Hardware Issues: Tips/Tricks/Solutions

[Jack-UK]

Just fiddle with the settings, try different combinations, find one which looks good enough for you, and which gives good performance.

[operation madman]

what is the chepist computer that can play arma on normal and at least the second worse resolution?

I ask this in anouther area but they are not reponding

[Mr Fenix]

Very welcome info on graphics there, especially the AGP aperture which explains some of the crashes I've had. I couldn't understand why the game was crashing 256MB short of the 2GB available memory limit.

I had turned off the XP swapfile, maxed-out the aperture and told ArmA to use a maximum quantity of RAM but I didn't take into account the aperture when deciding on that maximum. When the game RAM demand collided with the BIOS aperture allocation, ArmA crashed every time.

The one other fault I had, which persisted even after I upgraded my nVidia GF6600GT 256MB to an ATI X1950 Pro 512MB, I narrowed down to audio. I disabled onboard 6.1 and installed a branded Creative PCI card, and still got crashes, even with hardware acceleration and EAX disabled. Then, I noticed just one line in the troubleshooting biki which said update your OpenAL drivers (www.openal.org). WTF is OpenAL? Who cares - updating it has eradicated my crashes.

Now the game's stable, I've reapplied my motherboard o/c settings. I'll put the sound back as it was and then I'm going to experiment with the AGP aperture to see what changes.

I've mentioned it in another post somewhere that I'd love to know more details about how the interplay of graphics settings with graphics hardware works - so you can see definitively whether what you've set is optimal or not.

-Fenix out.

[nuxil]

gotta love this game,, but for some reason i get texture lag when i put textures on high or verry high,, IMO i should have a pc that can handle it,, if i set every thihng to default. it works fine,, but i want more,, since i got a gforce 8800 card..
hw is:
amd 64 3700+ "overcloked with 300 Mhz"
ram : 2 gb crosair
grafick: gforce 8800 gts "640 MB ram"
disks: "not relevant"
mobo: asus a8n32 sli delux.

i have not tested the FPS with default settings,, but i get no lagging at all.. but as soon as i turn it up a bit, things start to slow down..
is this a common issue people have ?

[HBK]

I've mentioned it in another post somewhere that I'd love to know more details about how the interplay of graphics settings with graphics hardware works - so you can see definitively whether what you've set is optimal or not.

What kind of detail do you ask ? Thing are pretty complex or, should I say, hard to explain.

Basically, most of the ArmA settings do have an impact on the GPU rather than the CPU.

Resolution have a main impact on the GPU (fillrate) and the video RAM. It might have some side effect on the CPU (due to objects LODs) but I can't confirm that.

Visibility has an impact on everything (raw triangle rendering). But it seems the default setting can be increased to 2000~3000 with little impact on performance (dunno why) at least in most areas.

Terrain detail has a similar impact than Visibility (i.e. raw triangle rendering) except for the Very Low detail that disables grass. Grass eat a lot of GPU power (fillrate).

Object detail has mostly an impact on your CPU, but in the end, your GPU is gonna work more, albeit a little more (triangle rendering).

Texture detail has a main impact on video memory and system memory as well (textures need to be loaded in order to be transfered). It also put a huge load on the CPU while streaming.

Shading detail has an impact on GPU (shading power) as more shaders and more sophisticated ones need to be computed.

Postprocess effect has an impact on GPU (fillrate, shading power) for similar reasons.

Anisotropic filtering is a "GPU olny" related feature (fillrate, shading power).

Shadow detail has varying impacts on your GPU and your CPU depending on the scene (triangle rendering, fillrate).

Antialiasing is a "GPU olny" related feature (fillrate, shading power), and it eats lots of video memory (proportionnal to used resolution).

[nuxil]

Intresting

[BiGGiBs]

Hi

Here's a tip for people having fps,missing sound issues,
and use an onboard soundcard (nforce asus mobo with ac97 sound in my case)
Try turning off your sound hardware acceleration 'ingame'
Note.i had to close the game and restart it for the change to take effect.

After just buying Arma and trying MP i was having terrible trouble with some sounds (vehicles,radio messages,choppers) not playing
Plus realy low framerates (5 fps at most),but only in mp!
basicly game was unplayable.

In sp missions,campaign sound and framerate are fine.
I have an asus a8n5x nforce 4 mobo and i'm using the onboard ac97 sound.

Asking a few people ingame about it didn't help i got the usual crap of get a legal copy and FADE awnsers.

So i tried turning the graphics settings down too medium without any luck.
I then tried turning the sound hardware acceleration off 'ingame' and it didn't help at all.
But after closing the game and restarting 'BAM' decent framerates and alot more sounds working.
& i was able to set my video settings back to most things on high

Sorry i don't have any numbers for you framerates wise but i was ingame and was too enthrawled at having a playable game again to check but the change in framerate differance was like night & day!

Hope soemone else will find this usefull

BiGGiBs

p.s. if my sys specs,drivers and dxdiag will help
i'll happily post them,just send a pm if needed
but for now i'm going back to play some more mp arma

[McTavish]

It seems ArmA is one of those "stressful" games that comes along occasionally and exposes the weak spots in everyones computer

I bought an X1950 XT to play it and all those pixel rendering pipelines mean I can throw as much AA/AF and post processing at it as I like.

I've been struggling with low framerates though and the one change I've made that has made a realy worthwhile difference is the one recommended by HBK (thanks) above. My 256Mb card just cannot cope easily with Textures set to Medium or higher. I resisted and resisted (because that is one of the few settings I consider really important for games) but finally dropped it down to "low" and the framerate soared. I've added in "high" AF and the textures still look good to me so I don't feel like I'm loosing out too much, especially since I can enable Post Processing on high- I'm in love with that depth of field effect


Moral of the story- everyones bottle-neck is going to be different so try everything.

[SHWiiNG]

HELP>>> When i select 1024 x 480 Resolution (this is the perfect choice as its lower then 1024 x 740 but high enough to get high quality textures) The game is extremely Blocky and Blurry..i sould use 800 x 600 but that too is a too blurry but no blocky..
PLEASE ANY HELP!

[Jack-UK]

Its probably blocky because you would be stretching the view... Try 1024*768 and if the problem dissapears then that is a poor resolution, you must have it in a bit of scale. You're giving your monitor 1024 pixels across and only 480 downwards...