Armed Assault - bizarre performance issues

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

[TW]Fox

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,190
Hi guys,

I hope someone can help with my bizarre performance issues ruining Armed Assault for me :(

Basically, some of the time, the game runs fine. Nice and smooth. Then, all of a sudden, everything goes wrong. FPS dives to less than 10, everything stutters, even voices on Teamspeak stutter and the Menu's are jerky.

If I change the screen resolution, the problem is fixed for another 3-7 minutes. Note, it fixes it irrespective of what resolution I change it to. So, If I am playing at 1024x768 and I change it to 1280x1024, it will fix the problem and go from 10fps to 40fps for another 5 minutes or so before I need to change resolution AGAIN. It's VERY strange.

It started happening last week - until then the game had run flawlessly.

So far I have:

Formatted and completely renistalled Windows - so ArmA is now running on a fresh windows installation
Replaced my SB Audigy with the Gigabyte DS3 onboard sound
Tried the latest versions of all applicable drivers
Tried all available ArmA patches
Reinstalled ArmA many times including onto different hard disk drives

Nothing really helps. I am very stuck and a bit miffed - I upgraded to play this game as the makers intended.

Spec:

BGF GeForce 8800GTS OC 320Mb
Intel Core2Duo E4300 @ 2.7Ghz (Tried at stock, makes no odds)
2Gb OCZ PC6400 DDR2
Gigabyte DS3
Windows XP Pro SP2

Please help :(
 
Is it patched?? Have you tried adjusting the visibility distance, Custom PC said that was the main slider to change for performance!
 
Yes, it's patched. Yes, I've adjusted viewdistance. I can stand in the same place for 5 minutes at 50fps then suddenly, it will drop to 4fps. INCREASING the screen res then restores my 40-50fps level for another few minutes..
 
Not familiar with the game, but what texture setting are you using?

Noticed you only have a 320meg card and depending on how the game handles texture loading/caching it might cause problems if set to high/max. When you change resolution it could be flushing this cache and hence fixing the problem.

Then again if the game was running flawlessly beforehand, that raises a few questions. Are you playing the same levels as you used to when there was no problem? Have you tried running with default settings rather than a custom CFG or whatever?

edit: as an aside I have the exact same video card as you. Sometimes I experience a HUGE slowdown for no apparent reason, usually followed by the display freezing for maybe 30s and then an nvidia display driver error of some description appearing. I reckon it could be down to gpu overheating (leading to throttling) as it seems to happen more often if the card is overclocked. But it sounds like your issue is something different.
 
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[TW]Fox said:
Yes, it's patched. Yes, I've adjusted viewdistance. I can stand in the same place for 5 minutes at 50fps then suddenly, it will drop to 4fps. INCREASING the screen res then restores my 40-50fps level for another few minutes..
Click to expand...


Have you tried the new/ish BETA patch?..it can be installed and run without interfering with the install, as it runs as a mod using a batch file the run it.

I have been running for a week or so and all is fine.

Seems 8800 owners have a few issues with this game, but mostly related the the LOD going to pot after playing for a while, similarly fixed by tabing out or changing some setting-so it may be a related issue.

I had a similar issue with FSX which I fixed with differant (not always the newest) sound drivers.
 
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Try installing this Video Memory Watcher:

http://www.nonatainment.de/web/Default.aspx?tabid=62

Leave it running, and start up ARMA. Stand in one spot until the performance drops, then change resolution, and then go and check the Mem watcher.

If the vram crept up to 320Mb+, and then reset when you changed res, it's probably a problem with the game engine leaking memory.

I played the demo at 1920x1200, max details (10,000 view distance) and it used all my card's 768Mb ram, plus 100Mb of system ram.
 
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