I've been having a little trouble with my PC lately and while trying to figure out the problem I reset my BIOS to delault setting. I thought this would be a great time to see just how much of a performance increase I'm getting out of my overclocked CPU in a game like ArmA II, as you might already know this is probably one of the most CPU demanding games out right now and people are always recommending others to overclock their CPU to get a nice boost in performance in this game. Before I get into the results I've got a bit of complaining to do with the optimization in this game.
My specs
- GPU: 8800GT 700/ 1723/1000
- CPU: C2D 3800 OC'd to 3.8ghz (400*9.5)
- Motherboard: Asus P5Q deluxe
- RAM: Dominator 1066, 4gigs
A game like ArmA 2 requres plenty of RAM to run smoothly, due to it being an open/sandbox game, I recently added 2gigs to RAM with this game in mind because with just 2 gigs installed I was getting quite a lot of noticable stuttering during play. A game that had even more problems with stuttering was STALKER with the complete 2009 mod, and while that game ran flawlessly with the added RAM, performance in ArmA 2 bearly improved. I know these two games aren't directly comparable but put it this way, STALKER uses over 3.1 gigs of ram, while ArmA 2 never goes over 2.2 gigs, I still get the game freezing for a second while the game loads in the textures and when I zoom in on a village (and not even necessarily in the far distance) it can take up to 3 seconds to fully load the textures, all the while I've got nearly 2 gigs of RAM not in use.
Here are the results of my overclocked CPU test, I used FRAPS to record average, min and max FPS during the "Benchmark 2" test in ArmA 2 (the one with all the units attacking eachother at night).
With CPU running at origonal speed (2.66ghz)
- Total frames: 1230
- Average: 10.982
- min: 4
- max: 16
With CPU running at 3.8ghz
- Total frames: 1793
- Average: 17.218
- Min: 8
- Max: 23
So what I get for an overclock of roughly 1.2ghz over stock settings is a framerate increase of 6.23. Neither of these framerates are great by any means, but it's worth mentioning that what's being rendered during this particular benchmark is a large scale battle, during normal gameplay my framerates with my CPU overclocked average around 29 FPS.
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