[Guide] How to set up your graphics properly

[Nazreth187 1]

Still no fix for the HDR/Bloom affect when facing the sun?

And the pitch black, no visibility night time?

[nahaz 132]

You mean the glare you get when looking at the sun? That's as it supposed to be, or is there some side effect you're experiencing?

Night time has been improved but if it's no moon and cloudy it will be extremely dark. What I suggest you do is max out your gamma and brightness. You might have to adjust your monitor settings aswell. Though at some point you will still need to use a flashlight or some kind of light source.

[Nazreth187 1]

Alright, thanks man. And thanks for the guide too!

I had everything on high, and some things on low, and was still getting choppy gameplay, and it didn't make sense,

because I have a Intel i7 920, and a GTX 560. I can play Crysis maxed out fine, but ArmaII/DayZ was choppy.

But I set everything the way you have it here, and it runs perfect now.

So I appreciate it.

[nahaz 132]

Updated the post with comparison images! Click on them to see a little larger image. I resized them to 60% of 1920x1200 to save some loading time and bandwidth.

[nahaz 132]

Doing a little bumping. Please let me know what you think about the images, are they good as they are? Should I remove or change something?

[Maniacmike (DayZ) 24]

Great post man

[Deadend197 8]

Is there a setting that if turned off/on helps to get rid of the graphics glitches at the Airfields and Cherno? It's becoming too much for me to wait till it's actually fixed in some way, 'Shift' + '-' then typing 'Flush' makes the glitches worse for me.

[DazTroyer 227]

Brilliant read, very useful for someone like me coming over from the 360.

[DazTroyer 227]

This almost certainly saved my bacon, laying down to fiddle with the settings whilst in the woods i saw two guys run past me, followed by a third going from cover to cover behind them. If they weren't bandits, he probably was lol.

Edited August 13, 2012 by DazTroyer

[nahaz 132]

Is there a setting that if turned off/on helps to get rid of the graphics glitches at the Airfields and Cherno? It's becoming too much for me to wait till it's actually fixed in some way, 'Shift' + '-' then typing 'Flush' makes the glitches worse for me.

I usually fiddle with my Texture setting, going from Very High to High tends to solve the issue for a session or so.

[nahaz 132]

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

[h3retic 224]

i heard that editing scenecomplexity from 150000 to 100000 in arma 2 cfg files helps in most cases, but anyways the artifacts seem to be fixed now

[nahaz 132]

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.

[-=seany=- 65]

Nice guide, good job.

I would say though that Object detail is a big one for performance. This can really have a major impact when around buildings. It also increase the quality of foliage, which can affect your FPS when "zooming" view etc, depending on you GPU.

It might be worth noting that Terrain Detail and View distance are Controlled by DayZ (a lot of Arma multiplayer missions also have a default setting for these options and your normal graphic settings wont have any affect on them. In these situations there is usually a "mouse wheel" option that allows you to change Terrain Detail and View Distance via some in-mission menu.)

I also believe the only option that can swap between CPU or GPU rendering depending on the interface setting are the Shadow options.

One other hint to get more detail than in game options can give you is to go to Nvidia Control Panel and to the profile for Arma2:oa and set Anisotropic Filtering to x16. The in game Anisotropic filtering only goes to x8 on it's highest setting. Using x16 makes the terrain texture much sharper and casues no performance loss. ( I'm sure ATI users can do the same thing with catalyst)

Edited August 19, 2012 by SeanOfTheDead

[jaws4096 77]

Hi Nahaz,

Would you mind posting your system specs and typical FPS in cities / woods? I noticed you're running Eyefinity resolutions on high detail, which is incredible! I have a fairly high-end system and I'm getting around 20FPS in town, with frequent (sometimes as often as every 5 seconds or so) periods of under 10 FPS.

Here are my specs, for reference:

• Running Combined Operations from Steam, patched with Dayz Commander to latest version.
  
• Dual Radeon 7970's 3GB overclocked to max stock settings - rock solid in other games (Crysis is ~100FPS at full detail)
  
• Intel i7 Ivy Bridge 6-core processor with liquid cooling, overclocked to 4.5Ghz
  
• 32GB RAM, running a 1GB RAMDISK with all Dayz mod files
  
• Sound Blaster Fatality Sound Card
  

Thanks,

Jaws

[Negator (DayZ) 5]

you hav ma beans

[nahaz 132]

Nice guide, good job.

I would say though that Object detail is a big one for performance. This can really have a major impact when around buildings. It also increase the quality of foliage, which can affect your FPS when "zooming" view etc, depending on you GPU.

It might be worth noting that Terrain Detail and View distance are Controlled by DayZ (a lot of Arma multiplayer missions also have a default setting for these options and your normal graphic settings wont have any affect on them. In these situations there is usually a "mouse wheel" option that allows you to change Terrain Detail and View Distance via some in-mission menu.)

I also believe the only option that can swap between CPU or GPU rendering depending on the interface setting are the Shadow options.

