- Date:
- Wednesday, October 02, 2013
- Author:
- Grady McKinney
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

ARMA III Video Card Performance and IQ Review
ARMA III is our focus point for today. It features a large open world environment designed on a massive continent measuring 270 square kilometers. To go along side this massive continent is a max visibility range of 20km. Combine this with ARMA III's impressive looking graphics and we have a game that demands performance.
Highest Playable Settings
In the highest-playable settings below we will be looking at a wide variety of video cards. First we will look at the high-end setups. These include the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 SLI, GeForce GTX TITAN, and GeForce GTX 780 video cards, and also the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GE CF setup. Next we will look at more modestly priced video cards, including the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 and GeForce GTX 760, and on AMD’s side the Radeon HD 7970 GE and Radeon HD 7950 Boost. Our last group of video cards are far less expensive, and include the Radeon HD 7870 GE, Radeon HD 7790, and GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost. Our goal is to keep the settings as high as possible for the best gameplay and visual experience.
The "Overall Quality" option level selected below represents all the in-game settings and their levels we found playable. So if you see "Ultra" then that means: Texture, Objects, Terrain, Shadow, Particles, Cloud, PIP, Dynamic Lights are all at "Ultra" settings. If you see "High" then they are at "High" settings, if you see "Very High" then they are at "Very High" settings. We used this global option to select those features, then manually adjusted visibility and AA options and SSAO as needed.
*Note - A patch was recently released for the game through our testing, version 1.02, however that patch is a bugfix patch, nothing indicated in the patch that changes graphics performance in anyway. We double checked, and performance was the same under the new patch.
High-End Video Cards
GeForce GTX 780 SLI, Radeon HD 7970 GE CF, GeForce GTX TITAN & GeForce GTX 780

When we first dive into ARMA III using the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 SLI we were able to play with the overall game quality set to "ultra." We also utilized the highest values of FSAA at 8X and FXAA at "ultra," while playing at 2560x1600. We are using the default "ultra" visibility of 3800 and object visibility of 3200. At these settings we averaged 50.1 FPS. At these settings we had trouble increasing both overall and object visibility to higher levels, doing so would create a warping feeling while walking and produced extreme lag anytime we quickly moved the mouse. We found the default "ultra" visibility values still allowed us a far view distance. Remember, the view distance can go up to 12,000, so we are still far from the max visibility setting, even with 780 SLI.
The next best performing video card was the AMD Radeon HD 7970 GE CF setup. It was playable at the same settings as the GeForce GTX 780 SLI, but did perform 4.2% slower with an average framerate of 48 FPS. It was also less consistent than the GeForce GTX 780 SLI. We could feel noticeable jumps in the framerate that were not as harsh or noticeable when playing on the GTX 780 SLI setup. AMD has not yet dropped a driver to fix this frame pacing issue.
Now we take a look at our single GPU setups. The GeForce GTX TITAN was not capable of playing at 2560x1600 with "ultra" quality settings. Instead we had to lower the overall quality to "very high." In doing so, we also reduced FSAA from 8X to 4X. We did go ahead and manually increase the overall and object visibility ranges to the "ultra" values of 3800 and 3200 respectively. With these settings the GeForce GTX TITAN averaged 46.1 FPS, providing the best overall gameplay experience from a single GPU video card.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 couldn't handle the overall quality set to "ultra," or even "very high" for that matter. We had to reduce the quality to "high" in order to be playable at 2560x1600. We managed to enable 8X FSAA and also increased the overall and object visibility ranges back up to the "ultra" quality ranges. The GeForce GTX 780 averaged a solid 49 FPS at these settings. We found it borderline playable with the quality set to "very high," and using only 2X FSAA, however it was still slower than our ideal framerate.
GeForce GTX 770, Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, GeForce GTX 760 & Radeon HD 7950 Boost

The GeForce GTX 770 was almost playable at the same settings as the GeForce GTX 780. There was only one graphics option we had to change, FSAA. We simply lowered it from 8X to 4X for it to be playable with "high" quality at 2560x1600, with the default "ultra" range selected. This performance is only 1.3% faster than the Radeon HD 7970 GE which was playable at the exact same settings with an average framerate of 44.8 FPS.
The GeForce GTX 760 was the first video card that required us to drop the resolution from 2560x1600 to 1920x1080. In addition to the lower resolution, we also had to use the "very high" quality, with 4X FSAA enabled. Lowering all of these graphics options still didn't give us the performance needed, so we had to greatly reduce the overall and object visibility. We found the sweet spot to be 2600 for overall and 2000 for object. With these settings it averaged 48.8 FPS.
The Radeon HD 7950 Boost also required us to play at 1920x1080. It could not keep up with the GeForce GTX 760 when using the "very high" quality, so we had to reduce it to "high." We also used 4X FSAA, and the reduced visibility ranges to match the GeForce GTX 760. This provided us a performance of 46.2 FPS.
Mid-Range Video Cards
AMD Radeon HD 7870 GE, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost & Radeon HD 7790

In order for the Radeon HD 7870 GE to be playable, we had to run ARMA III at 1920x1080 with the "high" quality settings. We also had to reduce FSAA to 2X, and also reduced FXAA from "ultra" to "standard." Lowering these settings allowed us to increase our overall visibility to 2800 and object visibility to 2200. It averaged 51.1 FPS at these settings.
The GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost was the next best performance. It was playable at 1080p with 2X FSAA enabled while running "high" overall quality. We also had to reduce FXAA to "standard" and had to lower overall visibility to 1600 and object visibility to 1300. This allowed for us to get extremely close to what we considered playable. For a faster performance we would need to disable FSAA entirely.
The Radeon HD 7790 needed the faster performance. Without FSAA on, we had a pretty hefty surplus of performance to spare. Since we had to completely disable FSAA alpha to coverage becomes disabled as well. We went ahead and increased FXAA to "ultra," and increased the overall visibility to 2200 with object visibility at 1800. This provided a performance of 50.1 FPS.



