ARMA2 Settings

[Zak33]

Thought this would be useful as a sticky for next few months for people installing and playing

MINOR UPDATE APRIL 2012
With the 1.60 patch (for OA) don't bother with cpucount or maxmem, the game will make the best choice on it's own.

Few command line tweaks shamelessly ripped off the BIS Forums.

-winxp : Use it in Vista/W7 to enable multi-GPU support, will disable use of D3D9Ex (a special Vista only D3D9 version)

-nosplash : Skip splash screens

-world=empty : Doesn't load as much for menu, starts faster

-maxmem=2047 : Allows game engine to use more RAM (2047 is hardcoded maximum atm, anything higher falls back to 2047).

-window : Windowed mode

-noCB : Turns off multicore drawing, slow down rendering but may resolve visual glitches

-cpuCount=X : Change X to a number equal or less than numbers of available cores. (2 seems to have the best results....even on quads!)

Right click the shortcut, properties, then add after arma2.exe

Mine looks like:

C:\Games\ArmA2\arma2.exe -nosplash -world=empty -maxmem=2047 -cpuCount=2

Couple of other snippets:

* Shadow setting 'Very High' usually offers better performance than 'High'
* Video memory setting 'Default' uses the value in Arma2.cfg. 'Very High' is 512mb, therefore 'Default' will actually be higher if your card has more than 512mb vram.
* Your terrain detail will automatically be lowered if Arma2 determines that you set your 'Visibility' too high.

[Zak33]

Personally I have also dicovered that:

CPU=4 does make a difference to me, so I use it.

Terrain settings cripple frame rate the most, so should be first to be sacrificed for performance improvements

[Zak33]

Not sure why this works, so I won't guess. But for me it's made a noteable smoothness difference online.

Set the Interface resolution in game to match your monitors res, BUT INCREASE the 3d resolution to 133%. You can do it ingame, it only takes a few seconds to reload, and it LOOKS lush, and it moves much smoother. I don't know why and am not imagining it.. I promise.

More noteable on my ATI than on Bish's 260GTX, but he's sticking with it cos it looks amazing and is no slower.

I tried 125% and 150% and both were still smoother than default, but 133 seems best.

I think that gets the "Very Weird Award" for this week. Increase detail to increase smoothness

[DannyM]

The general consensus at .:iGi:. is that it seems to work better on an XP install too, so if your a die hard fan, get it installed on an XP install

[Zak33]

The general consensus at .:iGi:. is that it seems to work better on an XP install too, so if your a die hard fan, get it installed on an XP install

agreed. Just installed standalone XP for this game and performance is about 25% better. Much smoother frame rate too.

[HelghanEmperor1]

Thank you every much for the info, I have always found it hard to run arma on the highest settings, thank you very much again

[pauleden]

Zak,
I hope you don't mind a necro-update post from me.

With the 1.60 patch (for OA) that came out a few weeks ago, some of your info is outdated.

Don't bother with cpucount or maxmem, the game will make the best choice on it's own.

As to operating systems, I can't compare my W7 install to XP, because I installed an SSD at the same time as moving to W7, but I'm told the memory management on 7 is much better than on XP, so on those grounds alone, I'd go with 7 now.

I've not tried the 3d resolution trick, but have heard of it. Will try it now.

[Zak33]

thanks bud, and a necro was a good idea on this subject

Will alter the main text right now.

[tedz10f]

Thank you very much for the information