Wednesday

Some ArmA2 tweaks I’ve found useful

1 Comment July 8, 2009 – 10:04 am | Permalink |  Print This Post |

ArmA2, I write about it sometimes

Yes, more ArmA2 damn it. I can’t help myself, I’m hooked. Here are a few tweaks I’ve found useful if you’re having frame rate trouble, or issues with crashing/freezing.

1. Overclocking your CPU can be scary and time consuming, but absolutely worth the trouble. Taking my Q6600 from stock 2.4ghz to 3.7ghz (with a stop over at 3.3ghz) made an obvious world of difference in how ArmA2 (and everything else) plays. A couple of previous articles on OC’ing and monitoring temps can be found here.
2. On the other hand, overclocked video cards can make ArmA2 unstable and prone to (n4v_disp error) freezing. Use Rivatuner (for nVidia) or ATI Tray Tools (for ATI) to pull back any drastic GPU overclocks, including factory OC’s.
3. Shadow Detail of High (or Very High) can give better performance than Normal or Low for some reason.
4. Leave post-processing off for an easy performance boost, and many don’t like it anyway. (I think it’s spiffy myself)
5. Try your view distance at 2000 or less if you have it out farther, you get better performance and the distance fog in ArmA2 is actually kind of nice anyway. Pulling the view distance back will also help with mouse lag and texture redraw issues.
6. If you’re finding an annoying amount of mouse lag (and pulling the view distance back as suggested above doesn’t help) try turning off “Enhanced Pointer Precision” in Windows. For XP you want Control Panel>Mouse>Pointer Options>Enhance Pointer Position and in Vista look for Windows Control Panel>Mouse>Enhance Pointer Position.
7. If you have an SLI rig, either rename your arma2.exe to Crysis.exe to get SLI working or apply either the nVidia beta or evga SLI fix. Personally I just went with the Crysis.exe solution and will wait for a proper non-beta driver fix.
8. If playing on an LCD monitor, try setting your resolution one notch below your native screen res. With AA enabled you’ll find the resulting image looks a bit “soft” but it’s actually not unappealing like this, and it does provide a frame rate boost.
9. If you haven’t defragged the hard drive ArmA2 is installed on lately, do so. A properly defragged hard drive can speed up load times, and decrease texture load time while playing. If possible use something like Perfectdisk (payware) or Defraggler (freeware) as opposed to the native Windows defragger.
10. If you have an nVidia card, try setting anti-aliasing to the level you want in game, then install nHancer to tweak how it’s applied. Either in an ArmA2 nHancer profile or in your Crysis nHancer profile (if you have renamed the exe) set nHancer to “ehance in game settings” in the anti-aliasing section, then choose which type of AA you want to employ. I’ve found multi x4 looks good and gives good performance as well. There is a similar app for ATI cards whose name eludes me at the moment.
11. If using nHancer, change the “max pre-rendered frames” to 8 in the same profile, or do so within the nVidia control panel if not using nHancer.

There are other tweaks out there I haven’t tried of course, many for for people with more than 2gb ram or running on Vista and Win7. I will only vouch for the previous tweaks however, as tested at various times on the way to my current set up, on the following rig.

System
Q6600 2.4ghz overclocked to 3.7ghz (stable)
2gb OCZ Reaper 9600 1150mhz
nVidia BFG 8800GT OC2 x2 (SLI) with 186.18 drivers (as of early July 09)
Two 150gb 10k raptors (OS and games) + 1 1tb 7200 Western Digital (storage)
Windows XP Pro SP3

My ArmA2 settings are (currently) as follows:
Resolution : 1680×1050 (3d/2d)
Visibility : 3500
Texture detail : Normal
Video Memory : Very High (for 512mb)
Anti-aliasing : Very High
Antriscopic Filtering : Very High
Terrain Detail : Normal
Object Detail : High
Shadow Detail : High
Post Process Effects : Very High (I know, but I like them)

If you have any other tweaks that have worked for you, please post them in the comments.

EDIT: The above system has been updated, and I’m running ArmA2 a bit differently these days. Current specs/settings below.

System
Win7 64 bit (RTM)
Q6600 2.4ghz overclocked to 3.7ghz
Asus P5N32E SLI mobo with BIOS 1701
8GB mix of OCZ Reaper 8500 & G.Skill 6400 @825mhz 4-3-3-5-2T
nVidia BFG 8800GT OC2 x2 (SLI) with 190.38 64bit
OCZ GameXStream 850w PSU
Two 150gb 10k rpm WD Raptors + 1 TB WD Caviar Black
Logitech G15 keyboard
Logitech G9 mouse
TrackIR5 + TrackClip Pro

ArmA2 settings
Screen Res : 1680×1050
3d res : 100%
Visibility : 3000
Texture detail : Normal
Video Memory : Default
Anti-aliasing : Off
Antriscopic Filtering : Very High
Terrain Detail : Normal
Object Detail : High
Shadow Detail : Very High
Post Process Effects : High
Frame rate :  30 in the campaign, much higher everwhere else