Content
- General Guidelines
- General System Optimization
- Configure Settings
- Video Settings
- User Interface
- Quality Settings
- Texture Settings
- Rendering Settings
- DayZ.cfg
- Startup Parameters
- Memory Flush
- STEAM performance troubles and how mitigate them
- SweetFX
1. General Guidelines
- No-one can really tell you the best settings for you as it is up to your computers build and your personal preference, this is meant as a guide only to help you make decisions.
- MSI Afterburner (MSI AB) is a good tool to help you tune your settings when you enable the Memory Usage for the On-Screen Display (OSD). MSI AB can also show your FPS to help you discern if a particular setting is giving you a gain or a loss.
- After changing a setting and waiting a few seconds your FPS OSD will catch up so you can quickly see if you get a gain or loss.
- For recording footage I recommend any of these solutions: Fraps Alternative: Dxtory, Fraps Alternative: MSI Afterburner, Fraps KILLER: AVerMedia Live Gamer HD or Fraps KILLER: Nvidia ShadowPlay.
2. General System Optimization
- Disable CPU Parking, to help steady performance.
- Use ProcessLasso (or RadeonPro with AMD GPU) to set ArmA 3 to always run on High Priority, and help steady performance.
- Enabling the 3GB switch on 32-bit Windows may improve performance/stability.
- Using Razer GameBooster may improve your performance.
- Check out the free PC Maintainance, Security and Utility apps here to keep your PC running tip-top.
- The TweakGuides Tweaking Companion is all you will ever need to tweak and maintain Windows.
- Steam gives you the option to install DayZ to a different internal Hard Disk Drive, this helps to improve load times and stability.
- Update to the latest PhysX driver, not necessary but good habit. Current 21/09/2013.
- Update to the latest beta drivers for AMD or nVidia to get the best performance.
3. Configure Settings
Field of View: Set to whatever you find comfortable.
4. Video Settings
Overall Quality: Set or leave Custom.
Rendering Resolution: Set to 100% of your screens resolution.
Brightness: Up to your personal preference.
Gamma: Up to your personal preference.
VSync: Set to Disabled unless you are experiencing screen-tearing or somehow have a high spec 60+ FPS computer.
5. User Interface
Resolution: Max this, it is almost always better to run at native resolution.
Size: Up to your personal preference.
Aspect Ratio: Change this to match your monitor.
6. Quality Settings
Objects: Low seems to be the best trade-off between performance and quality, the higher the setting the less pop-in you will experience. *
Terrain: Very Low or Low seems to do the trick. *
Clouds: Set to Disabled, we aren’t flying yet.
Shadows: Normal is the minimum level for detailed shadows, else Disable it.
* These settings have the largest effect on your performance.
7. Textures Settings
Video Memory: Set to Auto as it will detect your GPU’s RAM.
Texture Detail: High or Very High doesn’t seem to impact performance.
Texture Filtering: High or Very High doesn’t seem to impact performance.
8. Rendering Settings
Antialiasing: Normal will be all you need @ 1080p, else Disable it. **
Alpha of Coverage: Set to All Trees or All Tress + Grass, else Disable it.
Edge Smoothing: Leave Disabled or set to SMAA High+ if you don’t use Antialiasing. ***
HDR Quality: Leave on Very Low.
Ambient Occlusion: Recommended Disabled for performance and gameplay.
Postprocessing Quality: Recommended Disabled for performance and gameplay.
Bloom: Purely cosmetic, set to whatever you’d like recommended Default.
Rotational Blur: motion blur, recommend off or Default.
** These settings have the largest effect on your performance.
*** if you disable AA and use just SMAA you should get a similar look but improved performance.
9. DayZ.cfg
Located in C:\Users\<username>\Documents\DayZ\
GPU_MaxFramesAhead=4; This may help smooth your frames and/or increase performance, try settings 1-4.
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0; This may help smooth your frames and/or increase performance.
refresh=120; This will make VSync work better if you need it.
You can also use the startup parameters to increase performance slightly by right-clicking DayZ in Steam > Properties > Set Launch Options and entering the following.
-cpuCount= set this to however many physical CPU’s you have, usually either 2, 4 or 6.****
-exThreads= Correct info coming soon, need to test. Ballpark settings are use 7 for high end quad core CPU, 3 or 5 for mid range quad core CPU and 1 or 3 for Dual Cores. Stay tuned for updated testing results. ****
-maxMem= set this to 2047 or about 1GB (1024) less than your maximum RAM, I am not sure if higher values have an effect as I’m pretty sure 2GB is the maximum.
-maxVram= this option will tell ArmA how much Video RAM your graphics card has, not really important for it to know however.
-noBenchmark mainly for the development build this option disables any benchmarking that ArmA automatically does.
-noLogs mainly for the development build this option disables any logging that ArmA automatically does.
-noPause Does not pause the ArmA window when alt-tabbed in Fullscreen window mode, good for multi-taskers and streamers.
-noSplash gets rid of the intro stuff at startup.
-world=empty Does not currently work, will bug out the game.
so for instance my startup parameters look like
-cpuCount=4 -exThreads=7 -maxMem=2047 -maxVram=3071 -noBenchmark -noLogs -noPause -noSplash
**** cpuCount and exThreads can help smooth the game by letting it know to spread the load properly.
11. Memory Flush
In DayZ you can actually flush or refresh the VRAM if you are experiencing graphical glitches or sometimes performance issues. To do this you hold down [shift] and [-], release then type in [flush].
12. STEAM performance troubles and how mitigate them
Dwarden wrote:
- STEAM friend-list (even while online, just closing friend-list saves most CPU usage)
- STEAM chats (the more of them active the worse the overall load)
- STEAM updating (as uses checksums it needs some CPU and I/O, so make sure nothing is updating)
- STEAM overlay
- STEAM IM (switch yourself to OFFLINE for lowest CPU usage)
- STEAM website (if you keep website open and minimize, it still keeps playing the flash animations for example, so ideally you visit e.g. your profile page as last)
+ then set STEAM to lower priority than arma3.exe
13. SweetFX
SweetFX wrote:
Basically you can use SweetFX to improve the colours of ArmA 3 making it more pleasant to look at, I recommend just using the LumaSharpen and Vibrance (or maybe up to 0.60) values that come already enabled.
Both AMD and nVidia users can use the SweetFX Configurator to more easily install and manage SweetFX, however AMD users can use RadeonPro instead to even more easily manage it (this however requires SweetFX 1.4 at the moment).
