Performance Optimisation – Arma 3

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 1K on a 4K 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 4K 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.

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means a heavy impact on performance

means an average impact

means little to no performance impact.

Category	Setting	Additional Details
Quality	Sampling	Defines the game's 3D resolution based on Display's Resolution setting (in %) - e.g 50% of 3840×2160 (4K) results in a 3D resolution of 1920×1080 (1K, 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

Category	Setting	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

Category	Setting	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