Turn your Pre-Rendered Farames int eh Nvida control panel to 0. 8 Won’t work but 0 seems to help
Turn OFF the PhysX accelration in the Nvidia control panel.
While you are setting the Pre-rendered frames, ensure that VSYNC is disabled.
Open up the .CFG file found in My Documents\ARMA2 and edit it so that your resolution and 3D resolution are the same.
In ARMA2 itself ensure that you have “hold breath” bound to a separate key. I did this but the game forgot so check it. For some ungodly reason “hold breath” was at least part of the cause for the massive FPS drop I got when zoomed.
Last point: Ignore the benchmark. As far as I can see it is broken (or at least brings out the worst in the game). That very first scene you see with the man on the cliff has bugger all in it yet I cannot get out of the teens FPS wise. To test your FPS play an actual mission.

With all this done I not have it set to 1600×1200, all details on very high bar AA which is on low (the AA they have implemented is geared for ATI cards it seems) and Post Processing which I have on Low (’cos it is VERY badly implemented) and, in a mission, I get 25-35 FPS. This is still pathetically low and I still have some mouselag issues, but I can at least play a mission to see what the game feels like.

Another thing I found really helped out was disabling Pointer Precision on my mouse. I usually leave it off but ArmA2 was on a fresh install and I hadn’t done it yet. Feels less floaty now. Of course, the higher FPS helps in that department too.

I can toggle AF from off to Very High with 0 FPS hit (well, maybe 1). AA, however, is a noticeable hit of about 20% even at low, for me. That’s ok, to me. AA is the last thing I usually ever turn on when tuning an engine up. Again, I like it fast as I can see it and 60 frames a second would get me killed out against the lions. Good thing I’ve moved on a bit as a primate goes…

I can see how playing this with mates would make it the ultimate coop experience, from a “complete this objective” viewpoint. I have to try to talk some of mine into it or maybe we can get a group going somehow. Intelligent people playing together is always a pleasure. The modability of the game is what really brought me to the game and the infinite possibilities contained in the future of community building.

The motion blur is vomit inducing at best. I liken it to me not having my glasses on while running. I’m legally blind without my glasses. Off it stays. :) I hope we can put the rest of the pretty stuff in soon. In the config file (if you edit it manually) the values for it vacillate between 8, 16 and 32, so I assume further delineation is somewhat possible.

When your character turns, he experiences instant vertigo and his environment turns into a smear. This is not realistic, at least not for someone who hasn’t suffered a serious concussion and needs immediate help. It doesn’t help that due to the insane upsampling/downsampling shenanigans, the lead character clearly has myopia(short-sightedness).

It can’t be disabled, except by disabling ALL post-processing effects.

I posted to the demo feedback thread, and hopefully they do make motion blur a separate option, someday, because I’d quite like to play ARMA II but right now I have an option between a) vomiting uncontrollably / experiencing horrific migraines, or b) ruining the graphics by disabling a very important effect.

I can’t fathom why BI decided to make their game look so horrible with this upsampling junk, and the sickening motion blur / no post-process choice. Did they not put this in front of testers, or did they assume the testers were vomiting uncontrollably because it was ’so awesome’?

@Markoff
I think this may be the issue. People who claim they are getting uber settings on hardware that clearly cannot handle it. The game is simply not making the changes it claims to be, i.e., changing everything to Very High detail does no such thing, instead leaving the user on normal or so as the game realises it cannot handle what it is being asked to do.
We’ll see in 6 months once Bohemia extract a digit from an orifice and patch this monstrosity.

So I just ran this ArmAII-Mark mission 3 times. First time was with my 2 hours fiddled with “optimized settings”. I got a 2798. Then I lowered all settings to the worst possible. I got a 4919. I then cranked all settings to the absolute highest possible (outside of 3D resolution which I left at 100%). I got a 2848. I got a higher score on the test with everything turned on than I did my optimized settings.

I had been reading that if you reduced everything to the lowest, then turned them back up that the game somehow rendered those new settings almost as fast as the lower ones. I didn’t believe it, but I have some tasty pudding here… Now to run more tests. :)

Running at 1920×1200. Made no attempt to optimise, just wanted to give it a quick go to see how it felt. Simply default settings. Am almost definitely gonna buy it as it was great fun even just one play of the demo mission where you start in a helicopter. An unsuccessful attempt at the mission was more engaging than some entire games I have played. I love having to think about what I am doing. Even if I am rubbish at it.