Sneakson

4: No, I have not heard about XMP profiles. What do you mean "what is about latencies"? Ofcourse you should ensure compatibility of all components, maybe I should have mentioned that but the components I mentioned are all compatible together. 6: What do you mean there is no difference in transfer speeds? Western Digital over Seagate, yes ;) The Seagate Barracuda is a common alternative to the WD Blue though, I would have mentioned that if I had remembered it! I think they're equal. Are you talking about RAID? I didn't want to go there in such a meant-to-be-basic guide. 7: Not heard of "fossy" brands but I'm confident even a layman will be able to locate a perfectly fine DVD on their own though. Can't understand that sentence... the drive eats brands? 8: Care to disprove me? ;) I have actually measured my wattage at the wall using a 4770K, 770, water-cooling and a whole bunch of other stuff that draws some watts including the monitor and everything and it came down to 300W. 9: What I meant by saying Windows 8 is like Windows 7 99% of the time was when it comes to user experience and I wanted to point out that Windows 8 is not all that bad... some users (including myself before upgrading) seem to think that you spend a lot of time in apps or the start screen in Windows 8 which you don't. 12: How cute... you have no idea what you are talking about. World best Counter-Strike players by money won here: 1. f0rest (400 dpi) 2. cArn (400 dpi) 3. dsn (?) 4. NEO (500 dpi) 5. TaZ (400 dpi) 6. RobbaN (400 dpi) 7. Loord (400 dpi) 8. kuben (400 dpi) 9. zonic (?) 10. walle (?) 11. Edward (400 dpi) 12. Zeus (?) 13. GeT_RiGhT (400 dpi) 14. ave (?) 15. HeatoN (?) 16. starix 17. Kapio (?) 18. LUq (?) 20. markeloff (400 dpi) 20. Storm (?) List order based on December 2013 data and DPI based on July 2012 data: http://www.ongamers.com/articles/top-100-counter-strike-players-of-all-time-by-prize-money-won/1100-508/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0AkghPvIh7ZVwdGZ3WXE0dDlTdk5rT1ZKZm91VXVzREE&output=html Quake ESWC 2010: Cooller 400 dpi Cyper 450 dpi DaHang 800 dpi Av3k 800 dpi Bodzo 400 dpi Fazz 400 dpi L1nkje 400 dpi Noctis 800 dpi Rapha 400 dpi Stermy 400 dpi Strenx 800 dpi http://www.esreality.com/index.php?a=post&id=1907380 Couldn't find any quick SC2 data but I believe 400-2400 is the norm. And on the water-cooling: I'm currently not overclocked. Try the settings in the older machine in my sig. If that doesn't work try setting everything to the lowest except for shadows which should never be on low because low is slower than the higher settings. There’s literally a million other things you can do outside of ARMA. Shut down other programs, do a CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE (or CTRL+ALT+DELETE) and turn off unnecessary programs and processes and so on etc.

First of all: 2560x1440 is a lot! That's "XHD" and to my knowledge graphics performance is usually proportional to screen size so you should expect only 60% the performance of someone playing the game in 1920x1080... that's the downside with a big screen. Also graphics cards always matter. ARMA3 being called “CPU dependent†is a misnomer. Also all talk about bottlenecking is usually simplified. By the way I would upgrade the graphics card. The new CPU is octa-core which means it’s not ideal for playing ARMA (what I’ve heard anyways is that it doesn’t scale well across more than a few cores) and only marginally better than the one you have it seems while the new graphics card is about the strength of the weakest ones of the latest generation instead of your old one which is the weakest three generations (years) ago. So I would buy the graphics card which will bring your graphics performance up to this generation and if you’re not satisfied with the performance you can continue saving for a maybe a MSI Z87-G41 ($70 at Microcenter) and i5-4670K ($180 at Microcenter) or some similar alternatives to bring your CPU up to the current generation. Note that Microcenter may not be the cheapest alternative and that buying used components may be cheaper (eBay or local auction/trading sites) and that there may be good alternatives to the 4670K (Intel or AMD alternatives) however generally I would not advice upgrading to something that isn’t the latest (or second latest) generation since that will probably mean you have to upgrade soon again if you want to continue playing the latest games. By the way I'm pretty much saying the opposite of doveman. Not sure who's right. Searching for benchmarks would be pretty wise.

