Conclusion

Having tested ArmA at three different resolutions and ultra settings with nine different, recent graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA we believe to have a thorough understanding to what this games engine responds.

A closer look at the results shows that the engine is not capable of using the full potential of today's GPUs. As you can see, although we've tested high-end as well as mid-range cards the differences regarding frame rates at 1080p as well as 1440p aren't too big. We had to run the game at ultra HD (2160p) in order to see big performance differences between the high-end and mid-range cards. Apart from that it was very interesting to observe that the engine on which ArmA 3 is based, responds better to AMD than to NVIDIA cards. We were actually suprised that a Radeon R9 390 8GB is as fast as an NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti.

Although these values are not inside this article we also had a look at performance scaling when overclocking a specific GPU. For that purpose we bumped the frequency of our 980 Ti by 150MHz, which had no influence on the frame rates at all. This is a very solid hint, that the engine of this game is only to a certain extent GPU dependent. Therefore it's highly likely that CPU and memory might have a well measurable influence on frame rates in ArmA 3, which is what we're going to look into later this week.

If you're into ArmA 3 and you're looking for best possible frame rates we recommend an AMD Radeon FuryX. Should you be looking for solid frame rates at an attractive price point, then we recommend you to choose a Radeon R9 390 8GB, which was able to perform remarkably well, even in comparison with much more expensive cards.