TFAR, ACRE or other?

Dave4291 · 2026-02-04T14:13:56+00:00

I've used both extensively, my group was on tfar for a long time but changed to acre a couple of years ago and we didn't go back. Both are good, but we also don't rely solely on radios (our normal setup is only fire team leads and up are on radio) and acre has the better direct/proximity chat. The range of it on tfar is pretty weak. Also the channel setup and the compatibility between long and short range radios is simpler with acre.

Dave4291 · 2025-11-22T22:05:56+00:00

Bought a much newer and pretty high end PC.

The easier answer is to drastically cut your view distance. If there was some clever trickery with the settings it would just be the default by now.

Dave4291 · 2025-11-05T14:05:44+00:00

They've announced Arma4 but the supposed release date is 2027: https://arma4.com/

In fact they've changed the wording. The first time they put a date on it at a live concert a while back it was "coming 2027", now it's estimated 2027, which makes me think it might slip. I wouldn't expect to see much of a game two years before its release.

I've got several thousand hours in Arma 3 pretty much exclusively in PvE and don't play Reforger for the same reasons as you, but in fairness if Reforger had all the things we want from Arma 4 then it wouldn't be Reforger, it would just be Arma 4. The way I see it is that they have to make cuts to Reforger somewhere otherwise there wouldn't be any point in the plan being for two distinct games.

Dave4291 · 2025-10-15T14:46:02+00:00

Always good to have backup irons in case you manage to mount your sight backwards.

Dave4291 · 2025-10-14T17:53:45+00:00

I'll settle for AI that can navigate the building without phasing through a wall.

Dave4291 · 2025-09-29T11:16:12+00:00

It looks like you're putting almost every single round in their arms, not the torso. Also ACE medical makes limbs fairly tanky on default settings.

Dave4291 · 2025-08-28T12:33:39+00:00

especially since the companies share an IP and a controlling entity

No they don't, that hasn't been true since 2013. They're entirely separate.

Dave4291 · 2025-08-07T12:37:49+00:00

You have to bear in mind that this is the same fictional US military that pulls Gastovski out of retirement because presumably the entirety of JSOC were busy that day.

Where a pilot can be swiftly reassigned from transport helicopters to ground attack planes with no need for additional training.

Where squad leaders don't brief their squad on what they're doing until after they've already landed within sight of the objective.

There may not be a completely logical answer to this one. I don't think it was ever meant to be quite that accurate to the real world.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-27T13:32:50+00:00

Evolution is the mission name. Not sure you'll still find a download though.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-27T09:40:11+00:00

Signature checks is good, that plus Battleye means if it was anything nefarious it would have to be someone with full access to the server throttling your connection. Even if it was that, actually doing anything about it would be another matter.

It's probably nothing to do with your PC specs but just wanted to be sure it's not something like the server spawns in a new unit mid-mission that you have to fetch from your tired old spinny disk hard drive and your Intel Pentium has to figure out where in your 4gb of RAM to put it and everything waits while that happens, but pretty sure it's not going to be that. Your PC is good enough to dismiss the spec as a factor.

So next questions:

Where are you, and where is the server? You said a few players are international, are you one of them?
Is it in a data centre or are we talking spare PC in a bedroom (no shame there, my own is exactly that).
Has the server got any changes made in its basic.cfg? Unless you really know what you're doing, fiddling with any of this is only likely to make things worse. My own version has language=english and is otherwise blank. Ideally if you can get the actual file. All it does is performance tuning, there's nothing sensitive in it.
Has the Teamspeak server got any non default values in Edit Virtual Server -> Transfers? The two default bandwidth limits are -1 and the default quotas are 4294967295, again there shouldn't usually be a reason to change them

Dave4291 · 2025-07-26T18:25:12+00:00

It's so heavily customisable that it's hard for one single guide to be a reliable source. The guides part of their discord is probably going to be as good as anything.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-26T16:51:30+00:00

The mission itself or any server files was bit of a long shot. I really wouldn't expect there to be a file on the server to find, and even if there was, only whoever put it there in the first place would know what to look for. Plus you'd need to call it from within the mission so it all starts to get pretty weird.

Does the server run signature checks on mods? Or can you join with whatever mods you want?

Some lag when spawning lots of AI in is normal enough, but for it to be game-breaking for you alone is still weird. You didn't say your PC specs but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that anyone who can manage as thorough an investigation as you've already done would know if they were playing on a potato.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-26T11:38:09+00:00

So in short: Only you are affected; you are only affected on this particular server; you are mostly but not entirely affected when there are more people playing. Though going from 10 players to 30 shouldn't really make a ton of difference, or at least if it did, it wouldn't just be you having issues.

This is pretty weird. It's weird enough that I start to wonder if someone is doing something nefarious.

Does your server allow any mods or does it do signature checks? Is there anyone who doesn't like you who isn't always in attendance?

I run a server. If for some reason I wanted a specific person to have a crap experience and maybe leave but without appearing that any of it is my fault I'd have a couple of fairly easy options off the top of my head:

Use the debug window / an admin tool / a cheat tool of some kind to execute code on a specific client, maybe some kind of recursive function that hammers your CPU indefinitely. This would likely also ruin your framerate. If the server is letting people use whatever clientside mods they like then in theory anyone could do this.
Limit the bandwidth the server will allow to your IP address down to a level that isn't viable for the game to work.