Battlefield 3 and 4 to my knowledge use many cores very well and Battlefield 3 even utilized hyperthreading in a good way if you had some certain specs. Wish all games did. Hopefully this years controversy of Arma, Battlefield, Call of Duty and Total War all being extremely buggy will mean developers start paying more attention to perfecting their engines from the very beginning instead of having it at the end of their schedule then have it be cut off completely when they’re asked to have the game done early not to clash with other games. It’s funny how most games only uses two or so cores well and 2GB RAM and then we have games like CoD: Ghosts that won’t even let you start the game without 6GB RAM installed when it still actually didn’t use more than 2GB, which was patched out after much controversy. And don’t get me started on i7s being marketed to a general audience. I have one, only for curiosity’s sake.

Fps can't be accurately measured in multiplayer, that's why I don't. ARMA3 is too unstable and the fps in multiplayer depends greatly on the host, server, map, internet connection and client... Also the game isn't designed to not be played by AMD users as much as AMD insists on making multi-core CPUs with substandard per-core performance and ARMA relies on only a few cores and doesn't scale optimally last time I heard. According to my standards by the way a game runs well when it runs 60 fps. If you’re willing to settle for 30 fps then congratulations, you can probably get away with a much cheaper computer. If you’re willing to play in sub-HD resolution that will be extremely significant as well. I wish I could settle for less, that's why I'm not upgrading to 120 Hz. I hear it's too good. By the way, I agree. ARMA3 is messy. That's why I've left it until the campaign is complete. However most believe that after some years of modding it will be about as good as the other ARMA games have been after their shaky start. The next time however, ARMA4, I really hope that BIS go for stability instead of being too ambitious and ending up with a buggy mess. They’ve got a bad case of the Daggerfalls.

Actually, playing ARMA 3 on high settings will cost you. If you buy an entirely new computer you really should spend about $1400 on it if you want to be able to play current and upcoming games on high settings and remember that a monitor and audio basically lasts a lifetime and all other components will be great for 5-7 years as long as you upgrade the graphics card every several years. And even then you’ll be able to sell it for some hundreds of bucks used. So it’s an investment. I could have included some cheaper options for the graphics card such as the 660 Ti and maybe even some 500-series card though that will probably proportionally affect your performance. Writing a guide is the easiest when it’s about the newest, widely available products and you do not consider buying used products but if anyone wants to buy anything used they can. To be honest I’ve never considered it a good idea to save a hundred bucks here and a hundred bucks there on components that have 7 year or lifetime warranties because in the long run such small amounts of money are a piss in the river if you know what I mean. If you are a young student chances are you don’t know but if you have an income or student grant I think you will agree. So I didn’t include some cheaper options because of 1) time constraints, 2) unsure of how well cheaper options handle ARMA3, 3) don’t know AMD well and 4) the used market varies from day to day. I could write a more complete guide of sorts but after writing the monitor and mouse sections I thought it was getting a bit out of hand and it was originally only going to be some advice. A sticky thread somewhere would be nice but in that case I would also need some AMD advice because I really don’t know AMD well and don’t understand their numbering of CPUs or graphics cards at all. Would be time-consuming. Anyways just to throw together a cheap variety on the above: Corsair 200R ($60) MSI Z87-G41 PC Mate ($85) Intel Core i5-4670K ($220) 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz ($88) MSI 760 2GB ($260) WD Blue 1TB ($60) DVD ($20) Seasonic G-360 360W ($55) Windows 8 ($100) Still comes down to about $950 though if you already have Windows 8 that’s $100 off. All students should also notice that they can usually have Windows cheaper if they buy it using a student card, for free if studying at certain universities and in Sweden any student can buy all Windows versions for only 150 SEK ($23) through a company that acts as a virtual Microsoft DreamSpark university basically, very nice. A cheapskate case, the cheapest Haswell motherboard, the i5 (I checked a benchmark for the i3 and it did not do well), memories, a 760 (660 is 20% weaker and 20% cheaper at $208, Amazon.com), a big HDD (cheap anyways), no SSD, a DVD (you probably already have one) and quite amazingly the Seasonic G-360 (80+ Gold) is only $55. Seasonic, in other words it’s not going to blow up on you and should be quiet while also being able to handle the 250-ish W that I would estimate the system should use. If you already have a DVD and Windows that’s $828 for a computer that may play ARMA3 about 75% as well as my $2400 does. You can save about $800 by buying a cheap case, cheap mobo, 760 instead of 770 and skip the SSD and the final about $800 my computers worth I basically wasted because I could afford it (nicer than average case, an i7 because I’ve never had one and want to try one, the 770, an extra size 250GB SSD, a fanless Seasonic because I don’t want any noise, water-cooling because I’m planning on some overclocking which I have yet to apply and a back-up HDD). Better? And here are some suggested prices which you shouldn’t go too far below for the extras: Monitor ($200) Audio ($200) Mouse ($60-ish) Mousepad ($10) Keyboard ($100-ish… for a gaming-oriented keyboard that is) Fps values are singleplayer. Measuring online is useless. Caught me. Yes, I use Corsair and MSI a lot and I both stand by that they are great and am sure of this because I own the components in question and can say with perfect certainty from browsing through a hundred benchmarks and testing my own components that they are no slackers. Asus also usually end up extremely close to MSI and Gigabyte are usually in the fight too but they never seem to win it. I mentioned EVGA too I believe because sometimes they are cheaper and they have good warranty conditions as I’m told. With motherboard I wouldn’t really go with any exotic brands but with graphics card I did mention that you can’t really go wrong… the differences between the cards are small but so are the cost differences so why go with a card that’s twice as loud? Why not just go for the best? They may “change with the seasons†but this is the current state of things. I'm going by current benchmarks and current statistics. AMD I’m unfortunately unfamiliar with.

