Hey guys, this seems like the right thread to post this. I've been seeing alot of people online reporting problems with their performance so I just want to write up a few tips that have helped me get a decent FPS in most situations. Wether it be DayZ or any other ArmA2 endevour these tweaks should help you greatly improve your average FPS Just a little disclaimer, this list of tweaks is in no way the be all and end all of tweak guides for ArmA2 and you may find that some are not even very helpful for you personally. This is simply a list of things that I've picked up over the years playing ArmA2 that have helped me get better performance on my system. This list also only contains things that you can do simply by already owning A2+OA and there are no extra requirements like 3rd party software or Solid State Drives. So here it is! Firstly some changes you can make to the ingame video settings: If you're experiencing a very blurry looking image what you should do is change your 3D Resolution to 100%. In other words your 3D Res should match your 2D res and both should obviously be set to your native monitor resolution for best results. Another thing you might want to look at if the motion blur is giving you headaches or you simply find that your image is too fuzzy is turn down or disable Post Processing. Basically the lower you have this the faster the game will run. Note: Post Processing actually has some other little graphical settings that are hardcoded into the different levels of PP. SSAO is one example check the link below for a full description. BIS CEO Marek Spanel on Post Processing: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?101040-ARMA-2-OA-Post-Process-Settings-Decoded One of the most obvious things to turn off if your graphics card is having a rough time running ArmA2 is your Anti-Aliasing. If you've ever played a PC game you'll no doubt have heard of this one. So if you don't care about jaggies... what are you waiting for! Turn that bitch off! :P On the other hand if you do get ticked off by our little jagged edge, aliasing friends (like I do) there will be a little section later in this post on how to still get a decent looking image without the performance hit of MSAA. Last but not least for ingame settings is VSync! I'm sure alot of you guys have had your fair share of experience with VSync being that it's a pretty common graphics setting. If your not familiar with this setting it basically just stops "tearing" of your image. So turning this off will give the odd vertical de-sync but you should notice a big improvement in FPS. Now some tips about the "ArmA2OA.cfg" file which can be found at: ...\My Documents\ArmA2\ArmA2OA.cfg AToC. Turn it off! Trees are a huge fps killer in this game and alot of you have probably noticed a significant drop when walking into a dense forest. One of the reasons for this is the newly (well new to OA) implemented AToC system which, without going into anything too technical, makes the trees and grass look purty. So, to turn it off open your ArmA2OA.cfg file with notepad. Right near the bottom you will find a line that looks like "AToC=7;". All you need to do is change the 7 to 0 and AToC is now disabled. You can set your AtoC anywhere between 0 and 7. Obviously 0 will give you fastest FPS while 7 will make trees/grass look nicer but will drag your FPS down. Here's a full list of all 8 settings and their effects. 0 - disabled 1 - AToC on grass 2 - AToC on new OA trees (takistan, zargabad, proving ground, shapur) 4 - AToC on old A2 trees (utes, chernarus) // combined 3 - AToC on grass & OA trees 5 - AToC on A2 trees + grass 6 - AToC on A2 + OA trees 7 - AToC enabled on grass, A2 & OA trees (default) Now about that aliasing I just mentioned. If your like me you hate seeing jaggies but you also hate the performance hit that the standard AA gives you. So in this last little section on the .cfg file I'll tell you how to set up FXAA. Note: FXAA was removed in beta patch 1.61 so if your running a beta patch this section probably won't be any use to you. FXAA in ArmA2 is now built into the engine, though it has yet to be implemented into the ingame video settings it still works fine once you know how to set it up. If you've already changed your AToC settings then you already know how to open your ArmA2OA.cfg file. To change your FXAA settings you'll need to open the same file and find the line "FXAA=0;" This should be set to 0 by default but your maximum FXAA setting in ArmA2 is 17. There is also the additional FXAA setting "FXAASharp=0;" which can be set from 0 to 6 but you actually have to add in the line FXAASharp=6 (6 being an example, feel free to set it to anything between 0 and 6). Basically the lower the number the better the performance but I'll put the list of all the settings and there respective attributes below so you can tweak your FXAA to your hearts content. 0 - Disabled 1 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_10 2 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_11 3 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_12 4 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_13 5 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_14 6 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_15 7 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_20 8 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_21 9 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_22 10 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_23 11 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_24 12 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_25 13 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_26 14 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_27 15 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_28 16 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_29 17 - FXAA_QUALITY_PRESET_39 Well that's some of the basics of the ArmA2OA.cfg file, for further reading use the arma2.cfg wiki link below: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/arma2.cfg Ok so lastly just a little bit about Arma2 and hyper-threading. This is obviously only applicable if you have a multi-threaded CPU like an i5 or i7 etc. and a graphics card that supports Threaded Optimization. Basically the RV3 engine, ArmA2's engine, has supported Hyper-threading since Operation Arrowhead as far as I know. That said, I still found the game pretty choppy while using my graphics cards Threaded Optimization. So this is only from personal experience and if you're not experiencing any problems with choppiness or stuttering then this might not apply to you. Now I don't know how this is done on (or if it's done) on ATI cards but if you have an Nvidia GPU you can: 1. Open up your Nvidia control panel (in control panel or by right clicking your desktop) 2. Go to the Manage 3D Settings section, 3a. Click the Program Settings tab and look for Arma2:OA in the list. 3b. If ArmA2:OA doesn't appear on the list then click the Add button and find your A2OA .exe (should be in your C:\Program Files\ directory or if your using the steam version it will be in your C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common directory) 4. Once you've selected Arma2OA in Program settings look for the setting "Threaded Optimization" and change it from "use global setting" to "Off". 5. Save changes and exit the control panel. If you experience a lower frame rate after this then just follow the steps again and change "Off" back to "Global Setting". A tip for better memory allocation if your having trouble with it is to go into your ArmA2 Operation Arrowhead directory and in the dll folder there should be a few different malloc.dll's. This will require some experimentation to find out which one works the best on your system and the link bellow can help you with setting up the game so that it uses your allocator of choice. Just make sure that if you use the method of only having one .dll in the folder that you back up the others. Custom Memory Allocator: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/ArmA_2:_Custom_Memory_Allocator Bonus Points: I know I said no 3rd party software but the ArmAII Launcher is the exception to the rule. If you use it I'm sure you've realized how convenient it is for keeping mods organized but it has some other pretty cool tricks up it's sleeve too. One of those I've found is changing the memory allocation and CPU core count options in the Launch options tab can help a lot with RAM allocation. Also if you only play DayZ or have a seperate profile for playing it you can use the ArmaII Launcher to launch the game with a specific profile and even set the game to launch Chernarus at start up to reduce loading time once you actually get on a server. OK so that's just a few of the tweaks I've found over the years to help improve my ArmA2 experience. If you read through this wall of text (I tried to put in as many paragraphs as possible :P) then thanks and I hope you get something out of it. Cheers, Clarkey
