Arma II Windows XP Windows 7 performance

[Cassius]

Found an Forum entry where some guy said that Arma II runs best for him under Windows XP 32 bit. He had following ranking from best to worst.

1) XP 32bit
2) XP 64bit
3) Win7 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)
4) Vista 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)

What difference would be between Xp 32 and windows 7? Are we talking like 2-3 Frames or is it a bigger difference than that?

[Scout5555]

Originally Posted by Cassius

Found an Forum entry where some guy said that Arma II runs best for him under Windows XP 32 bit. He had following ranking from best to worst.

1) XP 32bit
2) XP 64bit
3) Win7 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)
4) Vista 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)

What difference would be between Xp 32 and windows 7? Are we talking like 2-3 Frames or is it a bigger difference than that?

Hard drive speed, hard drive speed, hard drive speed, hard drive speed, hard drive speed..............

IT does not matter what OS you are running. OFP/ArmA/ArmA2/OA/BAF constantly stream from your hard dirve.

Please shout it to everyone you know far and wide. Get the fastest hard drive, SSD you can or get tons of RAM to run it from a ram drive.


P.S. The BIS Devs are using Vista and or 7.

[Cassius]

Here is the complete thing.

Since I have bought ARMA 2 a few month ago, I was unhappy with the performance of the game. Besides ample hardware power (i7 @ 4Ghz, 12GB DDR-12800, GTX280 Hydro Copper, 2 Vertex 120GB SSD in RAID0, etc.) I was suffering rather low frame rates and - more annoying - stutter and texture LOD trashing.

I have done a crazy amount of testing to find a solution to these problems, and now have finally reached a stage where I am happy with the results, which I want to share.

All these tests were done on 1920x1200 resolution (both 3d and display), and with 3000m view distance and everything on very high, and post processing off.


1) Selecting the best OS

I have tried Win7 in 64bit/32bit, Vista in 64/32 bit, and XP in 64bit/32bit. In terms of performance, ARMA 2 works best with XP32 - here's the ranking (from good to bad):

1) XP 32bit
2) XP 64bit
3) Win7 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)
4) Vista 64bit and 32bit (no big difference)

ARMA 2 seems to make no use of the increased capabilities of an x64 bit OS - it is a pure 32bit application. Running a 32bit application in a 64bit Windows in theory should not cause significant performance hits (thanks to WOW64), but in case of ARMA2, it does actually cause issues. This is most true for what I call the "smoothness" of the game: In 32bit, there was less stutter (i.e. if you make a 360 degree turn, it was a smooth turn without hiccups).

In terms of framerates, XP beats all other Windows versions, and 32 bit comes out best.

Stutter was also least apparent with both XP versions, and best with the 32 bit version.

No difference was found in my testing in terms of texture/LOD trashing - in all cases, after some minutes of gameplay, textures would visibly pop when you move fast, which I found very annoying.

Which leads me to my second point.

2) RAM disk

I wanted to find out what the reason for the texture trashing is. Do narrow down the problem, I monitored memory and disk usage during gameplay.

To make a very long story short: the hard disk is a major culprit here, as there is ~8GB of data and textures that is getting streamed as you move around the game. Both the occasional "Hiccup" as well as texture popping happen when ARMA 2 starts to stream from disk.

To solve the problem, I created an 8.5 GB RAM disk with SuperSpeed RamDisk plus (there is a 14 days trial version. The reason I chose this software over others is that is can adress the memory space above 4GB on 32 bit systems, it supports auto save/load of the RamDisk so it is persistent, and supports large RamDisks).

I then moved the whole ARMA 2 folder (Steam Version) into the RamDisk (please note that you have to start ARMA 2 using the arma2.exe within the moved directory. Alternatively, you can create a symlink to the folder - pls google it).

The result was - for the first time - a smooth game experience. It is hard to describe, but without all the stutter and texture popping, the game reaches a new level in perceived visual quality. Everything is smooth, LOD's draw instantly, and the whole game play feels a lot more fluent. For the first time, I feel happy with the performance of ARMA 2.

Let me know if you have any questions, and pls try it out yourself and share some of your results if you want !

qwertz.

Apparently he used RAM drive on all operating systems, with a ramdrive software that is able to adress more memory than the operating system in Windows Xp it seems.

[MadTommy]

err.. he has 2 SSD and still needs to use a RAM disk??

LOL.. he could have saved himself a lot of effort and just dropped his settings down to High...

Unbelievable that he went through all that with 12 GB ram, i7 @ 4Ghz & gfx 280 card... what a loon.

[galzohar]

If you get stutters, upgrading CPU/GPU won't help, only ramdisk or waiting for BIS to actually let the game use more RAM in a more efficient manner.

[Sabre_tooth_tigger]

Patch v1.07 was debuted on 28 June, 2010. Changes of note include improved performance within larger cities, enhanced AI driving skills, a raise of the file cache size to 4 GB RAM or more to take advantage of 64-bit operating systems, and improving the game engine's use of processors with 4 or more cores.

Did this help

[galzohar]

Not really, the game still doesn't use all that much RAM for some reason, with BI devs insisting that the game does not need to use more RAM and ignore the constant complaints about the issue.

[Cassius]

I am guessimating the application cant use more ram, being a 32 bit application. But maybe they could incorporate some sort of ramdrive solution with a patch, which the player can configure.

[galzohar]

Like I said, them allowing it to use more RAM on 64-bit systems seemed to have made no real difference in lod-trashing-related stutter for a friend with win7 64 and 6GB of RAM (and an overclocked i7-965 extreme with GTX295). Still had to constantly reload textures in the known problematic areas such as Zargabad and Chernogorsk. So just covering it to 64-bit will probably not be enough, they'll have to actually make the game use the extra ram available as well, and in a way that is more efficient than a ramdisk.

[Scout5555]

Originally Posted by galzohar

Like I said, them allowing it to use more RAM on 64-bit systems seemed to have made no real difference in lod-trashing-related stutter for a friend with win7 64 and 6GB of RAM (and an overclocked i7-965 extreme with GTX295). Still had to constantly reload textures in the known problematic areas such as Zargabad and Chernogorsk. So just covering it to 64-bit will probably not be enough, they'll have to actually make the game use the extra ram available as well, and in a way that is more efficient than a ramdisk.

I think their next ArmA engine will be 64bit. They know what needs to be done. Plus BI will probably change VBS to 64bit soon for their military customers. As they are always clamoring for more performance/bigger things.

I have faith in them. They will get it done.

Right now us ArmA2/OA/BAF users just have to make do and tweak it as best we can.