System Requirements?

First of all, sorry if this is in the wrong forum. Secondly, sorry if this (probably has) has been talked about at length before.

So a friend of mine lends me his copy of ArmA2 (Combined Operations). He's scared his key'll get cut off or some such if I go online, so I promise him to stay offline while I check it out (Told me to stay away from the demo, it would put me off, buggy as hell or somesuch). Now I am loving this game and am currently scrounging my couches for the cash to buy my own copy so I can join my friend online. The problem I'm having though, is the poor performance.

I'm running the following:

Dell XPS 15

Intel Core i7-2630QM (Quad Core 2.00GHz with 2.9GHz turbo boost)

6GB DDR3 1333mhz (I'm pretty sure that's the speed)

Nvidia GeForce GT 540m 2GB

500GB HDD 7200rpm

On Windows 7 Home

and at 1280x720 with absolutely everything disabled or as low as it goes, and with the no blur mod, and with every tweak I could possibly find, my game still dives down to an average of 20fps. Sometimes dropping as low as 10 (often enough to be a pain).

Now I've been looking at the system requirements, and the recommended specs and I should be able to run this at something higher than bare minimum, decently. Looking at some system monitors, my CPU and my GPU aren't even maxing out, but my frame rate just keeps plummeting.

Now before I go out and drop the cash to buy myself this wonky (albeit wonderful) game, are there any other options? Is there a chance that this will be fixed? I am loving the game, but the performance I get is brutal. I can play Crysis 2, on medium settings at my native resolution of 1920x1080 at a better framerate than this. Heck, I can play the original Crysis nicer than this. I understand there's a lot going on, but based on how my system performs with other games, I know something's wrong here.

Give me hope, I dearly want to buy this game.

is your instalment up to date = the latest stable patch?

Sorry, forgot to mention that. Yeah, I'm at 1.59.

even if AA is off, things can go sideways. Try going into your arma2.cfg, find the line that reads ATOC, and make sure its value is 0. If there is no change in performance, post again

Well, still it's a laptop. CPU would have to be at over 3GHz all time for some kind of smooth experience. Also GPU isn't the best, though it's enough even for higher than low settings.

should be playable on low settings though. my old system - 2.4ghz Q6600 with the gtx260 could play A2 on medium-high as long there wasn't a ton of AI on the map, or really high view distances

GTX260 ;] GTX560M is about as fast as desktop 9800GT, and we're talking about 540M here :)

And still, we don't know if the Turbo mode on CPU is working well (I don't have an i7 so I dunno how it works really).

i got 2 desktop i7s, turbo works very well. Maybe he should check using cpuz and prime95 (to stress the CPU)

Yeah I had already put ATOC down to 0. Didn't really fix anything.

From what I'm seeing my turbo is jumping up to about 2.6 - 2.7. It won't go 2.9 on all four cores, but from what I understand that's normal. It maxes out on applications that don't support multiple cores, so I know it's hitting it's full range.

I'll try what PuFu mentioned with cpuz and prime95. See if that sheds any light on the situation. Although like I mentioned before, neither my CPU or my GPU are showing that they're maxing out. During the game I checked their status. It's using about 500-600MB of video RAM, the GPU is running at about 70%, and my overall average for my processor is about the same. It fluctuates so much though it's hard to give a definite number. I just know it's rarely even in the 80% range, and often dips down to as low as 30-40.

Ok, so I checked everything over. My system is running just the way it's supposed to be running. My processors are all good, RAM's good, Video card is good, harddrive is good, and yet I still have this problem. I kill all background processes, I like my computer nice and clean, stuff is all shut off when the game is on. I just don't get it.

Thanks for the replies guys. I have no idea what I did, but things are running fairly well.

I'm now at 1280x720. Everything is set to Very High, except for Post Processing (disabled) and AA (disabled). In Warfare mode I'm getting about 20fps in the thick of things. Averaging around the 30s otherwise.

I wish I could pinpoint what I did, but whatever it was... it worked.

Guess all I've gotta do now is find some more couches to raid. Anyone wanna buy me my own copy? :P

You should run the game at your monitors native or natural resolution for the best performance. But if it is working :)

It runs slower at 1920x1080 than it does at 1280x720. So it looks like it runs better at my... non-native resolution :P .

It's sad though, I had to tweak the crap out of this thing to make it playable. I think I'll put the configuration files somewhere safe for when I reinstall.