Katana1000

A neat choice? I've never heard so much fanboy rubbish in all my life. Lets get some perspective here, there is really no difference in choosing a brand name for a graphic card unless you consider warranty a factor too, these cards use exactly the same electronic components, exact same PCB and originate from same factory and differ only in cooling solutions, overclocking and cool designs :) the very idea that a Gigabyte graphic card is better than same card from ... say ... Asus is just silly. For what its worth I went for EVGA for my latest overclocked and dual fan cooled GTX 780 purely because of its extend warranty, not that I'll need it as I'll upgrade to the inevitable 880 next year, this 780 was a replacement for my second machines GTX 680 that was in fact a Gigabyte packaged card with no other benefits from choosing a brand name what so-ever. As for your SSD advice, although well intentioned I'm sure, its full of same brand name loyalty nonsense. For sure SSD's are a more selective area where you can choose wisely, and I'm on my fifth SSD with ever increasing capacity and speeds and lower price too ... but you cant determine the quality of a product by its brand name alone.

Just installed but not expecting miracles :) also no mention of ARMA 3 improvements, maybe next time.

I hope that's wrong, cant afford another GTX 780 SC 3GB LOL.

Ahh, I see ... Thanks. I'm happy to wait the 4 weeks for a stable patch. Cheers.

I read on another forum (posted 17th Sept) about a 699MB update, went to steam to try update last night but there seems to be no update available? I bought in Beta and updated for the release version OK, but not sure if I'm missing something here? I'm on ARMA 1.00.109911 Thanks.

But why would you honestly recommend or suggest that if that is the minimum ARMA 3 gets bye with? dont you consider he might play something else too or might need room for an upgrade? also a dual might just scrape by on ARMA but a quad has room for more overheads for the OS during gameplay. Forget ARMA 3 needs, look at the bigger picture if you are upgrading. Make any upgrade last a while.

Can you even buy a high performance dual core CPU any-more? also why would you want to? with at least a quad you have room for ARMA and your OS and its overheads while the game plays.

Comedy reply: Definitely not, not even an Alienware Desktop. Even if I won the lottery I'd not buy one of those abortions, you dont need to be a computer geek to put a high performance PC together these days, just know what you want to achieve and pay for it. As for using a Laptop with ARMA 3 ... :rolleyes: But I know you were joking.

One point I'd like to make here when recommending new PC hardware is to ask what other games/simulations they play as well. This is something I see all the time in the Flight Sim world on forums asking the same, hardly any of us build a PC on the merits of one PC Game/Sim alone, most of us play many different Games/Sims too and a lot of them have different demands for hardware. Its never this black and white easy. In Fairness though most of the answers here are good for ARMA 3 and most high end Games/Sims, but some do demand more from the GPU and SLI/Crossfire and some more from CPU/Multicore, some need more ram, some work better on 64 bit OS's and so on, so this should all be considered too in the equation. I'd recommend if you are struggling with ARMA 3, read some of the tweaking posts here first, especially regarding view distance ETC, then if you still need more performance, go ask on forums on other Games/Sims too that are important to you. Enjoy your upgrade and build if needed OP, but your current system aint too bad :)

Use System Restore on your OS, that should get it back ... or maybe not :) Enjoy living in the past.

Well I've read that it doesn't on this very forum ... and no need to be sorry, I'm happy to be proved wrong :) But even it were there is always room for more optimisation over multi cores ... always. As you may have noticed I'm on six cores just now with hyperthreading so effectively 12 too but for what its worth and this rig was built mainly for FSX that on initial release could only use 1 core, then after its SP1 and later SP2 upgrade was apparently in theory be able to use 20 or more cores if they existed, Microsoft lied of course but in some tests it did look like it was using up to 20 cores, after years of extensive testing by enthusiasts it was found that FSX with SP1 and SP2 could use 1 core very efficiently but it was diminishing returns on each core after that where we now believe a six core system is the peak for its old engine and even then using the affinity to detail tasks within that simulator. I'm no programmer but i've read its extremely difficult to code for really efficient multi core coding in PC Games from a single CPU system that has multi cores and even more difficult on a multi CPU system like a twin CPU XEON processor, but these don't exist for the gaming market, they work with more dedicated and arguably easier to code applications that we as gamers dont use.

OK, fair enough. I hope you guys can get some more performance soon with better optimisation, this sim really should have been coded for multi core better i guess? I cant imagine anyone here trying to run this on a single core PC.

Are you both getting worse frames on Stratis island after update or are you only seeing worse frames on Altis island? Do me a favour as an experiment take note of your view distance slider setting in options, then try your view distance low on the new Altis map and work up, it should be better set lower now, right?

I dont think so mate or I'd have had these problems on Stratis too, no its definitely view distance and perhaps really greedy AA settings ... i just noticed somebody mentioned this in this thread before me, I'm not losing that res as its the native res of my 30" Dell U3011 and my 3GB vram is more than enogh for a single monitor. One utility I use is Nvidea Inspector, hopefully we can get a good profile for this game soon, but I've done a fair bit of beta testing in my time and feel sure its view distance slider that is the killer considering the new island is so much larger and its only there i got performance problems.

I think its Altis because its so much larger. I have a very decent rig and bought ARMA III Beta about a month ago, naturally I thought I could max things out and I suffered no perceivable slow down trying everything in the Beta ... I don't really do frame rate counting though, if my brain perceives smooth gameplay then it is smooth gameplay ... this is a contentious subject though and we wont go there just now please:) But for sure in Beta I had no performance problems, last night after finishing downloading the full update I tried my favourite Stratis Night Showcase again and it played perfectly smoothly, then I tried Altis for the first time in the Gunships Showcase and my system nearly ground to a halt a couple of times ... after the update I'd already done my usual cleaning, defrag on the WD Velociraptor ARMA III is installed on ETC and rebooted, all drivers are up to date as is my Win 7 64 bit OS, one more reboot and tried Gunship showcase on Altis again and same once more, a slide show. What i did next was go into options and choose detect for settings and tried Altis showmap Gunships once more and its perfectly smooth now, i dont know what i lost in auto detect? not much, a lot still seems on Ultra, i think its the max AA ansio settings I'd been using perfectly in Stratis before or more probably maxing out view distance? But it still looks good to me so I'll keep these settings ... I'm still on 2560 x 1600 resolution. Maybe the Altis map could be more optimised in future patches? Maybe future graphic drivers will help? That was what my performance issues were though. My PC specs are ... Intel I7-E 3960 X six core @ 4.2 GHz just now water cooled. 16 GB 4 channel ram Asus Rampage IV Extreme EVGA Superclcocked 3GB GTX 780 driving a 30" Dell U3011 @ 2560 x 1600 res Asus Xonar Essence STX OS drive is 3rd gen OCZ Agility SSD with latest firmware, Arma III is installed on a Western Digital Velociraptor with plenty of free space and de-fragged after playing once when patched. OS is Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium SP1. For what should matter and i run a lean mean rig for flightsim mostly, its well optimised. Hopefully we can get more optimisation out of the Altis map but I'm happy enough for now. EDIT: The more i think about it the more i think its view distances i was being to greedy on with the sliders, these would be fine on Stratis but struggle on Altis just now as its so many times larger and perhaps the PC (CPU or GPU) is being asked to calculate view distance if we can see it or not.