Arma 2 seems to me to be the only PC Game at the moment that really pushes a PC’s gaming performance to the max.The game is amazing when its in full detail but is a total nightmare to get any kind of decent performance from. I still have yet to finish the game as i just cant play it on the normal settings as it looks terrable however cranking up the detail slows the framerate down and your left chasing the Frame Rate Vs Visual Quality.

Its not been since Crysis or maybe Flight Sim 10 that its been hard to get a game running right and look its best. In Arma 2’s case it seems that im not alone in getting bad performance from the game. I was reading many posts on the Bohemia Arma 2 forums about Arma 2 and most people have the same issues i have.

The game seems to have huge problems loading textures and other stuff on the screen when you play, which leaves you looking a trees suddenly apearing and grass just loading before your eyes which totaly ruins any emersion or reailty when your playing the game. There is general theory that Arma 2 is just not optimised properly for the PC which seems to be true from what ive read.

I read a post on the BIS forums from somebody who had a brand new ATI 5870 (Best GFX Card you can buy at the moment) and the game was still running poorly.

Which is just shocking, however there seems to be a theory going round the Arma2 forums that the game is having problems loading data from the hard disk and thus the “poping” or “slowdown” occuring.

My own PC Specs:
AMD Phenom 9850 BE quadcore
4 gig DDR 2 Ram
ATI Radeon 4870 512mb
Windows Vista 64 bit

Here’s how I got ARMA2 to perform smoothly (high fps, no stutter, no LOD trashing)
A thread discussing possable solutions to improve Arma 2’s performance.

ArmA 2 I/O analysis results
How Arma 2 manages loading and saving Data to the hard drive.