One other hint to get more detail than in game options can give you is to go to Nvidia Control Panel and to the profile for Arma2:oa and set Anisotropic Filtering to x16. The in game Anisotropic filtering only goes to x8 on it's highest setting. Using x16 makes the terrain texture much sharper and casues no performance loss. ( I'm sure ATI users can do the same thing with catalyst)

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.

Hi Nahaz,

Would you mind posting your system specs and typical FPS in cities / woods? I noticed you're running Eyefinity resolutions on high detail, which is incredible! I have a fairly high-end system and I'm getting around 20FPS in town, with frequent (sometimes as often as every 5 seconds or so) periods of under 10 FPS.

Here are my specs, for reference:

• Running Combined Operations from Steam, patched with Dayz Commander to latest version.
  
• Dual Radeon 7970's 3GB overclocked to max stock settings - rock solid in other games (Crysis is ~100FPS at full detail)
  
• Intel i7 Ivy Bridge 6-core processor with liquid cooling, overclocked to 4.5Ghz
  
• 32GB RAM, running a 1GB RAMDISK with all Dayz mod files
  
• Sound Blaster Fatality Sound Card
  

Thanks,

Jaws

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

[Naddiseo 0]

Great job on the guide. Works well. One question, which setting would cause something like this (screenshot): http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/541809954076769735/D89D7257D69E8B0B6887F5BD4857D8EEC58666C3/

[nahaz 132]

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.

[Battlelord 0]

Hi Nahaz. This is really an intresting topic and it helped me out alot. But still I'm having difficutlies in setting up my video settings correctly. Probably because I have quite a mixed configuration. I have a brand new GPU, but pretty old CPU, motherboard etc. Here are my specs:

I've got got a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHZ

4GB DDR2 Dual Channel 400Mhz RAM

GPU: Asus Nvidea GTX 560 TI (Stock overclocked)

Windows 7 64 bit

Screen: 23" 1920x108

DirectX 11

Could you please give me some advise how to set up my settings correctly? I have Arma II, Arma II: Operation Arrowhead and the Private Military DLC via Steam. I have Dayz commander and everything patched up. I'm downloading fraps right now to check my fps but I'm sure it's really low. I've turned off my anti virus and firewall but nothing helps. I've completly copied your settings but it didn't work out neither... :(

In other games like BF3 and Max Payne 3 I've experienced same kind of issues. Graphics looking really nice, but lagging like shit. Maybe I should consider playing on my laptop? There I have at least a core i5 cpu. Gpu is way less though, I believe it's the mobility radeon HD4600 series...

Also I changed the parameters in the Arma2 document folder like you said to try double my fps. But i'm not sure if I did it the right way. I've edited it in notepad. So before I saw this white icons, and now the 2 files I edited have the notepad icon. Is that normal?

Please help me out

Update: I kinda fixed it myself, I have 60 fps now with my firewall and antivirus and fraps and everything on. I completely reinstalled all games and patches. Tips are still welcome to improve my framerate and perfomance even more.

Edited September 9, 2012 by Battlelord

[Muminmuffin 0]

great post! before everything looked like shit, and just didnt look realistic, and still i got small but noticable fps drop. now everything is better, thanks alot man.

Edited September 9, 2012 by Muminmuffin

[jeremy768 2]

Hi , hope u guys can help me

Heres my specs

I5 ivy bridge 2.5ghz -3.3ghz

12gb ram 1600mhz

Nvidia geforce gt610m 2gb + intel hd 4000 graphics

I noe tis is rather low end, but hope u giv me the best specs to run dayz at a acceptable fps. Thanks!

[nahaz 132]

Hi Nahaz. This is really an intresting topic and it helped me out alot. But still I'm having difficutlies in setting up my video settings correctly. Probably because I have quite a mixed configuration. I have a brand new GPU, but pretty old CPU, motherboard etc. Here are my specs:

I've got got a Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3GHZ

4GB DDR2 Dual Channel 400Mhz RAM

GPU: Asus Nvidea GTX 560 TI (Stock overclocked)

Windows 7 64 bit

Screen: 23" 1920x108

DirectX 11

Could you please give me some advise how to set up my settings correctly? I have Arma II, Arma II: Operation Arrowhead and the Private Military DLC via Steam. I have Dayz commander and everything patched up. I'm downloading fraps right now to check my fps but I'm sure it's really low. I've turned off my anti virus and firewall but nothing helps. I've completly copied your settings but it didn't work out neither... :(

In other games like BF3 and Max Payne 3 I've experienced same kind of issues. Graphics looking really nice, but lagging like shit. Maybe I should consider playing on my laptop? There I have at least a core i5 cpu. Gpu is way less though, I believe it's the mobility radeon HD4600 series...

Also I changed the parameters in the Arma2 document folder like you said to try double my fps. But i'm not sure if I did it the right way. I've edited it in notepad. So before I saw this white icons, and now the 2 files I edited have the notepad icon. Is that normal?

Please help me out

Update: I kinda fixed it myself, I have 60 fps now with my firewall and antivirus and fraps and everything on. I completely reinstalled all games and patches. Tips are still welcome to improve my framerate and perfomance even more.

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 :)

[Dat Bushmonster 17]

You sir, win the internet

And a ton of beans :beans:

[fluxley 2228]

Excellent guide, thanks