Steam’s launch options allow you to supercede the internal settings of whichever game they are applied too. To access launch options, you need to right-click on DayZ within steam and select ‘settings’. Now select ‘launch options’ and you will be presented with a single line text-box. There are a few different launch options that are useful here.
-nosplash – removes the Bohemia Interactive splash page.
-noPause – gets you into the game faster.
-cpuCount=8 – set this to how many cores your CPU has.
-maxMem =8192 – set this to the total amount of RAM your system has, 2048 for 2GB, 4096 for 4GB, 8192 for 8GB.
So you’re launch options within the box should look something like this: -cpuCount=8 -nosplash -noPause -maxMem=8192
There are a few files which can be tweaked on your system that will give you a performance boost. First of all you want to locate ‘My Documents\Dayz\Dayz.cfg‘. You can edit this file in ‘notepad’ or any other text editor. Open it up and edit the following:
GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1 - set this to 1.
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1 - set this to 1.
now you want to open another file, you can locate it at: ‘My Documents\DayZ Other Profiles \<your profile>\<name>.dayzprofile’. You can edit this file in ‘notepad’ or any other text editor. Open it up and edit the following:
sceneComplexity=100000 - this number affects your object details. Setting it anywhere from 50000 to 20000 can improve performance significantly.
shadowZDistance=250 - this number affects the distance at which shadows are drawn, setting this to a lower value will increase FPS.
preferredObjectViewDistance=1000 - this number affects the distance in metres that the engine will draw objects. A lower number will greatly improve performance.