i have around 15 to 20 FPS on my 9500 GT

Changes

v1.02 final
Optimisations with distant lights.
Blur and bloom - option to disable added.
Option to change the rendered resolution instead of fillrate.

For v1.02 users due to the changes in 1.02 kegety's no blur/bloom mod is needed.

-cpucount added to first post.

With v1.02 installed I can't seem to find out how to disable blur and bloom. Where is this option I read about? Do I have to play with my config or something?

Disable post processing to disable blur.
Set your brightness to say 0.9 or lower and increase gamma a bit (or the other way around, dont remember exactly). That should reduce the bloom for not making things shiny white.

I had seen that my ArmA 2 was not running as smooth as my ArmA 1 even though i have an 8800 GTS, so i spent most of the day finding the right setting to overclock it. Now i get incredible performance with stunning graphics.

heh sorry! I didn't find it.. damn i'm blind. argh

I also sent a pm to foxhound. CRAP
oh well

BIS forums has helped alot, i will continue to give you guys some updates here of their findings.

Updated first post with the following:

Renaming ArmA2.exe to crysis.exe or crysis64.exe, also sometimes enables SLI for some people, if not try using the command parameter with crysis.exe or crysis64.exe -winxp.

EVGA SLI fix, read more here.

Settings in nVidia control panel to be found useful:

Thanks for all this, very usefull!
I will need this topic as soon as I find some time to test/play ArmA2 :)

There seems to be a serious issue with Arma II performance on Vista systems. I cannot find the link now, but my interest was sparked when I read a thread about someone who had a far better machine than a friend yet was getting significantly lower frames in an identical benchmark with identical settings. The difference was that the OP had Windows Vista and his friend had XP. So, refusing to believe that my Athlon 3.2ghz Dual Core, 4GB RAM, GTX 285 2GBVRAM, Win Vista machine should be getting 15-25 frames at the lowest settings I decided to do a test. I installed the game on my brother's Win XP machine, which is identical in every way except that mine has a better video card (he has a GTX 275). On identical settings and in the same area (Chenogorsk) his machine was getting 30-55 FPS while mine was struggling at 15-20. So as you can see, the only factor is that he has XP and I have Vista. I tried running the game with that "-winxp" in the command line but that did nothing.

I'm pretty upset that I have been waiting for this game for so long and it is unplayable at any setting on a machine that should be able to run it just fine. I have also read several articles/forums that touch on the fact that the game runs poorly on AMD Phenom II Quad-Cores...as if it was not a quad core at all (I am only mentioning this because this is the next upgrade I have planed for my machine). It just really sounds like BI needs to take some serious time to address these game-breaking performance issues.

More importantly, I just wanted to shed some light on this thread about this issue in case people are having trouble running the game on a Vista machine despite implementing these optimisation suggestions.

Settings on mixture of high/normal/very high.

Manufacturer: PCspecialist
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz (4 CPUs)
Memory: 4000MB RAM
Hard Drive: 750 GB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX+
Monitor: 24 inch
Sound Card: Realtek HD Audio output
Speakers/Headphones: Digital Precision
Keyboard: Tesco value keyboard
Mouse: Microsoft Laser mouse 5000
Mouse Surface: RAF Avro Vulcan mousemat? lol
Operating System: Windows XP Home Edition
Motherboard: ASUS PND-5
Computer Case: Conqueror



WITH GAME BOOSTER



I really do recommend this program.

I did not take screenshots but finally thought I should take some time to test how ArmA2 runs on my system (havent played yet though).

My specs:
Intel E6600 @2.4
GTX8800
Windows XP
Forceware 182.06
2GB RAM
Clean install, formatted my whole system last week and running a Virtual Machine for the ordinary internet stuff. So this XP install is only used for the game and some additional programs (for the overclocking I planned as well).


All ingame settings set to normal, PP disabled.

Highest ArmA2 scores I saw was:
Test 1: 43.5431
Test 2: 34.8481
Test 3: 25.8926
Test 4: 37.7358
Test 5: 20.8778
---------------
ArmA2 mark: 3257.95


Now, I will overclock this CPU to 3.0 and than test again. I also will buy 2 GB additional RAM so if needed ArmA2 can use the full (and max) 2 GB while XP still has some too :)
(I know XP supports max like 3.5)

Foxhound : Now, I will overclock this CPU to 3.0 and than test again. I also will buy 2 GB additional RAM so if needed ArmA2 can use the full (and max) 2 GB while XP still has some too :)
(I know XP supports max like 3.5)

No, 32 bit OS's have max adress space of 4 GB, that goes for both XP, Vista and 7.
I have the same specs you do but vista 32 and 4 GB of ram, my comp recognises all ram but can only use 3.

Arma 2 doesnt like Vista, i remember everyone complained about this in Arma 1 (at the time i had XP too) but i dont want to go back.. i've been monitoring Arma II in window mode and the most ram it ever used was around 1 GB, with XP 2 GB should be enough.
Im going to try and see if i can put my conroe at 3.0 too (333 fsb), you be carefull, increasing the FSB can be dangerous to other system components like the ram or the graphics card. But.. i dont think i will be able to resist buying a new CPU soon (Quad).

Yeah I know there always is a risk ;)

I did a little test last night and joined a MP game with 20 people on it, I think it was domination or evolution.
I played with (please dont get scared) 50 - 60 frames, so I increased all graphic settings to high/very high and ran around/drove around with 25 - 50 frames.........incredible I must say.
I even enabled PP to very high, no notice in frame drop, but I disabled it again as I do not like the blur. Set 3d render to 125% I think.

FPS in the campaign suck, so why in MP (it was just a short test for like 30 minutes) its better, or at least seems to be better i dont know. Maybe bad mission making in the campaign cause of all the bugs?

is anybody out there running a dragon system (amd processor, 790 board chipset, and ati card) im working with the demo right now, and im sure there are issues in the full game that do not present themselves during demo play (huge explosions, tons of knuckleheads running around, the occasional goober shooting his own team) but i am running everything at high and no choppyness what so ever.

For me I found that setting the pre-rendered frames in the nvidia control panel to 6 for arma2.exe worked best.

Also I would like to point you to an addon I have created to help improve FPS, please leave your feedback in that topic.
http://www.armaholic.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=7146