Arma CO, Microstutters, Hyperthreading and Firefox

[Tonci87]

During the last Month I experienced increased micro stuttering while playing Arma. It could be observed while driving through Chernarus. Every few seconds the game would stop for a split second and then continue. I found this extremely annoying and searched for a way to improve this.
My relevant Specs:
Asus P8P67 Pro Rev 3.1
i7 2600k
Sapphire Toxic 5850HD
8GB RAM
Arma is installed on a
Seagate Barracuda Green 7200.12 1TB SATA 3 6GB/s

First I tried the fancy chache Stuff which didn´t work as expected, it made the stuttering even worse.
Ramdisk was my second try but it didn´t fix the issue.
I tried using different memory Allocators but this didn´t help either.
Since my i7 was always running at 25-50% while playing Arma I started to think that I have these Problems because of my GPU so I enabled Overdrive and OCed it. Surprisingly this didn´t improve performance at all.
I asked my Squadmates at the Brigade Forums for help and one of them told me to disable Hyperthreading.
And indeed after I disabled it Arma was running much smoother, the micro stutters were almost gone. But the general PC Performance suffered especially Video rendering and unpacking files was MUCH slower.
So I enabled Hyperthreading again to see if I can find another solution.
I started the PC and immediately launched Arma, started my little test scenario with me driving though the forest and WTF!? Almost no Micro stutter! Just as it was with Hyperthreading disabled.
Well long story short: Before, I used to play with Firefox and Thunderbird running in the Background, with many Tabs open in Firefox. Believe it or not but a running Firefox reduces your Arma Performance a lot!

My advise: Shut down all unnecessary programms even if you haver more than enough PC Power to run them all. You can download Game Booster and launch it prior to starting Arma.
Now I can enjoy Arma again.

I would be very greatfull for a way to run firefox in the background without slowing down my game experience.

[Dwarden]

firefox and let me guess flash inside browser...

AMD drivers have specific code which if detect active flash application (e.g. inside browser) then it switch the GPU from 3D to 2D or video performance (usually it means different core / shader / memory clocks - read way lower)

[folgore_airborne]

you can use programs like Gamebooster or Jetboost to shut down all unnecessary processes and services during a game session...but for me it doesn't fix those microfreezes.

[Tonci87]

firefox and let me guess flash inside browser...

AMD drivers have specific code which if detect active flash application (e.g. inside browser) then it switch the GPU from 3D to 2D or video performance (usually it means different core / shader / memory clocks - read way lower)

Your guess is right. Usually there is at least one youtube Tab open

[domokun]

Your guess is right. Usually there is at least one youtube Tab open

Although the 1.60 patch has improved performance, this advice is still relevant, even for the most experienced users and/or powerful PCs...

[Tonci87]

Oh Yeah I forgott to ention that I had defraged and CCleaned prior to all this other stuff I tried.