Each to his own and if you’re happy with lower framerates that’s nice for you HOWEVER I think I should mention that player performance increases quite linearly along with framerates up to about 60 fps, studies show. (I think the study showed a slower increase in player performance at more than 60 fps ONLY because the users weren’t used to more than 60 fps and more than that may need some time of adjustment.) I can tell you from experience that aiming, handling weapons and the like is a lot easier on higher framerates because the delay in controls is much smaller and when you’re on low framerates you wouldn’t think it but when you play a game smoothly it’s a night and day difference. I tried this out specifically while speed-running some levels in the ARMA3 Beta. Anyways the aiming speed and accuracy lost with even 20 fps is only a split second. It most of all situations it doesn’t matter too much. FYI: the "go-to" build that generally all gamers are recommended to buy today is an Intel Core i5-4670K with a Z87 motherboard (Socket 1150), 8GB 1600 MHz RAM and a 760 or 770 graphics card or AMD equivalent and definitely an SSD. Note: the 4770K is exactly a 4670K with hyper-threading, a feature that has nothing to do with gaming and that usually slows down games (very slightly) though a few games do support it and in certain situations use it beneficially, including Battlefield 3 but last I heard (a while ago) ARMA3 does not support hyper-threading well. The 4770K is $150 cheaper and that money is better saved or spent on the graphics card or an SSD upgrade. A lot of users buy the 4770K thinking it is stronger than the 4670K but this is a complete, unfortunate misunderstanding. A bit weak I'm afraid. It might start up and so but I don’t think it would be completely enjoyable. On RAM: Oh, okay. I was aware that the C9 in the end is supposed to be lower but never checked why and only heard it’s a smaller difference than anyone would notice which I believe is very true still. Never heard about auto-overclocking memories and not really studied memories in detail at all beyond the bare basics I’ve need to buy my own. On HDD speeds: okay. CD/DVDs: okay. On PSUs: well duh, if you want you can scan every component inside you can. Might take a while though. If you want it over with all you have to do is search for one with at least the wattage you need and some sort of 80+ certification then google for reviews and check the verdict, especially noting the sound level which is the number one most important thing other than making sure it works and is compatible with your computer and all that. Compare a few and don’t forget to compare the costs obviously. On DPI: No, that’s "wrong." You set your DPI low and in-game setting high if you want it high end sensitivity, except for StarCraft II where you always do as I said: in-game 51-54% (or whatever I said before) and change the DPI on the mouse. Pro-players always do it that way anyways. StarCraft is different from shooters since it deals with two-dimensional mouse movement same as Windows and doesn’t need quite as much accuracy as well. Not that there's much difference between high DPI low in-game and low DPI high in-game but that's what the pros prefer for whatever reason they may have. I also hear 500 MHz polling is more popular than 1000 Hz. Sounds counter-intuitive but I can’t argue with them.

I see a lot of users going for the 4770K. Did I miss some benchmark saying it actually does better than the 4670K in ARMA3? Usually it's a few percent slower in most games despite being $150 more expensive actually... Yeah, that will run ARMA3 basically as well as anything else. I have a 4770k and 770 which I think is similar to the 680... runs fine in singleplayer. I haven't bothered much with multiplayer though. I would go with a 4670 instead of a 4770... $150 cheaper and usually a few percent quicker. First option there looks good though. Second one too probably though it doesn't say which RAM, HDD or SSD is included... neither do options 3 or 4. They're all basically the same though aren't they? Take the one with the case you like the most in that case (har har har).... Don't be afraid to buy a 770 or 760 instead of the 780 Ti either lol... the 780 Ti is quite strong and very expensive. Looks good. All top parts except the SSD which is a brand I've never heard of... Samsung 840 Evo (newer) Samsung 840 (older) are the best SSDs on the market currently. 128 GB is more than enough for OS, docs and programs... they most important thing is to have your OS on there really. I'm not sure how much anything else benefits from being on an SSD but I think there's a general consensus that games do not run better. Edit: Ofcourse if you CAN change anything about that I would change the SSD and also slim down the power supply... 750W? 500W is more than enough... I'm not sure what the TDP of the 760 is but even a 770 works with 500W and I know the 760 needs less. Also Corsair Vengeance memories are considered one step ahead of the Ripjaws but the Ripjaws are the second best as I remember and the difference is so small you would never notice outside of the benchmark test.

I’m not sure actually! I remember ten years ago when anti-aliasing started appearing in games and back then it meant smooth image and MASSIVE slowdowns. However nowadays there are many different modes of anti-aliasing though and some are better than others. In ARMA3 I can turn FSAA up to x2 or x4 with no slowdown what so ever and not until I turn it to x8 will I start noticing any slowdowns (if I remember correctly). I think everyone should experiment on their own with anti-aliasing. Object distance definitely makes a big difference, view distance less so. Smoke causes massive slowdowns however unfortunately using the lower settings doesn’t make it one bit better.