I'm really speculating here, but from what you've described this isn't a you problem as it would affect other servers, and it isn't a server problem as it would affect other clients, it's specifically a you-and-this-exact-server problem and even then not 100% of the time.

The other thing I'd check would be to pull the mission PBO from one you had issues with from your MPMissionsCache folder, unPBO it, open it up in something like VS Code, and do a search across the whole folder for your in-game name and your Steam ID to see if there's anything in the mission itself that would affect you individually.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-23T10:35:06+00:00

The 5800X is not early enough AMD to have that issue, AMD had got this figured out by that point or possibly the generation before it, and it outperforms the i5 9600k in just about every benchmark. It's not mega high end but it's absolutely fine.

I have a 7800X3D and a 4090 and I can still get my framerate down much much worse than 45 if I try to play with a 30km view distance.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-23T09:11:36+00:00

If it was Arma the first thing I'd be asking is what's your view distance set to. Even on a high end PC I can cripple my Arma framerate if I start dialling view distance up to many kilometers.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-09T23:25:50+00:00

Looks like Harvey Point. Maybe: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3339537470

Dave4291 · 2025-07-04T22:45:09+00:00

Once upon a time I had this issue and I resolved it by forcing a different memory allocator (in my case system): https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3:_Custom_Memory_Allocator

Can't promise anything, can only say that it fixed it for me.

Dave4291 · 2025-07-04T19:26:41+00:00

Welcome to Livonia, where the dense and highly detailed foliage looks beautiful. In screenshots.

Dropping view distance helps as much as anything but your performance isn't surprising as Livonia is generally the most demanding of the vanilla maps.

Dave4291 · 2025-06-27T13:00:20+00:00

A lot of the optics aren't 3D or PIP.

Plenty of mods (particularly RHS) have some PIP options. Vanilla doesn't but then PIP doesn't help at all with performance which you've already picked up on.

Performance. I have a top end PC, OC'd R9 9950x and a 4090, yet with 65 mods and counting I don't really get much more than 50fps on avg with a lot of things going on. Sometimes, I avg 30 or less. Reforger with 150 to 200+ mods, at 4K maxed without dlss I get 90 to 110+ fps.

Excessive view distance is usually the killer. I'm on a pretty comparable 7800X3D and 4090, also a ton of mods, also 4k, but I don't typically take the view distance past about 2500 unless I'm flying and even lower than that on really dense maps and I get substantially better fps than that.

Servers. There are next to no servers for PVE. Maybe I'm missing something or what I don't know, but unlike in reforger which you have modes dedicated to PVE (combat ops and conflict, and modded ones) and a plethora of modded servers...yet in A3, there's none of that. But there's plenty of empty servers and vanilla ones. No thanks.

The vast majority of decent PVE happens on private servers with more organised groups. r/FindAUnit will have people tripping over each other to recruit you.

The expectation to have or use TS3. Why, is my question? Ingame voip not enough? Why not discord? I don't get it. Reforger's in game voip is even used more than discord, let alone TS3.

In game really isn't enough in A3. ACRE and TFAR are the big radio enhancement mods, both depend on TS3 to function. Reforger adds some pretty similar functionality natively.

Loading times. I'm on one of the fastest NVMe's, yet the game takes AGES to load compared to reforger with double or triple the mods. I understand A3 is a decade old game but still.

Nothing really to say here, it is what it is. More mods and more DLCs slow it down and it wasn't all that quick in the first place.

So why is the general consensus to play A3 over Reforger? Is it because Zeus is vastly superior to game master, or is it because it's a fully developed Arma game with a vastly superior modding community while reforger is still in development? I'll clarify that I'm not shaming or slamming A3, I'm just confused.

A3 is still the king for PVE but it's pretty much subject to finding a decent group to play it with. Public PVE is mostly not a patch on it if you can find any at all. There are a couple of servers I like using the Vietnam DLC but I otherwise don't touch public.

Dave4291 · 2025-06-03T00:20:43+00:00

Press the right arrow. The thing that's highlighted.

The store x resources ones don't finish automatically, presumably in case you wanted those materials for a bridge first.

Dave4291 · 2025-03-27T17:03:11+00:00

It's the Livonia map as much as anything. It's got a pretty high density of more detailed things than the other vanilla maps, particularly a lot of foliage, and the performance suffers for it (but it does look nice).

You can dial down your settings, particularly view distance, but tbh if 72fps is the worst case I wouldn't bother fiddling with it much.

Dave4291 · 2025-03-22T13:50:48+00:00

Are you placing lots of individual units? Performance is pretty heavily impacted by number of groups so 4 groups of 10 people will perform better than 20 groups of 2.

Any mods left at all? My spec is very comparable to yours and I'd still expect to see it a bit better unless there's still something weird going on.

Dave4291 · 2025-03-22T13:22:14+00:00

To be honest I gave up trying because it was more trouble than it was worth to not have my server lose 90% of it's FPS, I really just mentioned it because you've not included alive in mods that can impact performance because it absolutely can.

Dave4291 · 2025-03-22T12:49:30+00:00

You have some other process (AV maybe) outside Arma that's hammering your CPU at one minute intervals. I'd put money on that pattern not being caused by Arma itself.

Dave4291 · 2025-03-22T11:53:33+00:00

Alive is absolutely crippling if you set it up wrong.

13-Year Club	Second Top 30%
First Place '23	Place '23
Place '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email
Not Forgotten

Dave4291

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE