Does anyone else find that when viewing trees from close distance frame rates sink?

I'm getting really comfortable frame rates when in the open or in small towns, but as soon as a I walk into a foresty area frames render about 30% slower.

There must be someway to control the LOD'ing of trees surely? Personally I'd much rather have super smooth frame rates and less detailed trees, than sluggish performance and individual branches and leaves modelled.

Cheers

Yes, I see this on my machine. The effect seems reduced if I set object detail on "Very Low", and gets worse if I turn on any AA.

I saw this with the smaller trees/shrubs (mostly the ones about the same height as the player). Whenever I'd get close enough so they filled my view my FPS dropped by 10-15. But, I have since defragged my HDD with a real defragger (Diskeeper 2009) and I don't loose near as many frames (only 2 or 3 now). I was just using the Windows 7 defragger but I was still getting really choppy performance, especially in towns. Now it's silky smooth

Might give it a shot if you haven't already

Thanks for the tips. I disabled AA and there's a big improvement in frame rates when in forests.



Wow that's depressing in so many ways. The fact that windows 7 still suffers from fragmentation problems when linux hasn't since day 1. The fact that you needed to use an aftermarket tool to defrag your drive properlly. The fact ArmA needed to swap when you have 3 gigs of RAM.

Cheers

I have experienced the most slow downs in the big towns. Yesterday while playing Domination in a large southern coastal town my frames were dipping into the teens at times. The trees do not seem to bother my system - at least not noticeably.

I get the same as Biff. Surprisingly, and much unlike ArmA1, gameplay for me is very smooth in woodland. Moving into the large coastal towns sends my computer into a flat spin.

sorry to sound redundant; but did you guys use a good defrag program? I was getting this too (I couldn't hardly play in towns because it was so slow). Since doing that it's helped a lot.

I'll give it a shot Jojo, thanks. I ran Windows defrag a few days ago. It appears Diskeeper 2009 is trialware, plus you have to register to download it, so I grabbed the free Defraggler (by the same folks behind the excellent CCleaner) instead.

Yikes, 37% fragmentation detected. I'm almost done a full defrag and will see how it works out.

http://www.howtohaven.com/system/vistadefragmentation.shtml

Haven't tred this myself, but I heard running the command line version of the Vista defrag works very well.

Concerning anti-aliasing, have you guys noticed if AA has a big impact on performance in Arma2? I'm currently playing with AA set on "high" because even on the "normal" setting I see a lot of jaggies.