Hey guys. I used to be here a lot during the Alpha/Beta. I’m a techy guy so I’ll drop back in with some buyer’s/set-up tips: 1. Case: Very personal! Towers, cubes or blocks in various sizes. Decide what size and appearance you want. The smallest cases may not hold standard size motherboards and some graphics cards. Different cases also have different cooling capabilities and noise blocking capabilities. If you don’t know where to start check out Corsair. I use an excellent Corsair Carbide Air 540. Costs $60 to $160. 2. Motherboard: “Motherboardâ€. The name says it all doesn’t it? This is where you attach all your components. Asus and MSI are the best brands. Motherboards are complex however the most important aspects are that it has a Z87 chipset and supports as many graphics cards as you want. Easy. Asus Z87-A MSI Z87-G45 Gaming Both of these support Haswell CPUs and at least two graphics cards of any sort (AMD/NVidia). You won’t need anything “stronger.†Both cost about $150. 3. CPU: CPUs are the magic crackers that do all your calculations. They are made my AMD or Intel and I believe there is a consensus that Intel CPUs work better with ARMA and I’m no AMD expert so I’m only going to mention the one and obvious choice here: Intel Core i5-4670K This Haswell boy will do all your calculations in a hurry. It’s the one every should buy and one of the best CPUs available to anyone while at the same time it is very cheap compared to any graphics card. It costs $220. 4. Memories: If you want to be able to do more than one thing at a time you’ll need some solid memories! Corsair are the best though many other brands are in the competition and the difference between brands is actually small. In other words you can use basically any big name brand and won’t see any difference whatsoever however if you want the best there can only be: Corsair Vengeance Next is how much and what speed? You’ll want 1600 MHz which I believe is the highest you can use without memory overclocking. A 32-bit OS can only use 4GB however a 64-bit OS can use a lot more. 4GB on a 64-bit OS can be a bit difficult and memories are not expensive at all so buy 8GB. 16GB is a waste of money unless you know exactly how you’re going to use it. Finally you may want to divide your memories onto smaller sticks so 8GB should be divided onto two separate 4GB sticks. Note that the colour of the memories makes absolutely NO difference: it’s only for appearance actually. In the end you’ll have: 2x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz Costs about $90. 5. Graphics card: Here you can spend $70 to $7000 and needless to say this is what will decide how well you can finally play your games. Graphics cards are made by AMD or NVidia where AMD are usually cheaper and NVidia are usually stronger however you will want a graphic card made by a third party including Asus and MSI as two of the best brands. Again I’m not AMD expert so I will only cover NVidias selection. NVidias cards are named 560, 660, 760 where a higher hundred is newer and 760 or 770 where a higher ten is stronger and sometimes there are Ti models that are stronger than the non-Ti model. A typical choice is the GTX 760. Now if you want a 770 you will have to pay 50% more and your games will run 33% quicker. If you want a 780 you will have to pay 40% more and your games will run 25% quicker, compared to the 770 now. Finally a Titan will cost several times more with only a 10% boost. As you can see the more expensive cards are less cost efficient. You can also use several graphics cards at once however doing so is also not very cost efficient at all compared to waiting two years for graphics cards that are as strong as two were two years ago and costs only what one does. What you should do is buy a 760 or 770 depending on your situation and again Asus and MSI are excellent choices though it has been said that you can’t go wrong with most of the 700-series.By the way you may see cards that have 2GB or 4GB VRAM. This is important to take into consideration if you are using a screen significantly bigger than 1920x1080 or 1920x1200 including XHD, 2K and 4K screens and whatever else they may call themselves. 2GB is enough for an HD screen however if your screen is bigger you’ll want 4GB. I use an MSI 770 Gaming 2GB. 6. Storage: Currently HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) are being succeeded by SSDs (Solid State Drives) and buying an SSD often said to be one of the best investments you can do to speed up your computer and especially shorten boot time significantly! What you should do today is buy one 64-256GB SSD by Samsung that are the very best in SSDs that you install your OS on and a cheap and massive 1-2TB HDD that I would say should be by Western Digital that you can store basically anything and everything on. Samsung 840 Evo Western Digital Blue Only you can decide how much space you need. Your SSD should be at least 64GB so you can store your OS and documents however 128GB is even better and will also let you install games though this doesn’t make much difference. 256GB is also quite cheap however buying more than that is not cost efficient considering that SSD costs are dropping quickly and in a year or two it will only cost a small bit of what it does today actually. A 1TB HDD is cheap today and 2TB doesn’t cost much more however how much do you really need? I use a Samsung 840 250GB and Western Digital Blue 1TB and the SSD holds my Windows 8.1 64-bit (20GB), 50GB documents, 80GB games and 20GB extras for a total of 180GB which is only 80% of the total 250GB. I have 180GB of downloads on the HDD and that’s only about 20%. Samsung 840 Evo 120GB costs $90 and Western Digital Blue 1TB $60. 