Horrible ground textures (demo)?

[bdo7]

Trying the demo. TrackIR is behaving oddly compared to other games (including Arma2, which is odd, because it should be the same code, yes?)... seems to lose its grasp of "centered" and also wants to jam my head up against the roof of the copter or up in the corner..

ANYWAY, I'm sure that can be worked out with profiles. My main question is about the graphics:

Muddy, blurry, abominable ground textures.

This is the DEMO, not the full game.

I have video options set to the "High" preset, then turned AA to maximum. I am getting about 28 FPS. :/

I am running two GTX 460 in SLI (I renamed the exe to "Arma2OA.exe" in order to get SLI, and SpeedFan confirms that both cards are working).

I guess my question is: is this as good as it gets? Arma 2 looks MUCH better, and runs at much higher frame rates. I think something must be wrong.

I tried to take screen shots, but I guess the PrintScreen key doesn't do this in TOH. Steam Overlay was not there either, I guess because I had to launch the .exe manually because I had renamed it. So no screen shots there either.

I'd love to get this game, been waiting for a sale, and the upcoming ability to "merge" with Arma2 CO sounds really cool. As it stands, though, I just can't bear to look at it.

Thanks for any help / advice. I appreciate your time, whoever has an answer!

EDIT TO ADD:

After some more tinkering using this excellent guide here:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthrea...Video-Settings!

... I found that no matter what I set my texture detail to, the ground would look nice for about 2 seconds after leaving the options menu, and then it would suddenly "degrade" into a blurry mess. This makes me think that it's actively swapping out my ground textures for distance LOD textures. The link above includes the words:

"our engine actively tries to detect a lack of resources, and scales back other aspects (such as picking which LOD to use), which can be often quite frustrating."

Indeed, my Bohemian friend, indeed.

So... I guess it's probably VRAM I'm running out of? Each card is 1GB, but you only get to use the RAM on one card in SLI, if I'm not mistaken.

ANYWAY, it looks a lot better after some tweaking, and there are so many options, I'm sure I can dial it down some more. This is a bona fide PC game, sure enough. Options aplenty.

So maybe I answered my own question... but if anyone has any advice, I'm still listening. In the meantime, I'm going to buy this game for three reasons:

1. I'll get it working better, thanks to the bazillion options they give us

2. I want to try the "rearmed" thing and combine it with ARMA II

3. It doesn't exactly go on sale very often

Okay, four reasons...

4. Anything I can do to support development of ARMA III... HOO-AH!

[acare84]

Demo only has "30 x 30 km section of our Seattle terrain". So if you are in other section terrain would be blurry and low detailed like the ARMA 2: OA lite DLCs. Full game doesn't have this problem.

http://takeonthegame.com/take-on-demo/

[Jedra]

I think you are maybe seeing the low res textures of the demo. Also, the ground textures are not as detailed as an Arma map (say Chernarus or Takistan) as the maps are huge - to put the same level of detail in would kill performance completely. They made this decision as you wiill primarily be in the air - especially on Seattle.

Things obviously get much better when you run re-armed as then you can use the Arma maps. However you will not get as good performance as you do with Arma especially if you are running the new Cloud system or PiP.

Also, 28 fps isn't so bad - especially if you are downtown Seattle with all those buildings. You should be seeing better performance in South Asia though.

After a while, you don't notice as the challenge is about the flying.

[bdo7]

Thank you for the replies. I don't know where I was, I just clicked on "free flight." I didn't see any downtown-type buildings anywhere, though. I may have been outside the demo area... I didn't realize that was even possible, so thanks for shedding light on that.

I bought it - it's B.I., I know it's money well spent.

[lionsunleashed]

Originally Posted by acare84

Demo only has "30 x 30 km section of our Seattle terrain". So if you are in other section terrain would be blurry and low detailed like the ARMA 2: OA lite DLCs. Full game doesn't have this problem.

http://takeonthegame.com/take-on-demo/

The full game has the same problem mention as i have it and agree arma 2 looks better...see my post with pics. lol I really hope Arma 3 is not heading the same route with some of these low quality textures it would just kill me to see that happen. Dont get me wrong i hope this would be fixed as mention but to dev i dont think it matters much to them because there would be some excuse why there is nothing wrong. Granted some parts of the game look really good its just here and there like it stop drawing the area on ground your helo is at. Im not trying to blow some steam but coming from a background of flying ala FSX and seeing low blurry textures it kinda hits a sore spot with me.

