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Squad XML
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Optimising Framerate
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Posted by defunkt on Friday 19th of March 2010 at 6:44 PM
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Thought it might be helpful to share what I know about extracting performance and beauty from ArmA II.
You need to understand that ArmA is very CPU dependant, you should also be aware that while it supports multiple cores it's main logic and rendering thread is still inextricably linked to a single core and so clock speed is all. If you're buying hardware for ArmA a dual core will perform better than a quad of the same dollar value because of its higher clock speed. Consider over-clocking.
Early reports suggested it ran better on ATI and so that's what I got (HD4870 1GB) and I'm very happy with the performance I enjoy given what I paid. Keep your drivers up to date. Here are my settings (click to enlarge):
I'll deal with each setting out of order as it allows me to group them by significance. The first group cannot be set from within ArmA and need to be forced in your driver control panel.
Driver (Only) Settings
Vertical Sync: ArmA sets vsync on and the only way to change that is to force it off (either for ArmA2.exe in particular or for all games) via your driver control panel. If I'm short on performance in any game I always make sure VSync is off, it just makes the game feel more responsive. The downside is occasional tearing where the frame will momentarily have different top and bottom halves but I find it barely noticeable YMMV.
Prerendered Frames or Triple Buffering (other names may apply): This sets the number of frames ahead your GPU will try and render if it has spare time, not a bad thing for performance but often results in mouse lag, adjust as necessary to combat the latter. I believe the the upcoming patch will allow you to set this by editing your ArmA.cfg.
Irrelevant
Visual Quality: I'm pretty sure these are quick presets, don't touch or you'll undo the careful tweaking we're about to undertake.
Foregone Conclusions
Interface Resolution: Most of you will have LCD's and won't want to budge off native resolution. Anyone who does have a CRT and who is unhappy with performance might see some improvement by decreasing resolution, often it won't help because the bottleneck is not your GPU or fillrate.
Aspect Ratio: Again a product of your monitor.
Personal Preference
Brightness: No effect on performance, tweak to taste.
Gamma: No effect on performance, tweak to taste.
Interface Size: Scales the in-game dialogs and menus so you can also tweak to taste. That said, Mando Missile ArmA makes significant use of these dialogs amd is optimised for the Normal interface size, missions of mine will be using MMA and I'd recommend you stick with Normal.
Dynamic or Mission Specified Settings
View Distance: The single greatest mechanism for fine-tuning your performance once you decide what IQ you're prepared to live with. It only affects quality in an incidental fashion so if you're a graphics whore you'll want everything else high and rein in VD until you get an acceptable frame rate, if you're more into gameplay and competitive advantage you'll put up with some less spectacular visuals and keep your VD a bit higher. The island you're playing on will make a large difference to how you tweak this, Utes returns higher framerates than Chernarus and customs can be higher or lower again. In multiplayer this is more often than not dictated by the server to enforce a level playing field, I don't really see the sense in this, if people with inadequate hardware want to be competitive they should turn down the IQ. In my PvP mission you can set any VD or have the game auto-adjust it to keep you in a performance sweet spot.
Terrain Detail: Primarily how far out the clutter is rendered, everything said for View Distance applies here. Again often set by the server, my PvP mission presently sets it to maximum but does offer to turn it down a bit whenever you board a vehicle (on the assumption that those details are less noticeable when you're clipping a long at speed).
Notable Settings
Shadow Detail: Pick a setting you like but do some comparisons before using Normal as it is more dependent on your CPU. May not be a problem given ArmA doesn't max out all cores but it'd be a bad move if it ends up being calculated on the same core as the main rendering thread. On higher settings the work is done by your GPU.
Video Memory: Apparently everything other than Default is a legacy setting that pertains to an amount of memory LESS than 1GB. If you have a 1GB or greater card you'll definitely want this as Default, I think for all other cards this is also the safest option but you can check to see what it understands default to mean by opening your ArmA2.cfg (in your profiles folder I think) and see what's entered next to localVRAM, it should be more-or-less your graphics memory in bytes (mine is 1073741824).
Anti-Aliasing: I don't use it, even the lowest setting comes with a surprisingly high cost in ArmA, Reportedly this is especially so with ATI cards like mine, Nvidia users may find they get better mileage.
3D Resolution: This facilitates fullscreen anti-aliasing, your video driver will render everything to a higher (don't go lower) resolution in the frame buffer and then crunch it down as it is written to the display memory, this process smooths all the jaggies and the more over-rendered the better. How much headroom you can afford depends on your monitor's resolution but it's surprisingly economical (compared to Anti-Aliasing), I only notice a very small hit moving from 125% to 150% and virtually no difference between 100% and 125%. However if you've got a 24" monitor stick to 100% and pray you don't smoke your graphics card.
Post-Processing: Don't know why anybody would consider using anything above Low, higher just makes everything blurry. In choosing between Disabled and Low there's not a lot of performance cost to consider, it's more about whether you like a bit of extra HDR and the blurring effect as you run or turn (I do quite like but not in the quantities on offer).
All Other Settings
Texture Detail, Ansiotropic Filtering, Objects Detail: Pretty much what you see is what you get. Each has a cost but as you'll see from my settings I don't perceive any of the savings available as worth moving off Very High. Seek your own truth grasshopper.
I'll just quickly mention two Game Options
Aiming Deadzone: Is supposed to simulate the time it takes to align your front and rear sights but as implemented in ArmA I find it more akin to a gate banging around in the breeze, Trezza likes it but I don't. Incidentally this is one thing COD4 can model exquisitely if you play with the weapon configurations.
Head Bob: It's very Band Of Brothers for the first 10 minutes after which excessive Head Bob will make you want to hurl.
Performance Enhancements 
If you still haven't got enough frames I can recommend...
http://dev-heaven.net/wiki/proper-proje ... ak_Visuals : ...which removes the highest Level-Of-Detail from vegetation and knocks on that effect through every level. From time to time I will notice a visual cost but not as often as I notice how smoothly everything is running. There's another one for Buildings (http://dev-heaven.net/wiki/proper-proje ... ak_Visuals) which I haven't tried because at the time of release it introduced some ultra-low quality visuals for a handful of buildings but it may have been updated & improved since then, if you do try it please report back.
I also recommend...
http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.p ... ht=Landtex : ...no performance impact one way or the other but it's a very good visual free lunch for Chernarus.
And right now grab the patch betas...
http://www.arma2.com/beta-patch.php : ...probably about to become irrelevant within days when 1.05 is released but significant performance gains have been achieved and made available for public testing.
Operating System
Your particular flavour of Windows can have a significant impact (as much as 20% between best and worst cases), avoid Vista. 32/64 bit doesn't appear to make a whole lot of difference.
(Best) WinXP > Win7 > Vista (Worst)
Finally
A couple of problematic areas I have no first-hand experience of and on which I'd suggest you seek out additional information are SLI/CrossFire setups (I think look to the latest drivers available) and HyperThreading on i5/7 CPU's (disable HT).
The other major bottleneck for ArmA is hard drive performance, it's constantly streaming data and poor transfer rates can lead to micro-stuttering. If you've got a lot of RAM (8GB) you could move more frequently accessed files onto a RAMDisk (some say USB pen drive even) but for most of us de-fragging is the best tonic.
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