7. Optical drive: Not much to say here. Any CD/DVD or Blu-ray will do. 8. Supply unit: Now all we need are some watts! How much does a 4670 and 770 use? 800W? Closer to exactly 300W. Unless you use several graphics cards (you don’t) then you will actually only need about 500W. Again Corsair is one of the best brands however Seasonic are the, the, best. Some of Corsairs best units are made by Seasonic and all of XFXs units are actually only modified Seasonic units. Seasonic also sell their own units under their own name. It’s difficult to name one unit for everyone to buy because availability differs quite a lot in different countries, unfortunately. Search by yourself and only consider units with 80+ Bronze or higher! 80+ is a certification system and indication of quality. Costs $60 to $160. 9. OS: Windows 7 or 8, 32-bit or 64-bit. Unless you already have decided on anything else. Easy. Windows 8 is the exact same as Windows 7 99% of the time. The big difference is Start which can be modded and so can most if not all other arguably negative news. However Windows 8 is actually quicker than Windows 7 both overall and in boot time. Naturally if you buy a new OS today it should absolutely be 64-bit, $100. 10. Monitor: Monitors is a big discussion and I’m not going to go into detail but I will mention two important matters: 60 Hz vs 120/144 Hz. How many Hz can the human eye see? You’re lucky because I’m an expert on this subject and the answer is that the eye can see infinite Hz! Eyes don’t send one image to the brain every time unit; they send an image to the brain every time they are hit by light. They are analogue. Anyone that says that our eyes only can see 24, 60, 120 or 240 Hz or any value is wrong. A 120 Hz monitor is a lot smoother than a 60 Hz monitor however also bear in mind that you will need twice the computer to view 120 Hz and if you only can play a game in 30 fps than that would be about 90 Hz wasted. Console games usually run in 30 fps. Movies are shot in 24 fps actually. How come movies don’t stutter? Because of motion blur actually! Motion blur decreases temporal aliasing just as anti-aliasing decreases spatial aliasing. Motion blur does apparently (!) increase your fps even when ironically sometimes motion blur decreases your fps. I think you should always have motion blur activated unless it causes slowdowns. A 120 Hz monitor can definitely be worth it and only you can decide if you want one or not. Your choice. Another big issue is TN vs non-TN screens. All (few exceptions) 120/144 Hz monitors are TN screens which have a lot worse image quality than many non-TN alternatives. So you will have to choose between a 120 Hz TN monitor that’s smooth with lower image quality and bad viewing angles and a 60 Hz non-TN monitor with superior image quality. In my opinion the best choice is a 60 Hz non-TN monitor with the best image quality available because that makes literally everything look better while 120 Hz will only be noticeable when playing games that are old enough for your computer to be able to run them in 120 Hz. However if you are into Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, StarCraft or Quake a 120 Hz monitor may definitely be the better monitor for you! The cost of your monitor doesn’t have to match your other components at all though I would say $150 to $500 is comfortable.11. Audio: This involves speakers and headsets. I’m not expert on audio however a good set of speakers cost about $250-$500 and a great set can cost many, many times more. Speakers that were good 20 years ago are still good today though. They’re not something you upgrade often at all. Headsets can save a marriage. 12. Controls: A mouse and a keyboard, or keypad and maybe even a console controller! Again this is very personal. When it comes to mouse the important things are appearance, ergonomics and sensitivity. Having at least 5 buttons (scroll wheel counts as one) is also swell. When it comes to keyboards there are very, very many aspects to consider. There are also many keypads that are ergonomic mini-keyboards and you can buy both wired and wireless Xbox 360 controllers that work with your PC and that are great for playing games such as Assassin’s Creed, Dark Souls or emulation. Starting with mice there’s a big elephant issue. CPI/DPI (counts/dots per inch, synonymous) is a major marketing word and many mice boast 6400 DPI. However DPI is not any indication whatsoever of the quality of a mouse sensor. At all. DPI is a measure of how closely a mouse scans the surface it is being used on and not how well it scans it. A mouse can scan closely but poorly leading to a lot of noise being scanned and shaky mouse movements. If you make it scan even more closely it will only scan the noise more closely instead of scanning less noise. Close to all professional players use 400 DPI. So how much DPI do you need? Go to the Control Panel, then Mouse, then Pointer Settings and set Pointer Speed to 6/10 and disable acceleration first. Now when out in Windows nothing affects your mouse movements, so the DPI that your mouse is set to will be your final DPI. Adjust the DPI on your mouse to something that you think is comfortable