[lionsunleashed]

I hope a patch comes soon because i have all of arma stuff and Take On Helicopter. I dont know the Sixupdater seems not not find the file for using it in Arma yet. Hope this comes soon to play both and not haved to load one or the other game to play. Terrain thou some look nice some dont its the lod files maybe to save fps hope to see some higher quality terrain and a DX11 feature added to game.
Processor Information:
Vendor: AuthenticAMD
Speed: 3411 Mhz
4 logical processors
4 physical processors
HyperThreading: Unsupported

Video Card:
Driver: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570

DirectX Driver Name: nvd3dum.dll
Driver Version: 8.17.13.124
DirectX Driver Version: 8.17.13.124
Driver Date: 3 Apr 2012
Desktop Color Depth: 32 bits per pixel
Monitor Refresh Rate: 60 Hz
DirectX Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
VendorID: 0x10de
DeviceID: 0x1081
Number of Monitors: 1
Number of Logical Video Cards: 1
No SLI or Crossfire Detected
Primary Display Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Primary Display Size: 26.65" x 15.00" (30.55" diag)
67.7cm x 38.1cm (77.6cm diag)
Primary Bus: PCI Express 16x
Primary VRAM: 1279 MB
Supported MSAA Modes: 2x 4x 8x

6 gigs of Corsair memory
1tb hdd and 500 gb hdd




Video Settings
http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...D545D21FDBF25/

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...9306A549AA599/

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...94D1990B84D4D/
This one looks good but when you look so many feet away from helo the terrain loses quality.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...BE27834B6A656/



And this picture looks pretty good so why things dont look consistant through out the game.

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/55...7C5C552024EFA/

[Dwarden]

lot of people seems to not understand the problem of size, just doubling the resolution of terrain textures etc. would mean double the size of game
so from 17GB You would jump to approx 34GB

ofcourse demo has way lower quality textures than full game

[lionsunleashed]

Size doesnt bother me as my internet can handle it look at Rage now that was a big download in size. So smaller the size = less the quality. ok if that's what you say it doesnt set well thou for some but i do understand what your saying it just sucks to have a computer that we build to have these nice things and i guess where the minorty. Coming from FSX all together the size of file was big and after that adding all the texture packs Orbx etc those all add up even more in size. I believe my FSX had over 100 gb in files.

[lionsunleashed]

And Dwarden the game is good i just think it could be better that's all give us the option to have higher hd map textures that's all. I stll like the game i just see things i wish i could change or have. I love to fly and take in the area and surroundings im in its more for the immersion and the picks i listed kinda ruins it for me. Maybe it's just me as some seem to overlook it and not bother them but for me im probally more picky or love my eye candy. I will go away peacefully and be quiet now. Another thing i did notice when you go to building that has stairs you come across ladders that cant be climbed as in Arma 2 you could.

[neema_t]

So, are the terrain textures supposed to look like this?
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...B3F6A0606338C/

[A.fudge]

Originally Posted by neema_t

So, are the terrain textures supposed to look like this?
http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/...B3F6A0606338C/

That looks about right to me, for the lower settings. Nice resolution though, is that 3 monitors?

[neema_t]

Originally Posted by A.fudge

That looks about right to me, for the lower settings. Nice resolution though, is that 3 monitors?

Ah yes, but this is with the following settings:

Video memory: Very high
Texture detail: Very high
Object detail: Very high
VSync Disabled
HDR: Normal
PIP: Disabled
AA: Normal
Terrain detail: High
Shadow detail: High
AF: Very high
Postprocess: Disabled
Cloud detail: Normal.

I've shown a few other people and they seem to think it's normal too and Seattle looks pretty good, so whatever. I thought there might've been a problem to do with me having the demo installed but as long as it's normal then it's fine. Thanks for your reply!

Edit: Oh yeah, I've got three 1680x1050 monitors (Samsung 226BWs), run from one GTX 680. With a draw distance of 5km and the above settings (which is more or less what I have Arma II set at) I get anywhere from 20 to 90 fps!

[A.fudge]

Originally Posted by neema_t

I've got three 1680x1050 monitors (Samsung 226BWs), run from one GTX 680. With a draw distance of 5km and the above settings (which is more or less what I have Arma II set at) I get anywhere from 20 to 90 fps!

OOO that's nice. I was tempted by one of those 27" 2560 X 1440 monitors, but wasn't sure my GTX 480 would run it. Maybe that's the excuse I need to get a 680

Anyway, as someone said earlier in the thread the demo is restricted in graphics content in most areas. There's a fairly large area in Seattle that has the higher res textures though.

If it goes on sale again I'd recommend it if you either like Helicopters, or want a sneak peak at what flying in Arma 3 will be like. Of course you can still get it if it doesn't go on sale as well.

Hopefully you enjoy the demo as much as I did when it was first released.

[acare84]

This game needs more CPU power not GPU power. So there isn't huge difference between GTX 480 and GTX 680.

[Bee.]

Yeah the graphs are horrible in the demo