DayZ Tweaks Guide – How to fix your FPS issues!

Index 

1. Intro
2. In-game settings
3. Graphic card settings
4. ArmA2.cfg and ArmA2OA.cfg
5. Launch parameters
6. Setting up RamDisk
7. Game Booster
8. Stuff
9. Changelog
1. Intro 

First of all let me say none of the following tweaks are my own inventions and i will not take credit for any work others have done nor will i take responsibility for any trouble any of the following tweaks might cause you. Remember to back up your files before changing them. Use common sense.

Keep in mind this guide contains no voodoomagic and tweaking your settings is no substitute for proper hardware. However if you feel like you got a decent machine and can’t reach proper FPS, this just might be the right place for you to look. 
If you have no idea how well your hardware should perform, please check the following link and follow the instructions on the website. This will very likely give an idea how well your computer should run DayZ. 

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri

From the research I’ve done on this topic it seems to me, people had success with different parts of these tweaks, so whatever did the trick for me, might not be the uber fix for you. Just keep going and see what’s best for you and your machine.
I will mark the parts of the guide which really helped me in case you can’t be bothered to go through every single step (look for the bits marked like this: Glow).

2. In-game settings

This is the easiest and least invasive procedure to improve your game performance. At the same time most of the changes in the in-game settings won’t make a huge difference and most of you will already tweaked these options to your liking.
Keep in mind some options will not make a noticeable difference in performance and should therefore be set to whatever you believe looks best (or whatever gives you the best in game experience). 

• Visibility = 1600 (Several sources on the great interwebz tell me that this is actually the highest setting accepted by the game. You may set this higher but it will not actually give you more visibility)
• Brightness = Whatever you see fitting
• Gamma =Whatever you see fitting
• Interface resolution = Choose whatever suits you and your monitor. This should ALLWAYS be the same value your 3D resolution and the other way around.
• 3D resolution = Choose whatever suits you and your monitor. This should ALLWAYS be the same value your Interface resolution   and the other way around.
• Texture Detail = If you've got a graphics card with more than 1GB RAM don’t worry about this and crank it up to Very High. You may lower this setting if you're playing on old hardware or you prefer your game looking really bad
• Video Memory = Set to default! This is very important. The default setting will use all your cards memory as its suppose to. If you set it to max DayZ will fail to use all of your memory, so don’t do it.
• Anisotropic Filtering = Set to Very High for looks. This only kills your fps on low-end graphics cards.
• Antialiasing = this will affect your performance, so don’t use it unless you want it.
• ATOC: Set to disable for performance boost.
• Terrain Detail = lowest setting for best performance
• Object Detail = lowest setting for best performance, but keep in mind that this
• Shadow Detail = lowest setting for best performance
• HDR Quality = Set to normal
• PPAA = Set to low
• Postprocess Effects = THIS IS A PERFORMANCE KILLER! Set to off for best performance. If you have this turned on by default, turning this of may give you a significant performance boost.
• Interface Size = Normal
• Aspect Ratio = Set to whatever fits your monitor
• Vsync = off (unless you see a lot of screentearing)

3. Graphic card settings

This section is under construction! 



4. ArmA2.cfg and ArmA2OA.cfg

ARMA II and a lot of other games don’t actually give you direct access to all video settings from the in-game video options. Therefore it might be a great idea to check the .cfg files for additional tweaking options. In ARMA II the .cfg files have quite a potential for a proper performance boost.

Look for the files in the following path (or just use windows search):
\Documents\ArmA 2\ArmA2.cfg
\Documents\ArmA 2\ArmA2OA.cfg
or 
C:\Users\*your_user_name*\Documents\ArmA 2 Other Profiles\*profile_name*

Open both files with notepad or another basic text editor. Find the following entries and set them to the value suggested below:

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0; 
refresh=120;  (If you use Vsync)
(note: remember to save the file or the changes will have no effect)

An additional FPS boost might be achieved by editing "...Documents/ArmA 2/playername.ArmaA2OAProfile". Like before open with notepad and search for "sceneComplexity=". Change it to the following value "sceneComplexity=10000". 

(Note: You can change your FOV settings in the playername.ArmaA2OAProfile file as well. Do not fool around with these settings unless you know what you are doing. I could make a guide for this as well if you like. Leave a comment to let me know)


5. Launch parameters 

Launch parameters is yet again another way to tweak our game.
I will explain how to apply launch parameters more thoroughly at a later point in time, if needed. Let me know in the comments. For now just Google it if you don’t know how to apply them. You can apply them without much hustle with steam, Dayzcommander, playwith6 and windows shortcuts. For DayZCommander users, look in the settings for "Additional Launch Parameters" and put in whatever parameters you wish DayZCommander to use every time you launch the game through the software.

The following list is more or less a copy/paste from the ARMA II wiki. I've only chosen the entries that could be relevant to you. Read the description below and pick whatever you need. 

