Arma 3: Performance Optimisation

Arma 3 performance has always been a great interrogation topic. This page brings light on some aspects of the video settings.

General Guidelines

• use auto-detection as a base for other settings - the autodetect button knows best, most of the time
  • an exception to that being that auto-detection will set the render sampling to at least 100% - this is not ideal if one wants to play e.g in 1920x1080 on a 3840 x 2160 screen.
• in order to bring some relief to the CPU, play with (terrain/object) view distance
• to alleviate pressure on the GPU, lower PiP settings and reduce 3D Sampling (e.g 50% on a 3840 x 2160 screen = 1920×1080)
• to reduce stutter and greatly improve loading times, it is highly recommended to install Arma 3 on a Solid State Drive (SSD)

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• Do your tests on a Vanilla (no mods) Arma 3! Some ill-conceived mods can bring performance down.
• Do your tests in a single player environment. If your performances in multiplayer are worse than in single player, the server/connection/mission is at fault; nothing can be done on your side.

Video Options

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  General

• 

  Display

• 

  AA & PP

Settings Impacts

ⓘ

means a heavy impact on performance

means an average impact

means little to no performance impact.

General

Category	Setting	CPU	GPU	Additional Details
Quality	Sampling			Defines the game's 3D resolution based on Display's Resolution setting (in %) - e.g 50% of 3840×2160 results in a 3D resolution of 1920×1080 (1/4 of the original resolution)
	Texture			Defines textures' quality - dependent on the GPU's memory
	Objects			Defines object's details and LOD thresholds
	Terrain			Defines terrain's geometry details at medium long range (does not affect textures)
	Shadow			Defines shadow precision
	Particles			Defines quality and the amount of particles (smoke, fire, dust, etc) visible on screen.
	Cloud			Defines if Cloud Simulation should be used and at which level of detail
	PIP			Adds (doubles?) the strain on the CPU - another scene has to be calculated in order to do the render. Quality here means PIP drawing distance
Visibility	Overall			Terrain's view distance
	Object			Object's view distance - The CPU killer. Set to about 1/3 to 1/2 of terrain's view distance
	Shadow			Shadows' draw distance - range 50..200m
Lighting	HDR			Sets HDR quality, 8 or 16 bits
	Dynamic Lights			Sets the maximum number of dynamic lights (light sources that are not the sun or the moon) in the scene
	Water Reflections			Defines quality of water surface reflection

Display

Category	Setting	CPU	GPU	Additional Details
General	Display Mode			Full Screen can solve some issues, Full Screen Window can fix some others. Windowed is useful for debug purposes
	Resolution			Should be set to the screen's native resolution and use Sampling to lower the 3D resolution if needed
	Aspect Ratio			Set to auto or to the screen's aspect ratio. No impact on performance
	VSync			Vertical Synchronisation
	Interface Size			No impact on performance
	Brightness			No impact on performance
	Gamma			No impact on performance

AA & PP

Category	Setting	CPU	GPU	Additional Details
PostProcesses	Bloom
	Radial Blur			Adds "speed" blur to the border of the screen
	Rotation Blur			Adds screen blur on fast camera movement
	Depth of Field			Adds blur to non-focused background
	Sharpen Filter			Makes the image sharper, but can also make it more grainy or too outlined
	AO			(Screen Space) Ambient Occlusion. HBAO stands for Horizon-Based AO (Nvidia), whereas HDAO stands for High Definition AO (AMD).
	Caustics			Water surface reflection on the ocean floor
PostProcess Color Corrections	Color Preset
	Brightness			Post-process image brightness
	Contrast			Post-process image contrast
	Saturation			Colour saturation - the higher the more colours, the lower the more black & white
AntiAliasing	FSAA			Full Screen Anti-Aliasing
	AtoC			Alpha to Coverage. Requires FSAA
	PPAA			Post-Processing Anti-Aliasing. Less taxing than FSAA, with very minor graphical glitches
	Aniso. Filtering			Anisotropic filtering

See Also

• Mission Optimisation

External Links

• Yet Another Arma Benchmark