and so you can easily click on small objects while also being able to move your mouse across the screen. On a 1920x1080 monitor you will probably want about 1600 DPI. On a small monitor less and on a bigger monitor more since it takes more counts and more hand movement to move across the screen. In games you should do the same thing and experiment. A good suggestion in first-person shooters is to adjust your sensitivity so you can easily shoot targets and do a 180 degree turn comfortably. However while in-game you should adjust the in-game sensitivity and not the DPI on your mouse because then your sensitivity outside of the game will change too! Some old games don’t have sensitivity adjustments in which case you should adjust your DPI on the mouse instead. Note that in StarCraft and other strategy games it is a bad idea to adjust in-game sensitivity and you should always adjust your DPI. In StarCraft II as I remember your in-game sensitivity should always be at 51-54% because that will make your mouse move exactly the same in the game as outside of the game. First-person games work completely different due to them being set in inverted world transform matrixes and if you have no idea what that means don’t question it. Do this and you will always have maximum accuracy. I use 1200 dpi without any adjustments in ARMA (in-game sensitivity at default value) and outside of the game that lets me move diagonally across my 1920x1200 screen with a flick of my wrist and in-game it lets me do a 180 spin with the flick of my wrist. I hold my mouse in a swipe grip and only move my mouse a few centimetres which the high sensitivity (1200 high, that’s right) compensates for which is what I personally enjoy. I’m also deadly accurate which is important because I like being accurate in games. Someone else may enjoy a much lower DPI or in-game sensitivity settings and move their hand around on the mouse mat a lot more. Someone else still may have a much higher DPI or in-game settings and move their hand a lot less than I do. Someone else still may have a much bigger monitor than I do and need a higher DPI because of that. Anyways there are many different mouse brands. I’m going to mention one excellent mouse: the SteelSeries Sensei. This is a cheap, excellent starting and advanced mouse for everyone. It has a classy appearance, ambidextrous ergonomics, 7 buttons plus a DPI-switch, three-zone customizable backlighting and thanks to a built in CPU (!) you can adjust DPI between 1 and 5700 (and boost it up to over 11000) acceleration, deacceleration and smoothing all directly on the mouse without any need for hardware so you can plug it in anywhere you want and it works. The intricate customisation will let you discover which DPI is good for you and if you enjoy acceleration or not. It is considered one of the best mice ever. Still it’s only $60. Buy a $10 SteelSeries QcK (also available in bigger or smaller sizes) mouse pad while you’re at it too. It really does make a noticeable difference over your average office mouse pad. Did I mention the Sensei has a screen on its underside? It is out of control. Anyways, this is turning into a long text so I’m only briefly going to mention keyboards: the Corsair K70 is amazing. Mechanical Blue/Brown/Red switches, three different colour styles, backlighting, USB… it has everything. At $130 it is definitely worth it because you will love it a long time. 13. Extras: An external HDD like the Western Digital My Passport is excellent for back-ups! Also: cooling. CPU cooling and graphics card extra cooling exists. This is mainly for overclocking, cost inefficient and will not be covered by me. Total about $2000-3000 will get you a really nice computer set-up. The computer only (without monitor, audio, controls) usually costs $1400 to $2400. Used computers or older components and cheaper components can save you a lot of money sometimes. All prices calculated from Amazon.com. International prices are usually a bit more. I have a Corsair Carbide Air 540 with an MSI Z87-G45 Gaming, Intel i7-4770K, 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz, MSI 770 Gaming 2GB, Samsung 840 Evo 250GB, Western Digital Blue 1TB, Seasonic P-520FL 520W, Corsair Hydro H110, Windows 8.1 64-bit, HP ZR24W, 20 year old 4.1 speakers, Corsair K70, SteelSeries Sensei, Xbox 360 wireless controller and Western Digital My Passport 1TB. It starts to the desktop in about 16 seconds and plays ARMA3 on all max settings except for view distance 3000/3000/200 in 50 fps. Quick tips: Motherboards are full of crappy, useless features you’ll never use. Overclocking is not cost efficient, since you need better cooling. Hyperthreading (3770K, 4770K et cetera) does nothing useful. More than 1600 Hz or 8GB memories is basically useless. One graphics card only. Accept that you won’t play the newest games on the highest settings and wait two years. OS should be on an SSD. Everything else on HDD. Blu-ray blows. Unless you break all my other advice 500W is enough. Windows 8 isn’t that bad. Monitors cost a lot but last a long time. Audio costs a lot but last forever. The best of the best near exclusively use 400 DPI. Don’t forget a mouse mat. They do matter. Your keyboard is your friend. Back-up every now and then. Does it seem I'm breaking my own rules with a 4770K, 16GB memories, water cooling and Windows 8.1? Well I'm the master and I can do whatever I want! Final note: my sig is slightly out of date.

