nahaz

A guide on how to set up your graphics properly If you like it or have any feedback, please tell me so I can improve the guide! This guide covers the settings you can change to improve your graphics and/or FPS. Keep in mind that the server you play on can be the culprit in your FPS issues. I suggest that you benchmark on several different servers or in singleplayer on classic arma missions with lots of action and characters running around, they should give you a decent pointer on how your computer will perform in DayZ since it's a little bit more heavy than standard arma. First up, don't be ingame while setting this up as the game might ask you to restart your game and someone might attack you while you're in menus. Head into Options and then Video Settings and then hit the Advanced button in the lower left corner. You will see this: Let's start from the upper half settings: Visibility This setting determines your maximum viewing distance. This can greatly effect your performance if set too high. Brightness This is the brightness of colors, this rarely needs to be adjusted, it helps to increase this during nighttime. Gamma This affects overall lightning and contrast. Increasing this during nighttime will greatly enhance your vision but will cause your colors to almost go away completely. Quality Preference This is just a collection of presets for the settings in the lower half. Interface Resolution This is your actual screen resolution. This should match your desktop resolution. 3D Resolution This one is a bit tricky. If you want to keep it simple, just set this to the same as your interface resolution. What this does is controlling at what resolution the ingame 3D world will be rendered at. If you set it to a lower resolution than your interface, you will see a performance increase at the cost of visual clarity, your image will be slightly blurred. If you set this to higher than your interface resolution you will get a "Antialiasing" effect causing edges to be smoother. This is actually less of a performance hit than increasing Antialiasing in ARMA 2. And now the lower half: Texture Detail This determines how textures will be looking. Textures are used on characters, houses, weapons etc. This can often be set quite high without too much of a performance hit. Video Memory If you have a graphics card with 512MB of memory you can set this to high, if you have more you might gain some FPS by setting this to default as it is supposed to use more VRAM then. The biggest change this setting has is on the textures so if you have a card with more than 512mb VRAM you won't see a big improvement, you might gain a little fps if you have the setting on default but it won't be a major change from Very High. Anisotropic Filtering This controls how textures and terrain are rendered at a distance. If you have this setting on low, textures will seem diffused at a distance. Depending on your card this might not cause a performance impact at all, most people can set this to high or very high. Antialiasing This setting, in my opinion, should always be turned off. What it does, simply put, is that it multiplies your image to smooth out edges and that causes a great performance hit. You can achieve the same effect by turning this off, increasing your resolution and possibly increasing your 3D resolution. (I prefer interface and 3D on the same) ATOC Alpha to Coverage affects antialiasing on trees and grass. This setting doesn't do major changes but affects photorealism of trees and the like. If you use antialiasing you will have the best results if you set this to "All trees + grass", otherwise leave it at disabled. Terrain Detail This controls how detailed terrain will be, meaning how trees and grass will be rendered. This can impact performance greatly combined with a high Visiblity setting. Note: This image is from the Editor and DayZ isn't loaded. DayZ overrides the removal of grass on Very Low so grass will still be rendered when playing DayZ Objects Detail This is how detailed weapons and people, some house details will be. This can in most cases be set fairly high without a FPS drop. Shadow Detail This controls if shadows will be a black blob or an actual shadow of a person/object. This takes quite alot of power from your gfx. A normal or low setting will help you alot if you have FPS issues. HDR Quality This is affecting lightning quality and bloom effects. Setting this to high will give you better lightning effects but can cause a FPS drop. HDR on high can greatly enhance your visibilty during nighttime. PPAA Post Processing Antialiasing is a filter which affects objects in the world. I prefer the sharp filter (FXAA(Sharp Filter), the others makes everything look a little blurred on the edges in different variations. If you use AA I suggest you play around with this setting to find what you like as some filters are better suited on different monitors. Postprocess effects This is mostly annoying, this is the setting causing the world to "blur" when you run and move. I recommend setting this to Disabled. Interface Size This controls the size of menus and icons on your HUD. Aspect Ratio This controls your aspect ratio, or in other words, your viewable angle space. Most monitors have 16:9 or 16:10. Vsync This causes your FPS to match your refresh rate on your monitor. Disabling this will probably increase your FPS if it is constantly at 60. (Most screens have a refresh rate of 60hz) Balancing between CPU and GPU Any setting lower than high will use your CPU instead of GPU (graphicscard) and this can be very useful if you don't have a powerful GPU. Sometimes, setting values to high can actually improve fps since a GPU is alot faster on some types of calculations compared to a CPU. Advanced Settings I just found this out and it can GREATLY increase your FPS. It doubled for me, I was at a steady 30+ before while now I get a steady 60+. Go to your documents folder, in there you find an Arma 2 folder (you can also go via start -> run and then type "%userprofile%\Documents\ARMA 2\" without quotes in windows 7 or vista). In that folder are Arma2.cfg and Arma2oa.cfg, edit those files and change the 2 corresponding lines to this: GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1; GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1; A Note on servers and performance Servers can affect your clients FPS so if you still have poor FPS after tweaking, try changing server and find one with good performance. The easiest way is to hop on to one with low population, say 10-20, no more. Or if you know of a good server that can handle the load with max players without issues, there aren't too many of those around though. To sum it up: Turn off Antialiasing, Vsync and Postprocess Shadow detail can cause a quite large FPS drop The other settings don't impact that much on FPS and can often be set quite high. Note: The PMC (Private Military Company) DLC is needed to get high resolution textures on character models. If you don't have it they will be blurred and smeared looking. Without PMC: With PMC: Reference image for my settings I feel this guide is complete. If you think I have missed something please tell me.

