ArmA 2 horrible performance.

G80FTW

G80FTW

Active Member
I know that DX9 is less efficient than DX10 or DX11, but is it really that bad when you try to implement everything into it like ArmA does? I just got this game, and my god. Alot of it looks really good aside from the people and foliage, but what a performance hit!

Im getting between 20-25FPS at these settings (which are max I do believe):



I take it the 3D resolution option is the texture resolution? If so, thats an insanely high texture resolution!





I mean what the crap man. I feel like its stupid that my $650 video card is destroyed by a 3 year old DX9 game. I really hope ArmA 3 is better optimized, as I am looking forward to it after playing this one.
 
Stock ARMA2 is very badly optimised. If you have the game on Steam, buy ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead, run it once, close it down, and then launch combined ops from the OA launch menu. From there, you should be able to just launch arrowhead and play all of the content that you own.

The Operation Arrowhead expansion has a much better engine and you can play all linked ARMA 2 and other DLC/Expansion content through it. It's very simple with Steam, you just install them all, run them all once, and you should be able to just run OA and play all the missions.

Also, you don't need 10000 view distance, half that is overkill for infantry fighting and more than enough for vehicles and aircraft.
 
I cant understand why people say its badly optimised.

Its not, bare in mind the engine is a lot more complex than that of bf3 or cod. Its doing all ballistic calculations real time. Not only for the player and its surrounding but also the entire map. If there is a firefight on the other side of chern from where the player is situated that is also calculated at the same time as any player interaction.


@OP Have you updated to latest, or beta patch? If not that adds quite a chunk of performance (unless your on steam in which case you have latest). Also check bohemia forums, theres tonnes of config tweaks to sort the perfomance out, its just finding whats good for your system.


As i dont know your settings ill take a stab in the dark and presume you set video memory to high or very high. Put it back to default. Very high limits it to 512mb of vram i believe so you want that on default.


EDIT: Like linkin said your vis doesnt need to be that high. (about not knowing your settings i didnt see that pic lmao, it loaded in after i wrote this :P)
 
mikeb2817 said:
I cant understand why people say its badly optimised.

Its not, bare in mind the engine is a lot more complex than that of bf3 or cod. Its doing all ballistic calculations real time. Not only for the player and its surrounding but also the entire map. If there is a firefight on the other side of chern from where the player is situated that is also calculated at the same time as any player interaction.


@OP Have you updated to latest, or beta patch? If not that adds quite a chunk of performance (unless your on steam in which case you have latest). Also check bohemia forums, theres tonnes of config tweaks to sort the perfomance out, its just finding whats good for your system.


As i dont know your settings ill take a stab in the dark and presume you set video memory to high or very high. Put it back to default. Very high limits it to 512mb of vram i believe so you want that on default.


EDIT: Like linkin said your vis doesnt need to be that high. (about not knowing your settings i didnt see that pic lmao, it loaded in after i wrote this :P)
Click to expand...

The OA and DLC's engine does the same things, it's just far better optimised compared to stock ARMA2
 
To be fair its the same engine. They didnt change engine.

Its just the updates and patches. For example IF 44 is the exact same engine iteration as A2 CO. (1.60) ANd it runs like shit in comparison. Not to mention Chernarus is a terrible map for performance, and as A2 only ships with cherno and utes you cant expect the same performance as A2 OA. Taki and the ilk have a lot less vegitation which is the main impact on cherno.

I mean when i installed a2 on its own cherno ran like crap. Even with CO it still runs like crap.
 
mikeb2817 said:
To be fair its the same engine. They didnt change engine.

Its just the updates and patches. For example IF 44 is the exact same engine iteration as A2 CO. (1.60) ANd it runs like shit in comparison. Not to mention Chernarus is a terrible map for performance, and as A2 only ships with cherno and utes you cant expect the same performance as A2 OA. Taki and the ilk have a lot less vegitation which is the main impact on cherno.

I mean when i installed a2 on its own cherno ran like crap. Even with CO it still runs like crap.
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Chernarus runs fine for me, I've got all the games linked through steam and I just launch OA and not combined ops, which might be why.
 
mikeb2817 said:
I cant understand why people say its badly optimised.

Its not, bare in mind the engine is a lot more complex than that of bf3 or cod. Its doing all ballistic calculations real time. Not only for the player and its surrounding but also the entire map. If there is a firefight on the other side of chern from where the player is situated that is also calculated at the same time as any player interaction.


@OP Have you updated to latest, or beta patch? If not that adds quite a chunk of performance (unless your on steam in which case you have latest). Also check bohemia forums, theres tonnes of config tweaks to sort the perfomance out, its just finding whats good for your system.


As i dont know your settings ill take a stab in the dark and presume you set video memory to high or very high. Put it back to default. Very high limits it to 512mb of vram i believe so you want that on default.