Note to everyone: multiplayer is currently badly optimized and will run poorly for nearly everyone. BIS are working on it but for now only expect good singleplayer performance and do your measuring in singleplayer regardless of machine. Your fps depends on the server fps apparently so in order to have good multiplayer fps you will need to connect to a properly optimized server and most servers right now are poorly optimized. Should run well in singleplayer. Yes, I think it should run on standard-high settings. Check out my sig for my older machine which is similar and should run similarly. Should run well I would think at least if you look into overclocking. Right now nearly everyone has poor online performance. I would think you should be able to do singleplayer somewhat well though, just don't be too greedy with the settings. Cool! My mobo BIOS is updated but not my graphics card BIOS because the process is a bit more complicated and seemed a bit riskier. Check out my signature... you should be able to run at least my settings singleplayer!

I would say you should be able to run the game on Ultra settings however your view distance will probably be something closer to 3000-4000. It’s difficult to tell but I think your strong graphics card would mean that you can play the game on the highest graphics settings however higher view distance requires a stronger CPU than what exists today. You should be able to run the game about as nicely as anyone else though so if you want to buy it don’t worry about it running badly at least in singleplayer as multiplayer works so-so for now. Most users are having bad multiplayer performance so all you can do is wait for patches howver your CPU is also very weak compared to the rest you've got. Upgrade it to a 4670K with a Z87 mobo sometime soon.

