ARMA II Thread

[Fincuan]

I agree with Dowly. Especially the performance was, after I found out how to get my second X1950Pro to perform properly, a pleasant surprise. I was hosting the MP campaign, the mission was set at night and I was frapsing here and there, and it was still playable at my end with settings at normal/low. NVGs look really really good, and the word is much more live than that of A1. Lot's of trees and bushes, grass all over the place, goats and sheep... Arma1 would easily bring my PC to its knees with that kind of detail, so the engine has definitely been optimized.

[Arclight]

Not bad for something claimed by many to be unplayable.

World rife with detail; dense vegetation, animals, squeaky gates and interesting architecture. Various visual (motion blur, camera bob while moving, etc) and excellent sound effects really tie it all together to form a nice atmosphere.

The campaign indeed looks very promising, a far cry from the 'old' Arma, with a few cut-scenes here and there to easy you into the action and 'dynamic' mission flow. Don't be surprised when a perfectly good plan needs to be revised due to unexpected circumstances.

Any bugs encountered were minor, and considering the first patch is already up I'm sure this will shape up to be a worthy succesor.

Now if only I can get my PC to play nice; as usual when trying anything new I had to fight it all the way.

[Arclight]

Ah, the campaign just took off.

After 2 or 3 missions, you wind up in a forward base and are given a general objective. How you accomplish this is up to you. A chopper is assigned to your command and can be called in for extraction at any time, and you can use it to fly you anywhere. A UAV is also at your disposal. During your free-roaming exploits, you can be called on to complete secondary taks by HQ (haven't gotten any yet). Completing these can earn you additional support, such as the ability to call in artillery and tactical airstrikes, a valuable asset in any battle.

For more detail I'll need to tell on some specifics, so consider this a spoiler alert: you need to find a couple of guys. All you have to go on is the name of a town and some intel provided by an officer. That officer is in a base about a mile east, so me and the team hopped into a humvee and drove down there. After asking around a bit, I decided to call in the huey and have him drop us of a bit south-west of the town you heard one of your targets talk about. After asking around a bit, one of the civis told me a couple of 'Chedaki' cars came through there from the south, and headed for Malek's farm. Aparently this Malek has been consorting with the Chedaki's for a while, and I doubt he would be missed if we paid a visit to his farm to find out what is going on down there.

Spotted 1 or 2 soldiers patrolling the area, but have hold off on engaging them untill we can get a better picture. Now would be a good time to call in that UAV, but that would mean extracting back to base in order to man the console.



From awfully linear Arma to sandbox Arma II, quite the improvement. (though it takes a hell of a lot of CPU power)

Oh, and no crashes anymore. :rotfl:

[Dowly]

Ah, ArmA 2 is one of these games where lowering your GFX settings might actually make things worse. My PC gives the default settings as 1600m visibility, full resolution and everything on normal. That runs fine, but if I lower visibility to 800m and put everything on low (still full resolution) the game actually runs pretty darn much slower than on the default settings.

Oh well, I dont mind, just though to let you know.

PS. Ow, this test was made with the -winxp thing on the shortcut.

EDIT: Ow and the fillrate optimisation controls the AA as said on the SSC thread. But beware, it eats your PC power ALOT. Drop on FPS from 80%->150% (where the game started to look like it had some AA) was around 30fps.

[Arclight]

Good tip on the optimizer, was wondering about that.

What does that -winxp switch do anyway? Force DX9? Did improve performance a bit; didn't increase max FPS much, but improved min FPS considerably. Went from 14-20 to 20-22 in a pretty heavy scene. A lot more stable.

[Dowly]

Fincuan might be the better one to answer your Q regarding the -winxp parameter.

[Fincuan]

I have no idea what the -winxp parameter does. Compatibility mode maybe? All I know is it seems to help a lot of people running any kind of Ati Crossfire combination. For me it moved A2 from "runs like crap" to "runs really well", a huge difference. It also seemed to give a slight performance boost in Arma1, which is strange because A1 ran much worse on WinXP than on Win7 without the -winxp switch.

[Arclight]

The mystery remains.



