This is a bit of a mea culpa from me.
In 2022 I started the build of my dream PC. i9 13900k, 2 TB M.2 drive, 32 GB of 5200 DDR5 ram.
…and a 6600XT.
Now at the time it was all I could afford. I just wanted something that would run most games decently. nothing earth shattering but could do the heavy lifting i needed it to. I planned to upgrade later down the road.
For most games it was (and still is) perfectly fine. It ran most of my 100+ game library with no complaints from me.
But there was one game. Arma 3.
Now anyone who knows Arma 3 will readily admit it is a horribly optimized mess. This games drinks ram and chews up GPU’s like they’re candy.
And my 6600XT was crushed underneath it’s massive weight.
Now the problem for me is at the time I was fanatical about the game. It was pretty much the only game I played constantly. I still play it to this day, just not as much.
I would get stutters, massive frame drops and tons of crashes all centered around not enough GPU ram. (the 6600Xt only has 8) I HATED this card and would loudly complain on every forum every time someone would mention it. I sneered at AMD and desperately wanted to go Nvidia.
problem was i still couldn’t afford to upgrade.
But I finally had it last month and so I saved up and bought…
An Intel ARC A770.
But it worked. frame rates went up, crashes pretty much disappeared and and all was good in the world.
At this point I know you (probably) are screaming "Well what the fuck does this has to do with BIOS!?
well let me explain. You see I also wanted a much better m.2 drive so I bought a WD Black SN850X.
but while I was installing the NVME drive I noticed that my PCIe slot was set to gen3 X8. Not gen4 X16.
This solved everything. I went back to my 6600XT as I was having driver issues with the ARC card. and now when I play Arma 3 it runs much smoother. It still crashes because honestly the game needs a minimum of 16 GB of memory on a video card to run (sort of) fairly smoothly, but frames went up, stutters pretty much disappeared and the 1% lows were much more less noticeable.
All because I missed a BIOS setting.
So WHY? why is BIOS still so troublesome? why can’t it detect cards and automatically set the proper settings by itself?
WHY!?
Anyways, that’s all I have to say about that.
My brother in Christ
open the fucking game launcher and configure it
The defaults arma runs with are ridiculously bad. You need to tell it how much memory your graphics card has. You need to tell it how many cores your CPU has . You need to tell it that you have more than two cores and actually use your other cores for operations .How much memory your RAM has? Which memory allocator to use Intel is the best mostly.
All of that is set under the parameters header and the launcher specifically the all parameters tab. There are multiple videos on how to configure it .
Sincerely, somebody who’s been playing Arma 3 for over 10 years and who originally started playing on an I-5 laptop with 16 gigs of RAM and a 1050 mobile GPU and has been able to achieve a solid 30 FPS while flying helicopters for 10 years. Just FYI, the 1050 mobile has under 2 GB of vram
I’ve done all that. Don’t speak the deep magic to me. I was there when it was written.
(In other words I’ve been with the franchise since flashpoint!) 🤣
And that’s good for you. But every computer handles every program differently. for example when I had a starter i3 12100 with 16GB of ram but the exact same m.2 drive and GPU I could NOT get a joystick to work.
But when I switched to the new i9 I could get the joystick to work. Every system has it’s own unique bugs and features.