-nosplash	disables splash screens.
-world=empty	Speeds up loading time
-skipIntro	Skips intro
-window	Run the game in window mode
-noPause	Won’t stop rendering the game if you alt-tab.
-maxMem=<number>	Defines memory allocation limit to number Hardcoded maximum of 2047 MB)
-maxVRAM=<number>	Defines Video Memory allocation limit to    number (in Megabytes). 128 is hard-coded minimum (anything lower falls backs to 128). 2047 is soft-coded maximum , any value over 2GB might result into unforeseen consequences!
-winxp	Forces the game to use the XP version of DirectX9. This gave me almost 20 more FPS!!!
-cpuCount=<number>	Change to a number less or equal than numbers of available cores. This will override auto detection.
-exThreads=<number>	Change to a number 0,1,3,5,7. This will override auto detection (which use 3 for dual core and 7 for quad core).

At the moment i am running with a simple set of parameters: 
" -winxp -nosplash -world=empty -skipIntro "

However if i wanted to apply everything it would look somewhat like this(IMPORTANT!!! DONT COPY THE SETUP BELOW IF IT DOSNT FIT YOUR SYSTEM!!!): 

"-nosplash -world=empty -skipIntro -noPause -maxMem=2047 -maxVRAM=2047 -winxp -cpuCount=4 -exThreads=7"

The setup of launch parameters fits one of my systems with a 3rd. gen. i7 processer with hyper threading, 8GB Ram and a GeForce GTX 660m with 2047 MB of GDDR5-VRAM.


6. Setting up RamDisk

Like the name indicates, RamDisk is a piece of software which turns some of your RAM to regular storage memory. Using RAM as regular memory means achieving extremely high read and write speeds, even outperforming top of the line solid state drives. Personally i am not too familiar with this technology. I've tried it out and played with it a couple of days, but in the end i did not gain any insane FPS boost or noticeable improvement on loading screens. However many have reported great performance boots from using RamDisk, so in my opinion it's at least worth a try especially for those without a solid state drive. 

First of all you'll need to download and install RamDisk. 
Get the freeware version from the following link: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
Next you'll have to check how much space you need for your RamDisk. Go to you DayZ folder and see how large it is (The path of my Dayzfolder is for example: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead\@dayz). My DayZ folder is about 300 MB so i put my RamDisk size to 700 MB. I don’t believe it is necessary to oversize it like that, however better save then sorry. If you got less than 4GB of RAM you should consider skipping RamDisk completely as you might steal RAM from your system itself, which kind of defeats the purpose. 

• Launch RamDisk and setup your disk size ( 600MB recommended for most people, unless of cause your dayZ folder is bigger than that)
• Make sure "Fat16 Partition" and "Windows boot sector" are selected
• Now Press Start RamDisk. Windows will very likely tell you that it is installing a new hard drive now. This is perfectly normal so please accept the request if any appears.
• Go to the "Load/Save" tab and check "Load Disk Image at Startup" and "Save Disk Image on Shutdown".
• Now press "Save Disk Image Now" and save the image.
• Now you should have the new "RAM-drive" available, just like any other drive on your machine. My computer sets it as the D: drive, but you might just get any random letter.
• Go to you new drive and copy your @dayz folder to it. Like i mention earlier the path on my computer for the dayz-folder is: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead\@dayz   (Note: FYI as far as i know the @dayz-folder you have in your documents-folder is not the right folder so keep looking)
• Now all you have left is to tell your launcher to load DayZ from you RamDisk. DayZCommander user go to settings override the DayZ Directory to  D:\@DayZ\addons (Note: Remember your RamDisk may not have the name as mine)
  If you do not use DayZCommander please Google how to do it or leave a post in the forums.

7. Game Booster

Game booster is a free program claiming to boost your computers gaming performance. For those of you who are doing a great job of keeping your drivers up to date (This is also a very important part of beeing able to take advantage of your computer’s hardware to the fullest), your hard drive clean and visit your msconfig.exe regularly, this program will not be your savior. Personally i don’t like the idea of spending system resources on software that helps you spend less system resources. The reason why i bothered to make Game Booster a part of this guide anyways is due to the fact that many, including some of my friends report actually performance boosts due to this software. Furthermore it offers a free alternative to Fraps' screen- and video capture as well as an FPS-monitor feature. I haven’t yet tried to capture any in-game footage with game booster yet, so i can’t really comment on the quality of the feature at this point in time. 
Just try it and see for yourself: http://www.iobit.com/gamebooster.php (Note: It is currently in BETA. Does require a login, but it is still free to use at the moment)   

8. Stuff

Congratulations! You made it all the way through my wall of text. Please let me know what you think about the guide, what to improve and if it actually helped improving your computers performance. 

I will try to keep this guide updated as people reports errors, flaws or add other tweaks to the mix. You should consider this as a 1.000 version as there is always room for improvement.

Shout out to the people from the interwebz who made all these tips and tweaks available in the first place.

Yours

 Julin