darkdomino

Hey, I'm new to the DayZ forums here and was wondering if any of you could help shed some light on some of the questions I have. Like many others, I haven't actually played DayZ before - but I downloaded the Arma II Operation Arrowhead demo off steam to try and get some vague idea of how well DayZ standalone might run. I don't know if performance in Arma II is indicative or performance I'll get in DayZ - but I have a few questions (and if I'm totally off-base here, I apologize in advance) - I ask these questions, because I'm debating buying Arma II to play the DayZ mod before the standalone games comes out, but if I can't expect decent performance - I think I may hold off until I can get some new hardware or something. I'm currently using a laptop with a GeForce 580m and 2.4 (runs @3.1ghz) quad i7 w/ 12GB of DDR3 - I am using the 296.10 nvidia drivers, as the latest 300x drivers overvolt my GPU a bit and cause me to get some thermal throttling in my graphics card. Anyway, I'm getting an average framerate of 37 on the Arma II benchmark on all default normal settings with 8xCSAA and vsync. It only dropped to 27 FPS for about 2 seconds, and I did not really notice a slowdown in the benchmark at all. Is this a decent framerate for possibly playing DayZ? I found that in the scene with the tanks, I got a very high 55 FPS, and during the firefight scene with soldiers running around, it hovered at about 35 FPS. Not sure if this is indicative of how well DayZ will run, but if someone can enlighten me that'd be great. My second issue... or concern... is simply about the mouse sensitivity. I find it very hard to mouselook around because it seems the game implements some really heavy motion-blur and mouse smoothing. I've tried turning down the mouse smoothing all the way, but it still makes it somewhat difficult to look around. I've found that turning the X and Y sensitivity down to just about the lowest makes the very rapid mouselooking semi-manageable. Is this a part of the game? Should I leave the sensitivity on default and just keep practicing or what? My third and final issue is that I'm getting some weird texture/shadow issues in the demo. Running around, I found I sometimes seeing blocky triangular shadows on buildings - It's not a very common occurance, but I do notice it happening. Also during th benchmark, I frequently see a lot of "pop-in" on vegetation... Normally I don't care about pop-in, and when I actually play the demo (not the benchmark) the pop-in reduces significantly. So I'm not sure if this pop-in is just a symptom of the benchmark, or an issue with the engine itself.... or maybe my drivers. I also noticed that a lot of the shadows in the game, especially when up close, look blocky and pixelated (I have a similar issue in Skyrim) - When I upped the shadow quality to max, it helped a little, but it was still there. Ultimately I just want to see if these issues are inherent to the game or if I have some settings out of whack. I don't mind not playing on max settings, and I can deal with some minor graphical quirks. I'm most concerned about being able to play DayZ and a consistent framerate. If I have a playable experience on this Arma II demo, is it safe to say that my DayZ experience will be similar? The in-game benchmark didn't seem to include a whole lot of actual characters on-screen... and in DayZ I understand there are often many players running around. Is there a better way to guage my potential DayZ performance?