FPS Up and Down like a Yo Yo...

[Jocko-Flocko]

As I mentioned in a different thread I have been having this odd issue of the framerates dropping through the floor in large urban areas in Arma 2, mainly in the larger cities on Chernarus. The issue happens mostly when right clicking iron sights and zooming in on built up areas. Zooming in and out a couple times will bring the FPS back up to normal. I have tried every trick in the book, different settings within Arma 2, ATOc turned off, etc, but the issue still persists and is quite annoying and really takes away from the game.

My FPS on average will be anywhere from 70-130fps in these cities which is quite excellent, however, as soon as I go to my iron sights and right click zoom in, the framerates drop through the floor to 25-30. Does anyone have any ideas what might be causing this? I read elsewhere that this game can only address 2GB of memory at a time? Is this serious? In this day and age? Some people had even resorted to using RAM drives of all things to make up for the games massive short comings in the memory dept. This isn't something an end user should have to resort to just for gaming.

Is this issue being caused by the loading of textures and other objects? Keep in mind, I am starting out in the middle of a large city, not traversing across the map between them. I would expect the game could at least have enough code to support starting out in one of these small cities.

Any help and input would be greatly appreciated.

---------- Post added at 12:32 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:11 AM ----------

To add, I just ran the E08 Benchmark in the game and got 122FPS average score with no jerkiness or stutters etc, smooth as silk.

---------- Post added at 01:01 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:32 AM ----------

Ok, well I feel like a bit of a complete idiot! I did some more testing and I forgot to try selecting "Video Memory" to "Default". For some odd reason changing this from "Normal", "High" or "Very High", has fixed the problem completely.... Yay!

If anyone out there is experiencing the same issue just select "Default" in the "Video Memory" drop down menu under your video advanced settings.

Problem Solved.

[])rStrangelove]

I think this was posted already somewhere, still thx for the heads up. its easy to miss infos on these forums.

About the fps issues in cities, i got a theory:

- there are houses with several LODs ingame
- houses in front block other houses in the distance to save fps. sometimes you can see this if things disappear too early (1cm ) behind a corner of a building.
- zooming leads to objects changing their LODs

I guess there's some extensive script looping going on when you start zooming. Once the nearest objects in front start changing their LODs all the blocking views of every other objects behind them will have to be updated as well.

If something in those script loops breaks up a lot or cannot keep up with ingame fps there might be problems like repeating unnessessary commands that take a lot of CPU resources (nearest object for example).

Just a theory.

[[FRL]Myke]

@Jocko-Flocko

you should know more about how games work before complaining about ArmA 2 being capable of using "only" 2GB of memory.

First of all, on 32 bit Windows, 2GB limit is quite common, rarely a game can use more. Only because there is (much) more doesn't mean that Windows allows a application to use it. Btw, ArmA 2 could use more than 2GB since one of the patches as the LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag has been set accordingly.
Anyway, ArmA 2 takes as much as it needs. Remember, these 2GB don't include VRAM and therefor textures wont affect the RAM usage significantly.
Allowing ArmA 2 to use even more RAM wouldn't have any effect simply because it doesn't need it.

This explains the fact why all of a sudden your FPS got better after adjusting the VRAM usage. Again, the RAM usage didn't changed but all of a sudden the textures fit in the VRAM as now it is allowed to use all of it.

[Jocko-Flocko]

"you should know more about how games work before complaining about ArmA 2 being capable of using "only" 2GB of memory."

Coming across as complaining? Interesting, I was pointing out the comparison between newer games and older game engines such as Arma 2's. But we could piss and moan about it all day long; something I'm not going to do.

But thanks for the information regarding why it started working correctly. Now the game runs smooth as silk.

[Kerikus]

Set AToC=0 in arma2OA.cfg. This is a new feature in patch 1.59. U can change this only in arma2OAcfg. More info here - http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/arma2.cfg

[Jocko-Flocko]

Set AToC=0 in arma2OA.cfg. This is a new feature in patch 1.59. U can change this only in arma2OAcfg. More info here - http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/arma2.cfg

Problem already solved. I play with ATOC=2, it's a nice balance between looking like a cartoon (the default setting of 7) and looking realistic.

[Ginger McAle]

I think this was posted already somewhere...

Yeah it was me. Analysed it and did came over this strange FPS drop, check out: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=112646