Battlefield Rants: 2016

After spending hours researching how to get the best FPS out of my ARMA 3 multiplayer experience it seemed best to put my notes together for safekeeping.

STEP ONE: OPTIMIZE YOUR VIDEO CARD SETTINGS
1. Right click your desktop and select NVIDIA Control Panel
2. At the top left under 3D SETTINGS choose Manage 3D Settings
3. On the right select the tab that says PROGRAM SETTINGS
4. Under select a program to customize, select Arma3 (or any other program you wish to optimize).
Note: If you don't see the game, click Add and then navigate to where the .exe file is stored.
5. Use the settings as seen in the pic below.

Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1
Multi-display/mixed-GPU acceleration: Single display performance mode
Power management mode: Prefer maximum performance
Threaded optimization: On

6. Close the NVIDIA Control Panel

STEP TWO: INSTALL MSI AFTERBURNER (here)

1. If your card runs hot go to the fan tab and enable user defined fan settings.

2. Drag and move the points on the fan curve to meet your needs.

3. This program has many more features, such as on screen monitoring and overclocking, which we will not discuss here.

STEP THREE: MAXIMIZE YOUR PROCESSOR'S POTENTIAL

1. Install Process Lasso (here). This program will prioritize ARMA 3 when it is running and will help performance.

2. Disable core parking (here) - follow the instructions.

3. Use launch parameters (we'll get into that shortly).

STEP FOUR: USE THE CORRECT LAUNCH PARAMETERS

I use the following parameters for my system. You will need to adjust these to fit yours.

These are entered by going to Steam, right clicking Arma 3>properties>set launch properties.

-nosplash -skipintro -maxMem=12288 -maxVRAM=3584 -cpuCount=4 -exThreads=7 -nologs

More explanation on these commands are available here.

-nosplash -skipintro: will load your game faster by skipping the intro and splash screens.

-maxMem=12288: I have 16GB of ram but didn't want the game to go over 12GB. Multiply how many GBs of RAM you have by 1024 to get the correct value.

-maxVRAM=3584: This is how many GBs your video card has. GTX 970 says 4GB but only has 3.5 GB usable ram.

-cpuCount=4: A lot of people with i7s put 8 here because that is how many cores Windows sees. That is incorrect. Enter 4 or 6 here depending on how many your processor actually has.

-exThreads=7: This will override auto detection and the formula is (#cores x 2)-1. So for quad core it is 7, for 6 cores it is 11.

-nologs: Be aware this means none errors saved to RPT file (report log). Yet in case of crash the fault address block info is saved.

A note for you nerds that think I forgot about the hyper-threading command -enableHT: This enables the use of hyper-threading CPU cores which might slightly improve performance in certain scenarios. This option may be overridden by -cpuCount so if you want to use maximum number of CPU cores use -enableHT without -cpuCount.

STEP FIVE: CHECK YOUR SOUND SETTINGS
1. Change your Windows sound quality to 16 Bit CD (Right click Speaker in task bar>Playback Devices>Right Click your Device>Click Properties>Select Advanced Tab>Choose 16 bit CD Quality).
2. Change your in game sound source to 32 (ARMA 3 Settings>Audio>Sound Sources).