But does affect performance significantly.

Hi! Not many people actually responding to you yet so I'll give it a go. Running an i5 3450, 660 SC and 8GB RM you should be able to run at least singleplayer quite well. Yes, ARMA is badly optimized but what OS and resolution are you using? And most importantly what settings? The default settings and “auto detect†often run worse than if you set the settings manually. Go here: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?147391-Will-my-PC-run-this-What-CPU-GPU-to-get-What-settings-What-System-Specifications/page132 If you haven't already (I'm heading there now)...

Watch your language ;) I was warned for saying sh*t not long ago.

Hi, first of all what OS, resolution and exact graphics card are you using? It sounds like to me that you should be able to run the game on standard. You are measuring using Fraps or something such and in a singleplayer mission right? Or better yet the editor.

I would love to hear how 8 GHz CPUs and such run ARMA... that should max. Yes. A 4+ GHz Intel Quad-core, 8GB RAM and strong graphics card is pretty much the best you can get today for playing games. Yes, except viewdistance. Oh, by the way: do you have ANY idea what you are doing? Because either that’s a work computer for media editing or something such or you have no idea what you are doing. So I have to ask. A MSI Z87-G45, i5-4670K, MSI 760 and 8GB Corsair Vengeance is my current recommendation and that only costs a fourth of your components and will probably run the game very nearly as well.

Well, did you TRY? I see lots of users complaining and moaning about ARMA and then dropping bombs like â€Hey bro, why can’t I max all settings on my several years old hardware! Bullshit!â€. I haven’t had any major issues on two different machines running Win7 32-bit and Win8 64-bit so whatever issues users are having clearly are not universal so re-installing their entire systems or something close to it should have a chance of clearing up any issues unless the issue is specific to your exact components. Issues like these are not magical and either are specific to your computer because somewhere there’s a mess that needs to be cleared or it is specific to your or a broader (universal) spectrum of components. If I’m having the issue and you’re not and we have similar hardware then it is obviously the software spooking. If you really want to solve an issue then take your time instead of adding start-up-parameters and whining about how I’m making you waste time. And I just tried flying around Altis and playing the Showcase: Infantry on both a Win7 32-bit Q9550/560 Ti/4GB DDR2/HDD and on a Win8 64-bit 4770K/770/16GB DDR3/SSD system with no micro-stuttering whatsoever. I’m not denying you have issues but I’m saying there’s probably something more you could do to resolve the issues.

Spent an hour playing a small editor mission I made for myself today. I made some enemy sentry patrols outside a town with waypoints all over the place then made a recon, three recon teams, a backup rifle squad, a Marshall, a sniper team and a UAV team and then I snuck into the town with the recon and used the UAV to locate and take down enemies and then when a bigger squad of enemies approached I moved in with the rifle squad and Marshall and then spent a while cleaning up scattered survivors. I really wish I could make missions easier though. It takes forever to set up the player team, make every guy playable, set up lots and lots of enemies, then make waypoints for each group and they still act miserably dumb and either walk or just stand there instead of ever acting intelligently.

Started up the red course today and wasn't pleased. Every time you reset you switch back to the default weapon and all your equipment is completely reset but your stamina is not and it is impossible to run through the zig-zag maze because you get stuck and very near impossible to stand in the right spots on the bridge. Having your equipment reset is pretty annoying on the red course where the best course of action is dropping the machine gun and loading 30 round clips into your handgun which is impossible to do before the Rangemaster tells you to go.