EDIT: Like linkin said your vis doesnt need to be that high. (about not knowing your settings i didnt see that pic lmao, it loaded in after i wrote this :P)
Click to expand...

Yea, I know this engine is doing ALOT more than BF3 but still, a top of the line graphics card 3 years after it was made should play it :confused:

I have both arrowhead and this one so Ill run arrowhead and try that suggestion out.

And yes my video memory was set to very high, but I dont think it limits it to 512MB as the game is using upwards of 1.7GB of VRAM. Thank god I waited and got the 4GB version of this card. Feel sorry for those who though 2GB was going to be enough :D
 
Put it to default. And have a look for those optimisations. Also gpu doesnt mean shit in arma 2. Thats not whats limiting you. Its your cpu ( i know its a good cpu) You need to overclock the shit out of it to make this game sing. Seriously people have played it maxed with gtx 260. Its all about the cpu in this game unfortunately.
 
mikeb2817 said:
Put it to default. And have a look for those optimisations. Also gpu doesnt mean shit in arma 2. Thats not whats limiting you. Its your cpu ( i know its a good cpu) You need to overclock the shit out of it to make this game sing. Seriously people have played it maxed with gtx 260. Its all about the cpu in this game unfortunately.
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Yea i seen people running it with a 295s and i was pisssed
 
3D resolution is what resolution you see on the screen. You're running it at double your native resolution. Turn it to 1920x1080
 
linkin said:
3D resolution is what resolution you see on the screen. You're running it at double your native resolution. Turn it to 1920x1080
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I dont get it.....why would there be 2 resolution settings? Are you sure its not texture resolution?
 
It is not the texture resoltion. It is the resolution that the world is rendered in before being downscaled to the resolution of your monitor, or whatever you have it set to. By having it higher and then downsizing it, it has an effect similar to AA, so having it higher does improve image quality. The pro to it is that whilst it has the same affect as AA, it uses less resources for the same effect
 
mikeb2817 said:
Not to mention the mouse lag is horrendous using 200% and it can act like bad fps when in fact its uber res.
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First thing I noticed was the controls. My mouse was having a lag effect. But its only in certain places its really not bad to a point where I cant play. I will try running OA with the 3D res at 1080 and see what happens. I got 9 FPS during the first mission running through the woods :confused:



Thing is though, it was such a steady framerate that the 9FPS felt like a good 20FPS cuz there was not stuttering or jumping it was consistent. And that was with AA turned off, because I figured that would help. Turning AA off from 8x had NO impact on framerate at all. None. So I think you may be right, my CPU may be taking most of the load seeing as my GPU is only running at 65%. Horrible optimization there.
 
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Its not horrible optimisation :P Its bad settings coupled with an underclocked cpu. Seriously even on my clapped out pc im getting higher fps than that.

Honestly please check out bohemias tweak guides and user guides on armaholic. They will do wonder for you. On cherno i generally get 20-25fps (which is playable on arma) and on takistan i get 30 fps mostly. This is with most settings on high.
 
mikeb2817 said:
Its not horrible optimisation :P Its bad settings coupled with an underclocked cpu. Seriously even on my clapped out pc im getting higher fps than that.
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If its mainly using my CPU to generate the graphics, then that is almost by definition horrible optimization has its not making much use of my hardware. :\ .

And I tried running OA got near the same FPS as I did in the first one in the boot camp:







And Im not gonna overclock my CPU, I shouldnt have to. 3.34GHz should be plenty for any game today especially games from yesterday. And I get around 80c with my CPU fully loaded with a $60 12 copper heatpipe heatsink on it so there is no way Im letting it get hotter than that and not worth it for me to spend a bunch of time and money on water cooling just for one game. I mean, I like the game but Im not doing that.

Well Im still getting mostly between 20-30FPS. Occasionally it will go up into the 50s but doesnt stay there for too long. And most of the time its only using 50-60% of my GPU. I sure hope 3 is better optimized.
 
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That because the graphics have nothing to do with your performance. Your machine isnt struggling with graphics. Its struggling with the amount of calculations, view distance etc of the game.

Arma 3 is said to use a different sort of way of showing view distance which is the biggest performance hit but i all ballistic trajectories are dealt with the same way i believe.
 
mikeb2817 said:
That because the graphics have nothing to do with your performance. Your machine isnt struggling with graphics. Its struggling with the amount of calculations, view distance etc of the game.

Arma 3 is said to use a different sort of way of showing view distance which is the biggest performance hit but i all ballistic trajectories are dealt with the same way i believe.
Click to expand...

I turned distance down from 10k to 4k with no performance effect along with 3D resolution set to 1920x1080. Ill hook up my other monitor to see if its making good use of 6 cores.
 
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