Why is Arma II so demanding?

I hear a lot that Arma 2 is a pretty demanding game hardware-wise. I was curious what exactly makes it so? Also, what's the typical playable frame-rate for it?

I hear that the game is CPU hungry, but I can run the game on high on my E6600. My guess is that the scale is so big and that you can make some big firefights in the editor that the game won't be so nice to your rig.

Because it looks good and its big.

It uses an engine from 1999 and attempts at doing open-world AI that can read and react to different situations. It fails most of the time though.

Its demanding but it runs well for me, expecailly since the latest two patches.

30-35 FPS I average which is fine for me.

Its a HUGE game with alot goign on at once.

Its more CPU dependent then GPU though, which is probably why it runs well for me now.

It uses an engine from 1999 and attempts at doing open-world AI that can read and react to different situations. It fails most of the time though.

Wasdie

Because it has very good graphics and textures and the size of the enviroments is even more wide than oblivion.dakan45

[QUOTE="Wasdie"]

It uses an engine from 1999 and attempts at doing open-world AI that can read and react to different situations. It fails most of the time though.

Mystic-G

Other way around.

Older engines don't utilize ANY sort of newer hardware that today's engines do. Sure the developer may tack on some threading here and there but overall the whole engine doesn't utilize any of the modern hardware for doing parallel processing that greatly increases efficency.

The power of todays CPUs doesn't just come from a single core just pumping out trillians of calculations per second, it comes from the way the chips break down the code and run it in order. Ordering of a programs run-time, breaking it up into chunks to be run parallel, smart use of the cache and of memory to reduce memory calls, and so many other methods of optimization just weren't in the single core processors of the day.

OFP ran like crap back in 1999 for the most part. A lot has changed. BI put even more demanding features into the game that require even more calculations per second. Since the whole game engine wasn't built with these newer methods of processing in mind, they would have to bascially rewrite the entire engine to really optimize the game.

That is something they just don't have the money for. ArmA 2 will be the last military sim we ever see. There is no money in it and the programming is MUCH more complicated and complex than nearly every game on the market. Unless EA or Activision decide to fund BI in making a new one, it will never happen. The best chance we have is that the US or some other military contracts out BI to develop a new VBS with a brand new engine. If they can pull a government contract and build an engine for the combat sim, they can they strip the classified stuff out of it and release it to the public like they did with ArmA 1.

[QUOTE="dakan45"]Because it has very good graphics and textures and the size of the enviroments is even more wide than oblivion.Mystic-G

[QUOTE="Mystic-G"][QUOTE="Wasdie"]

It uses an engine from 1999 and attempts at doing open-world AI that can read and react to different situations. It fails most of the time though.

Wasdie

Other way around.

Older engines don't utilize ANY sort of newer hardware that today's engines do. Sure the developer may tack on some threading here and there but overall the whole engine doesn't utilize any of the modern hardware for doing parallel processing that greatly increases efficency.

The power of todays CPUs doesn't just come from a single core just pumping out trillians of calculations per second, it comes from the way the chips break down the code and run it in order. Ordering of a programs run-time, breaking it up into chunks to be run parallel, smart use of the cache and of memory to reduce memory calls, and so many other methods of optimization just weren't in the single core processors of the day.

OFP ran like crap back in 1999 for the most part. A lot has changed. BI put even more demanding features into the game that require even more calculations per second. Since the whole game engine wasn't built with these newer methods of processing in mind, they would have to bascially rewrite the entire engine to really optimize the game.

That is something they just don't have the money for. ArmA 2 will be the last military sim we ever see. There is no money in it and the programming is MUCH more complicated and complex than nearly every game on the market. Unless EA or Activision decide to fund BI in making a new one, it will never happen. The best chance we have is that the US or some other military contracts out BI to develop a new VBS with a brand new engine. If they can pull a government contract and build an engine for the combat sim, they can they strip the classified stuff out of it and release it to the public like they did with ArmA 1.

[QUOTE="Wasdie"]

[QUOTE="Mystic-G"] See that's the part I don't understand. How is the engine so demanding if it's so mature? If anything should it not be super efficient by now? I have a C2D E8400... how well do you guys think that fairs with this game?Mystic-G

Other way around.

Older engines don't utilize ANY sort of newer hardware that today's engines do. Sure the developer may tack on some threading here and there but overall the whole engine doesn't utilize any of the modern hardware for doing parallel processing that greatly increases efficency.

The power of todays CPUs doesn't just come from a single core just pumping out trillians of calculations per second, it comes from the way the chips break down the code and run it in order. Ordering of a programs run-time, breaking it up into chunks to be run parallel, smart use of the cache and of memory to reduce memory calls, and so many other methods of optimization just weren't in the single core processors of the day.

OFP ran like crap back in 1999 for the most part. A lot has changed. BI put even more demanding features into the game that require even more calculations per second. Since the whole game engine wasn't built with these newer methods of processing in mind, they would have to bascially rewrite the entire engine to really optimize the game.

That is something they just don't have the money for. ArmA 2 will be the last military sim we ever see. There is no money in it and the programming is MUCH more complicated and complex than nearly every game on the market. Unless EA or Activision decide to fund BI in making a new one, it will never happen. The best chance we have is that the US or some other military contracts out BI to develop a new VBS with a brand new engine. If they can pull a government contract and build an engine for the combat sim, they can they strip the classified stuff out of it and release it to the public like they did with ArmA 1.

As respectfully as people, it's also not true. The engine is one of the few gaming engines out there that actually makes use of multiple cores efficiently - examples of ones that DON'T are Crysis' Crytek 2.0, and STALKER's X-Ray engine. ArmA2's engine actually will show massive gains for adding multiple cores, as the engine's pretty much designed around it. If you're talking about engines based on 1999, something like COD4 or MW2 is a more apt parallel - COD4 could still directly trace its lineage to the Q3 engine from 1999. IIRC it also couldn't do dynamic lighting and things like that, but since the rest of the engine was so mature it was pretty easy to make it run well and hide deficiencies in the tech.Makari

I'm not to sure where you get your facts, but ArmA 2 has been slowly patched to include more threaded programming, the engine is HORRIBLE optimized. It's an old engine, it would take time and money that BI does not have.

The reason why it seems like it runs better on a multi-core processor is because todays chips can actually break apart programming themselves to run in parallel. Every patch for ArmA 2 has been slowly adding threading to various things, most recently was the geometries of the terrain, which finally gave a decent FPS boost to all players.

The engine was built around single core processes and has had threaded programming slapped upon it.

I hear a lot that Arma 2 is a pretty demanding game hardware-wise. I was curious what exactly makes it so? Also, what's the typical playable frame-rate for it?

Mystic-G

10KM view distance can rape the PC. You can always turn this down though. Overall besides the view distance I was not impressed by the graphics of ARMA II but I can see why combining Crysis like visuals with their huge view distance might be a bad idea.

It doesn't support multi gpu setups...JigglyWiggly_