If you’re 40 and have been PC gaming your whole life, then I’m going with you’ve had fairly high end hardware, and are just misremembering.

Arma 2 is unoptimized in general… but largely thats because it basically uses a massive analog to a pagefile on your HDD because of how it handles its huge environments in engine. Its too much to jam through 32 bit OSs and RAM.

When SSDs came out, that turned out to be the main thing that’ll boost your FPS in older Arma games, because they have much, much faster read/write speeds.

… But, their motion blur is still unoptimized and very unperformant.

As for setting everything to high and getting higher FPS… thats largely a myth.

There are a few postprocessing settings that work that way, and thats because in those instances, the ‘ultra’ settings actually are different algorithms/methods, that are both less expensive and visually superior.

It is still the case that if you set texture, model quality to low, grass/tree/whatever draw distances very short, you’ll get more frames than with those things maxxed out.