Arma2 Graphics Settings Effects

I did a tutorial on Youtube that I showed how to setup your graphics settings, and which ones are important. I am going kick this blog off as a supplement to the video tutorials I make for some static graphics to make it easy to see differences, etc.

Please see end of blog post for a critical part that might help you with graphics / FPS problems on lower end equipment.

For my tutorial and this blog, I have a high end system, so everything about what I said could be a bigger hit on your FPS than myself depending on your hardware.

My System:
Processor – Intel Core i7-3770S 3.10ghz
Ram – 16 gb
OS – Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Video Card – NVidia GeForce GTX 670 Factory Superclocked 4gb

Now a link to the video:

Below you will see the differences between two settings and what kind of framerate hit we are talking about for each of them. I am not going to do them all, but the ones I think matter the most.

Please note that some people have said vsync has a hit on older equipment, but I show on my rig that it doesn’t seem to matter either way I set it. So try it disabled and enabled to try the FPS hit of each setting. In fact I would say try all the settings this way, you should load up the single player editor in Chernarus and put yourself in various places in the map and try different settings as you will get a worse FPS out looking across a mountain with a ton of trees than you will looking at the city.

Distance:
You can see below that with Distance it’s the single worst hit by far on your FPS. The longer the visible distance, the worse your framerate. I go from 73 FPS down to 35 going out to 10,000 distance!!! If you don’t have your distance long enough though, the snipers will get you and you won’t see them coming so try to find a happy medium for your hardware.

Object Detail:

You will see below this is the second setting that has a big hit on my framerate. With the detail set to low, I have a 27 FPS and with it set to very high I have 20 FPS. If I am taking that much of a hit, then lower end hardware is probably taking a massive hit for this.

The rest of the settings didn’t really make much of a difference on my FPS. But I will say that Anti-aliasing probably has a big difference on older hardware, and the ATOC / PPAA settings I talk about in the video are a must on older hardware. Be aware that ATOC and PPAA is just a visiable change to how the Antialiasing works. So if you have Antialiasing disabled, then the other two settings won’t matter.

If you are still at the lowest settings having some issues, you can add “-winxp” to the launch parameters of your game. In steam right click Arma2: Operation Arrowhead and click on Properties. Click on “SET LAUNCH OPTIONS…” and in there you would put this. This will switch the game to using DirectX 9 instead of DirectX 10. This alone gave me 5 FPS pretty much across the board but the game didn’t look as good.. It would seem the lighting model between the two is slightly different. I think I might keep it at winxp to get the additional FPS. 🙂

Hope this post was a useful addition to the video.