TheSkudDestroyer

My rig:
AMD 4200+ 2.20 GHz
2 GB Ram
NVIDIA 8600GTS

I'm running 800x600 on all normal at 1200 view distance with a few settings at low and still get around 20 FPS in cities and sometimes less in areas with lots of vegetation. I would get Low Plants, but unfortunately I don't own Queens Gambit.

Which mods may help/is there a good tweak guide lying around?

Would setting affinity to one processor before I play help?

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|TG-6th|Skud
The 6th Devils: Attack!

vanity11

Dang, I posted a lengthy response but accidentally closed the tab and lost it!!

In brief:
Install FRAPS or Teamspeak Overlay so you have a frames-per-second counter you can see in-game. Then start modifying your in-game graphics settings and see what happens to your FPS.

ArmA is weird because it doesn't follow the "Lower quality = better performance" rule. While everything you have is set at low, this could be slowing your performance instead of accelerating it. If you boost some settings to normal, high, or very high, it's likely you could see a performance increase. It sounds strange but I don't think ArmA was completely optimized during development. You'll have to play around with settings to find the best speed for you.

Lower is not necessarily faster here.

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yourgrandma

you can get low plants to work with out queens gambit check out THIS thread.
As far as graphic options what you see is what you get in arma you cant really tweak them. But are a few things that can help make sure your game and all your drivers are up to date, experiment with different options and resolutions (some people actually get higher fps at a higher res than a lower in arma).
Also while in game and you start getting very bad performance you can ctrl alt delete go to performance tab and then commit charge (K) if your total is very close to your limit try increasing your page file.
Arma is a very demanding game on top of that when your on a server using a ton of scripts it can kill your computer. such as my computer runs about 10-15 fps with every thing on low on a script heavy server but on a normal map i get 30-25 with most my options on normal.

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life is good, shoot things

Bamboo

Couple of things to consider.
Can you overclock?
What ram are you running and can you install more? (Ram is SUPER cheap right now)
Can you spend about $140 (maybe little less) on a new grf. card. The 9600GT that just came out is really amazing, and scores the same as my 8800GTS 640mb in benchmarks. I am running everything on high. It would be a huge jump form your card.

Couple of articles for you to read

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=724 --compares it to a 8600GTS

http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?...asc&highlight=
he actually went from an 8800gts like mine and saw improvements.

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LINKS
10th Tactical Guard
Server Rules and SOP * Kicked? Banned? READ THIS FIRST!*
Contact an Admin * Nominate your teammates for a ribbon

Stoop and you'll be stepped on; stand tall and you'll be shot at.

-Carlos A. Urbizo-

vanity11

The 9600GT Bamboo recommended to me DOUBLED my framerate even with everything on high. I went from 20-30fps to 40-60....all with a $200 ($180-200) graphics card. The thing is a beast

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Bamboo

SOme good sales on it:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00141CIZO?tag=techbargainscom --$153

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814261002
I don't know that brand, but it is $109
Looks like it got good reviews, and has a HDMI port if you ever wanted to hook up to a TV.

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16814150277
$140 for a really good name brand one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...GeForce+9600GT
All the rest, right around the $150 mark

http://www.clubit.com/product_browse...Force%209600GT
The other place I usually buy from, same low prices.

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LINKS
10th Tactical Guard
Server Rules and SOP * Kicked? Banned? READ THIS FIRST!*
Contact an Admin * Nominate your teammates for a ribbon

Stoop and you'll be stepped on; stand tall and you'll be shot at.

-Carlos A. Urbizo-

TheSkudDestroyer

Ok, thanks. I'll be trying this out after the CoOP today.

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|TG-6th|Skud
The 6th Devils: Attack!

Redd_Wiggler

i have almost an identical rig, and have been playing at High settins, view distance 1200 with 1440x900 resolution with out a problem.

amd 64x2 dual
2.21 Ghz, 2.0 GB ram
nvidia 8600 GT

i am thinking of trying to increase view distance...

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"Tank squad...you need an engie?"

SailinDawg

Hey Guys!

Regarding ARMA & Peformance, the game is very cpu intensive. The engine renders a pretty limitless world, not a simple map like BF or COD4. The cpu is helping to render the grass, trees, AI behaviour and what ever else. A very good graphics card is also important to help out the cpu.

My rig:
AMD 4400 X2 clocked at 9x325
2 x1GB Mushkin DDR 500 clocked @ ~266 or DDR 532
8800 GT, clocked at 700/1952/900 or there abouts
Raptor w/ only XP SP2 installed and a few other games, the drive is my gaming drive.