Read some post explaining what the optimizer does: it scales the internal resolution. Say you're running 1280*960 res and 50% optimizer, then the game is rendered internally at 640*480 and blown up to fit display res, making it very blurry (think of zooming in on a photo). At 100%, things are normal, producing a very crisp picture, though you'll notice some jagged edges offcourse. At 150%... well you get the idea, less jagies.

Technically then, the game uses super-sampling AA (SSAA), a first as far as I know. Every other game uses multi-sampling (MSAA) because SSAA is too costly... Why they chose to do it like this is really beyond me, to be honest.

I'm really happy with the graphics now that I'm running the optimizer at 100%, at least I can see something now, that blur was just too much at 88%.

[Dowly]

Ow... I knew the fps hit was biggish on the campaign, but come oon! When the 'dynamic' campaign started, kaboom, my fps took a crash dive.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by Arclight

The mystery remains.



Read some post explaining what the optimizer does: it scales the internal resolution. Say you're running 1280*960 res and 50% optimizer, then the game is rendered internally at 640*480 and blown up to fit display res, making it very blurry (think of zooming in on a photo). At 100%, things are normal, producing a very crisp picture, though you'll notice some jagged edges offcourse. At 150%... well you get the idea, less jagies.

Technically then, the game uses super-sampling AA (SSAA), a first as far as I know. Every other game uses multi-sampling (MSAA) because SSAA is too costly... Why they chose to do it like this is really beyond me, to be honest.

I'm really happy with the graphics now that I'm running the optimizer at 100%, at least I can see something now, that blur was just too much at 88%.

Ah that explains it then. Was wondering it'd be something like that when I tried to set it to minimum. The game looked like playing it at low res without AA. Thanks for clarifying it! Tho, I must say, the decision to make it like this is pretty farking stupid.

[Dowly]

Ow, Chris. You bought ArmA 2 already? Just asking as metabolic farked something up and I kinda have 2 ArmA 2's atm.

See, it went like this:

I bought it the first time, downloaded and all, but didnt install it until just before we tried it. During the day, I got an email from paypal that metabolic had refunded the game and I checked and I had 50€ on my paypal account, so they really had refunded it.

So, I went on to install the game, typed the CD key wrong at first, so I though they had disabled the CD key when they refunded the game. So, I bought the game again (this time it was 40€ instead of 50€). To my amazement, I didnt get a new CD key! Ok, so I went and tried the old CD key again, this time, typing it right and it worked.

Yesterday, I got another email from metabolic WITH a new CD key. So, I'm fairly sure I have two ArmA 2 CD keys just for 40€, because my old arma still seems to work just fine.

EDIT: Ow and the ArmA 1 faces work on ArmA 2, just copy the face.jpg from the Arma other profiles folder thingy to the ArmA 2 other profiles thingy.

[Oberon]

Nicely done Dowly

[Arclight]

Originally Posted by Dowly

Ah that explains it then. Was wondering it'd be something like that when I tried to set it to minimum. The game looked like playing it at low res without AA. Thanks for clarifying it! Tho, I must say, the decision to make it like this is pretty farking stupid.

I think it has something to do with the fact most people use LCD monitors these days; those things only look good at their native resolution, so they included the optimizer to scale the res internally. That way people with cheaper models don't get the black bands, and maybe it looks better than the monitor scaling it.

Still, I tried it at 200% (2*2 SSAA, essentially), and I think 4* MSAA would look much better (not to mention being much less costly). It might be a valid solution for LCDs, but as far as anti-aliasing goes, it remains questionable. If you have a good CRT, it makes more sense to just change the resolution and get the same effect, but with no performance penalty or blur (below 100%) because the game needs to scale it internally.

Another thing is that from the G92 8800s (8800GT/8800GTS 512) onwards, the cards were getting more and more optimized to handle MSAA, resulting in less of a performance hit.

And yeah, you're gonna need a quad-core to play the campaign properly. For me it hovers around 20-24 FPS, sometimes lower. If it indeed is the CPU that's holding it back, still need to properly confirm that, but all the signs are there.

[Raptor1]

Haha, LCD!

CRT is obviously the superior technology *pets 8-year old CRT*

[Arclight]

Aye, should be getting a 'new' second-hand Liyama next week (showroom model, never used). 1600*1200 @75hz, a lot better than the pos I have now... which IMHO is still better than any LCD.