Gambit7

Well... I'm sure some of you have been wondering why I havent been playing lately. Basically, 2 reasons; I've been travelling and quite frankly I was fed up with the way the game was playing on my system.

Interestingly enough, while I was travelling I decided to think on the problem(s) I was having with Arma on my system. I'm running a Vista system with the 8800GTX, so yeah, I was basically getting crashes regularly.

What I came to realize was the crashes always seemed to take place as my HDDs (raid) were winding up to load data for the game. Since I'm running the 8800GTX along with 2GB of RAM, the game basically doesnt need to access the HDD much at all. What I realized was... my damned HDDs were spinning down for power management.

The freezes always seemed to occur as I was hearing my HDDs power back up to load data. What I surmised was happening was I was basically lagging too far behind the data crunch waiting for my drives to power back up and the game would crash. Since my default power mng. time for my HDDs was like 10 mins, more times then not the game wouldnt need data within this timeframe, especially if playing the same areas over and over. So they'd power down while I was playing.

The fix? shut the damned power management off and leave the HDDs running at all times while gaming.

Anyways, this is just a theory. I just got home from travelling so I'm going to put it to the test later. Might solve a few issues I know many of us were having.

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AMosely

A good theory, and totally supports the traditional rule of thumb that power management does not mix with gaming. In other words - turn it all off!

curtagain

Hope it works ! Let us know!

TheBigC

Nice find. I had issues withh Vista 64 and ArmA asaa well, but mine turned out to be the newer drivers fron NVidia.

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Gambit7

Originally, that's what I thought as well... but shifting drivers never really helped. Many of us were having "texture" issues, but those were separate from this one. Basically, this is a memory allocation issue so they say.

They came out with a quick fix that basically dumps VRAM, which is another indication of the problem I found with the HDDs. Dumping the VRAM periodically will cause the HDDs to spool up and reset the power manager.

Since the majority of the issues I saw were newer systems like mine, I also figured people were just forgetting to address the power manager and/or were just not used to having to deal with it; since we're talking nearly 3GB of cached data (2gbRAM and 768mbVRAM) not including that on the CPU. Obviously, either the entire level loads or it loads "just enough" for your HDDs to spool down.

Anyways, I have yet to try it... so we'll see

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TheBigC

Another issue I found with that was the memory itself on the video card. I am running a set of 8800GTXs yet I have a limit on the max memory that the game accesses. I added the “-maxmem+512” to the command line and it seemed to help a lot. I am able to get 80+ FPS ingame without any flickering. I do not know if this was a Vista 64 issue or what, but I saw that posted in another forum as a hotfix.

__________________

The Meek shall inherit the earth..... after we're through with it!

The Wounded Warrior Project; help support my friends