I'm running the game at high settings for shadows, normal for objects & environments, very high for AA & AS. As of the latest patch, I can now run a view distance of 6000 m. The resolution for ARMA that is the sweet spot for my machine is 1152x864. The game looks gorgeous and runs a stable 25 - 75 fps in single player, a stable 35 - 75 fps in multiplayer, unless a map is very laggy and the entire server lags as well. I play mostly infantry. I do not fly at this point in time.

Regarding driver settings, I am using the latest nVidia betas, the 174.74(?) for 32 bit XP that came out on 27 March. I set AA to 4x, AF to app control, multisampling AA, max frames to render ahead=1, V-synch on (my resolution runs at 75 Hz), Triple buffering on (also forced with Riva Tuner), Overall texture quality = High, LOD Bias = clamp.

Regarding forcing trilinear or bilinear mipmaps, I have found that by forcing trilinear mipmaps kills fps by over rendering the ARMA world. Every twig, blade of grass, rock, building, etc, gets trilinear mipmaps. Too much of a load on the gpu and it makes the game run poorly. I leave that setting disabled. There is no visual difference that you will probably notice with it off.

Things I have noticed playing around with ARMA for the past year.

-game loves cpu cycles more than very high graphic card clocks

-a very fast hard drive helps the I/O subsystem process data much faster for the game engine.

-keep force trilinear mipmaps off if you have a nVidia vid card

-nVidia's drivers have improved as the game is patched. The latest beta's have a usuable game quality setting menu. Previous drivers have had a very bugged game quality setting menu. I usually use nHancer for adjusting game quality settings, but the 174.74's 3D game setting menu seems to work fine. ARMA runs fine with the latest beta's and the 1.12 patch.

-overclock your cpu / ram to get more cpu cycles and better ram speed. Approach overclocking in a step wise manner, using a stress program like prime 95, to test for stability. One needs a very stable rig for ARMA.

-tweaks, put this in the taget line for ARMA: -maxmem=768 or up to 1024, if you have 2 G RAM. Play with the setting, try from 512 - 1024 and figure out the sweet spot. Kill the beginning movie with -world=none.

That's about it in a pretty quick over view. I really enjoy this game because of the modding community that supports the game. I run quite a few mods and they do not impede performance, but enhance the game and make it more like a sim, than a game. I play mostly single player because of time constraints. I like the coop MP format and enjoy TG's server when there's enough TG'ers to play a well coordinated mission. However, some of the missions are sooo long, but sooo good. Unfortunately, i do not have a lot of time for very long extended coop missions. I do enjoy the coop server when I can stop by.

I hope this can help you.

Redd_Wiggler

forgive me for being a noob, but where/how do i do this? i remember in COD you could access console by hitting the "~" key, and adjust the "hunkmegs" command line (or something like that). i assume this is something similar? i looked for a confini.dll file (where i would make that kind of change in IL2) but couldn't find that either. i would love to up my maxmem for this game.

thanx

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"Tank squad...you need an engie?"

Bamboo

At Redd, I think he means target line, which is what you will see if you right click on the shortcut to start the game.

Also, how did you get it to run more than 60 FPS. I never go over 60, no matter how little the game is having to render, it just hits a wall there and stays at 60. I thought Vsync was the reason because I read that having that on limited you to 60fps, but even when I went to the Nvidia control panel and forced Vsync off, I still stick at 60.

__________________

LINKS
10th Tactical Guard
Server Rules and SOP * Kicked? Banned? READ THIS FIRST!*
Contact an Admin * Nominate your teammates for a ribbon

Stoop and you'll be stepped on; stand tall and you'll be shot at.

-Carlos A. Urbizo-

Tripper

I've been having weird GPU issues since 1.11 and 1.12 have come out. I've got two 8600 GTS cards in an SLI config. This ran great until 1.11 (and now 1.12), and now it seems ArmA turns off the SLI. I start out as normal, but part way through the mission optics start to not work, crosshair disappears, and dappling under trees and such cause the screen to white out. I exit the game and SLI is now set to off.

If I run the game with SLI off in the beginning, nothing weird happens, but the performance isn't very good. It's hard to hit the bad guys as they stutter around.

So there's my backstory. Would the 9600GT give me an improvement? Why is it cheaper than the 8800 series?

Any advice would be totally appreciated.

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vanity11

This has some good info on the performance/comparisons of not just the 9600 and 8800 but others as well

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/...for_the_money/

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TheSkudDestroyer

Thanks for the help!

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|TG-6th|Skud
The 6th Devils: Attack!

Tripper

Aha! Thanks, Vanity, that told me all I needed to know.

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