Hi everyone,

I posted a little while back about the PC I was getting built.

I now have the PC, but I'm not quite getting the performance I was expecting from Arma 2.

I have an i5 2500k OC'd to 4.3ghz, 8gb RAM and an Asus direct cu Gtx 560 ti.

My graphics card drivers are up to date, as is Arma, as I have combined operations on Steam.

Basically my problem is that on the 'Very High' overall setting (not adjusting individual settings) my FPS sometimes dips into the 20's, especially when looking through grass with a zoomed scope in Chernaraus, or when on the Zargabad mission on OA.

This is annoying because I read lots of reviews on the GTX 560 ti before purchase and all of them claimed the card to have 30 fps minimum at 1920 x 1080, with the 'very high' graphics setting and 4x AA. I am running the game at 1440 x 900 so I expected to NEVER go under 30 fps.

I tried overclocking my card but this wasn't very successful and only gained me 3-5 fps. Also, even with overclocking I still sometimes dip into the 20's fps.

In fact, I find that even lowering most of the settings doesn't yield much better results, expect for AA. If I completely disable AA, I never go below probably 40. But I don't feel I should need to be doing this with my rig.

Any help would be very very much appreciated, especially comments from those with similar rigs?

Thanks so much,
Tripwires.

just tried a small battle, 2 friendly squads, 2 enemy and 1 helicopter near novy sobor. Overall setting is on 'very high' but from there I have lowered 3d resolution to match monitor (1440 x 900) lowered post processing to 'normal' and anti aliasing to 'normal.'

Also I changed the Atoc setting in the .cfg file to = 0.

my average fps is good - 52. But should I really expect frame dips down to 22 on these settings with my rig? can anyone advise?

P.s Installed the newest Nvidia driver that was released yesterday - made no difference either way.

52 FPS is very good if you consider the high demands ArmA2 has.

Depending on how much AI a mission has, or how many scripts are running at the same time a huge performance drop is not uncommon. If a mission has 200 AI units fighting each other and all kind of scripts checking things every 0.1 seconds also a NASA computer has a noticeable FPS drop.

3D Resolution is good enough if set to 100%, higher settings you wouldn't notice anyway. You need to play with your settings a bit as everyone has to until you found the perfect balance between good graphics and good performance.

Thanks for the reply I guess I was just a bit dissapointed after reading Custom Pc Mag where they tested arma 2 with a very similar rig to mine (same CPU + GPU) and got a minimum of "30 fps" on 1920 x 1080 with "very high settings" and "4x antialiasing" so naturally I thought I would never get less than 30 fps on 1440 X 900 with less than "very high settings"

One thing is for sure though I get MUCH better performance on any OA map apart from Zargabad which sucks.

Guess its to do with density of trees / grass buildings being the main FPS killer.

So what card would I have to upgrade to to get Arma 2 to run 60 fps minimum ha

The problem with Zargabad are the many enterable buildings which are a resource hog. Bundled with a lot of AI calculations that kills every PC.

The dense and numerous forests on Chernarus can also be a problem.

Best advise from me is to disable your FPS counter and enjoy the game. Once sucked into a good mission, you don't mind performance drops that much anymore - except they drop from 35 to 10 fps of course. If you get constant 25 - 30 FPS that's enough to really enjoy it.

Thanks W0lle that is good advice. None of my framerates are unplayable, so I should just enjoy it. Good to know it is a common enough problem though, thanks.

Yeah I found the same thing with Arma. I have an i7 920 with a Nvidia 570 and 120GB Corsair SSD and I still get lag on maps with lots of vegetation (although rarely have problems with Zargabad). Your best bet is to just tweak away at the video options until you are satisfied and then as w0lle said, turn of the FPS meter and just enjoy :)