A ramdisk will probably reduce load times but not impact FPS much at all. A 630M is a mobile card and they're quite weak compared to the discrete counterparts. Playing arma 2 on high graphics is like playing BF3 (highly optimized game) on high graphics, not entirely because of a photorealistic look but because in Arma/DayZ there's ALOT to render. You need at least at 650M to expect more than 30-40 fps on medium to high settings. On another note, I won't be updating this thread since I don't think it needs any updating anymore. I'm not playing DayZ currently, I'm waiting for standalone, but a 650 or better is what I would recommend for desktops as well.

Hello all First up, sorry to the regulars for me being away and letting SE 7 die, I got swamped with work abroad and had no time to manage the server. And on topic, SE 7 is back up with a private hive! It's currently all vanilla DayZ on Chernarus, I will be taking suggestions for modifications though, beginning with this thread until I see a good enough reason to get a community around the server up and running. See you in the woods!

There are ways but I won't, I like having both day and nighttime. Nighttime should occur at around 21-22 UTC+1 real time.

You're very much welcome. The server is public at the moment but will most likely become whitelisted or passworded in some way as soon as I have a solution for that ready.

Well, that's because it's obvious which one it is for. DayZ is a mod for Operation Arrowhead, you can't play without it.

It turns off buffering of frames on your gpu, sort of.

Help you with what? That rig is low end, it's a laptop, right? The GT610M card isn't very good at all, and the Intel one is even worse. All I can recommend is play on low details and very low vision range and it might be smoother, but you won't have good performance with that GPU, i'm afraid.

Servers affect performance alot, it could be the server you play on. Try the same area on a low pop server (say, 10 people, no more) and see if the same thing happens

Your rig is fine for Arma/Dayz performance wise. The notepad icon on the files is normal, it just means notepad is your default program to open that type of file. Since you seem to have fixed your fps issues there's not much input I can give you :)

Hey people! Here's my third movie, we had rigged a trap in the stary tents with stachel charges but our plan didn't quite go as we wanted... Tell me if you like it or not! Youtube seems bugged with the Captions so they're not available at the moment but will be as soon as I get it sorted with YT support.

I'd like to see thermal removed and AS50/M107 replaced with other snipers or medium ranged rifles (like a more fancy m16 acog). Also M4A1 Holo ought to be way more common compared to these guns. It's too easy to roam northern fields and farm downed choppers for these weapons.

Learning to range by eye or to be quick with mildots sure is better, but when you're suddenly surrounded it's easy to forget ;)

Here's a short sniping montage. I got the gun from killing a cheater, it wasn't more powerful than a .50 cal so I thought it was OK to use it. I no longer have it as I died from the 3rd guy in the group we were attacking.

Random bump

Hello all I have received reports and confirmed myself that the Heli on my server is resetting on restart. Please follow the link and upvote the issue if you play on my server or would like to see the heli fixed asap. https://dev-heaven.net/issues/42852 Thanks!

All other vehicles and tents are fine and have always been. It's only the chopper that's being buggy and I got told by support staff to create the issue, if you would have read the post after the jump you would have noticed. So don't jump the gun Mr Internet Police.

That's usually the textures on military corpses (non zombies, the static ones) found near some cities and camps. I go from very high to high on textures so the graphics are reloaded and then back up and it tends to solve the problem. I've seen another thread about going into your graphics control panel in windows and turning off multi threaded optimization (or something similar, it's about multi thread) and it solves the issue.

Yes, object detail can affect FPS, but it highly depends on what kind of GPU you're running, I got a high end gpu so I didn't notice much of a difference, some friends of mine with lower level and my testing on a spare GPU I have showed it was not much of a impact compared to other settings that affects you even more on lower end cards. I have seen equal amounts of statements about that being true and not. In my testing I got increased fps from higher overall settings so I assumed all settings were affected by it. I've been looking into making some kinde of guide/note about windows profiles in your GFX drivers but I havn't done it yet since I do nvidia and I wanted to finish this thread. Can't decide if this thread should be ingame settings only or have a part about driver profiles aswell. My rig is: i5 2500K @ 3.3Ghz 16GB Ram Nvidia GTX 670 When running on 3 screens (1920x1200 => 5760x1200) I have 20-30fps while recording and about 30 fps steady when not recording. If I run on a single monitor I have 50-80 fps

Alright, feels kind of good that the gun is gone instead of me not having it ;) We probably could meet up sometime. We're quite a large group me and my friends but alot has been away for a while now and it's not as fun playing only 2-3 as it is when you're a full squad of 6+

Let's keep it in english for the sake of everyone :) Yea I figured, my friend shot you just as you logged out and was severly pissed, I got it on video aswell. I was thinking of banning for alt+f4 but I figured you thought we were cheating so I let that disconnect slip. Just don't do it again ;) Do you still have the gun? If so, I'd like to trade it back, it's fun having a different and unique gun that isn't OP.

This thread is about performance, not bugs :) You can avoid the bugs to some degree, sometimes it worked with going from very high to high on textures so it reloaded them, sometimes not.

Threw in an update about the PMC DLC being needed for high res textures on character models.

It will probably run on low settings, but barely. Here's some reference from notebookcheck, it's a very good site to check mobile performance: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-4000.69168.0.html

Yea thermals are too easy to come by now. I don't like it at all but if it's in the game i'm gonna use it.