Arma II Review

Graphics

While some graphics engines are now capable of rendering outdoor environments with reasonably realistic looking terrain and flora, such as the CryEngine2 engine used in Crysis, the range of modern weapons means Bohema Interactive was forced to develop its own graphics engine for Arma II. And it looks gorgeous.

Although this engine shares the same codebase as used in Operation Flashpoint and the original Arma, its been given a severe overhaul for Arma II. The most obvious improvement is the huge increase in the amount of flora and fauna. Whereas grass was a welcome but sparse occurrence in Arma, Chernarus is lush and in severe need of a full-time gardener. There also appears to be a much larger number of small bushes and trees dotted around.

This rampant undergrowth not only helps to break-up your (and the AI's) line of sight, but adds to the visual variety. There are also many more small animals, creeping, hopping and flying around Chernarus too, including a variety of domesticated animals dotted around the various scattered farms. It's these small details, such as the way that you crush flora underfoot that help suspend your disbelief and draw you into Chernarus.


In spite of the visual splendour on offer the greatest success of Arma II's graphics is the sheer scale of the world. As already mentioned, nowhere is off-limit - you can explore everywhere. Having 225km2 to fight across, as opposed to the more usual 1km2 of most games has a downside, however - there's a vast amount of data to process and render.

For this reason, one of the most important variables you can tweak in the options menu is the view distance setting. If you're lucky enough to already own a couple of GeForce 480 GTXs or Radeon HD 6890s you might just be able to set the maximum view distance (10km), but for the rest of us some sort of compromise will be necessary. If you're going to be mostly playing as an infantryman, you can probably get away with a view distance setting of between 2 and 3km, but armoured vehicle crewmen or pilots will definitely need to see further to survive.


The graphics engine can render terrain and objects up to 10km away - on this page we've got the same view seen (from top to bottom) with the view distance set at 1km, 3km and 10km to help give you an idea of the levels of impact and scale that we're talking about.

Unless you do own one of the aforementioned imaginary graphics cards and a 5GHz Core i9 CPU then you just won't be able to run Arma II smoothly at a high resolution at maximum detail settings. It is worth pointing out though that Arma II is one of the few games that really benefits from a quad-core CPU and a powerful graphics card - put that in your pipe and smoke it Nvidia!


One of the biggest framerate killers is the post-processing effects, but these do such a good job of tricking your eyes into seeing a real, living-breathing world it's hard to justify disabling them all together. Similarly, some effects look simply terrible at their lowest settings - yes, I'm talking about you Mr Shadow. At maximum detail, shadows are geometrically correct and have soft dappled edges, but at the minimum setting are blocky and a single shade of black.

Fortunately, Bohemia Interactive has already released several patches, the latest of which, v1.02, improves performance and fixes a number of bugs. Even so, the in-game anti-aliasing needs a lot of work. However, Bohemia Interactive has a history of supporting it's games with patches and free downloadable content for several years after release, and we have no reason to expect Arma II to be any different.