Restart, update drivers, bios, reinstall ARMA, switch to Stable, switch back to Dev... if you have microstuttering despite a high framerate being read it sounds like a graphics card issue.

Try reinstalling. I've never had any framerate drop issues whatsoever so it really isn't a universal issue.

Well if it is only ARMA it probably isn't motion sickness so try turning up or down the motion blur and other settings such as bloom or try SMAA to soften the image. Maybe it’s just a temporary thing though. Play in a well-lit room on a monitor with lower brightness (google for calibration recommendations for you screen), stay hydrated and don’t play extensively. Also eat something. If it is only ARMA, not motion sickness and not blur I can’t think of much and you’ve probably just had some bad luck.

Yeah. I did some more testing: Windows 8, 1920x1200 4770K @ 4.0 GHz 770 16GB 1600 MHz RAM Samsung 840 Evo Dev-build Maxed everything except Objects quality high, Terrain quality high and pip disabled with visibility 3200/3200/200... I tried flying around Altis and had a nice 50-something framerate and in the showcase with lots of AI I had a 45 fps average. Not sure how it will perform in ultimately stressful situations however turning down FSAA to x4 makes a big difference and so does lowering SSAO. By the way the game does look really nice on all max settings: http://i.imgur.com/I7H9cwD.jpg?1 (197 kB) How to you link images here so they show up in a small window instead of just a link anyways? This one's smaller... Anyways I also did some easy ground testing yesterday and on ground a lot more settings matter than in air. Texture quality and anisotropic cause absolutely zero slowdown (on my machine). Dynamic lights and particles also did nothing though they are probably situational but at least lowering particles does not make smoke clouds lag less. Clouds only cause minimal slowdown and so does post-processing anti-aliasing. Shadows I’m not sure but in any case maxing them doesn’t seem to be very demanding. FSAA causes slowdowns and especially x8 is much more demanding than x4 to me while x4 only is somewhat more requiring than x2 and the difference between x2 and disabled is small. ATOC also causes a noticeable slowdown but only if set to Arrowhead trees or all trees with or without grass. And then there’s object quality which makes a big difference in the air but not on ground and terrain quality which makes a big difference on ground but not in the air. Finally SSAO does make some noticeable difference and I didn’t test picture-in-picture but it should cause massive slowdowns in vehicles with picture-in-pictures. Also I still haven’t really tested that newer setting that causes underwater reflections or something. Not sure what difference overclocking does yet but auto-overclocking to 4.2 and 1200-something MHz on the 770 didn’t really make a difference anywhere I think. Still haven’t tried manual overclocking, disabling hyper-threading or changing any ARMA start-up parameters.

Ooops. 7990 is beastly. With a 2500K that should go far. Try max settings except for visibility and then turn down object quality as needed, I guess. Remember that view distance makes a big difference.

Turn down your visibility! Try settings in my signature.

Well I can confirm I'm able to play the game on Altis without any issues whatsoever on both a 32-bit machine and a 64-bit machine.

I'm going to test and tweak as much as I can this week. Moving things between computers is a pain however exchanging graphic cards and memories and comparing load times for SSD vs HDD assuming other components doesn't affect that much should be possible. So a 560 Ti (= 660) vs 770 and maybe downclock to 760 (= 660 Ti) specs might be possible as well as comparing my 4GB DDR2 RAM to 16GB DDR3 RAM. Comparing my entire old rig versus my entire new rig is too much difference to compare. ARMA max with Object Quality High and Visibility 2000/2000 flying aggressively over Altis in an empty editor gave me 50 fps and the Crysis intro on everything max gave me 50 fps on my new computer in 1920x1200 and on my old one it’s 22 fps and 45 fps in 1680x1050 so divide that by 2/3 and it equals 15 fps and 30 fps… Reading anything out of these values is difficult though since absolutely all components are different.

Windows 8 1920x1200 (16:10) MSI Z87-G45 Gaming 4770K @ Stock MSI GTX 770 Gaming 2GB 16GB Vengeance Pro 1600 MHz RAM Arma on 840 Evo SSD Everything max except Object Quality High and Visibility 2000/2000 @50fps.