To access the settings, start America's Army and click on the Settings button to access most of the settings.

Video Settings

Gamma, Brightness and Contrast affect how bright or dark, washed out or crisp your graphics appear in-game. Adjust these to your likes in conjunction with your monitor.

Screen Resolution is also to your likes, with the higher the resolution the lower your fps, but the more detailed the image. Its better running the game in Full Screen mode to reduce any display problems.

Here are alot of settings for the textures of various game elements. They go from UltraLow to UltraHigh.

Terrain relates to the complexity and sharpness of textures used to show the terrain in maps, the higher the setting, the lower your fps, particularly on large outdoor maps like Radio Tower.

Weapon and Player texture settings are just that - the higher the setting the more details are give to your character and weapon, but at a cost of less fps.

World  is how objects like trees, bushes look. The higher the setting the more realistic and detailed they  appear. If you set this too low, your weapon's iron sights might be alittle blurry.

RenderMap and LightMap, improves the appearance and reality of objects in terms of lighting and shadows, with the higher the setting, the greater the performance.

Change All allows you to set all of the above to one particular setting quickly.

Remember that the higher the texture settings, the lower your fps will be. The lower the texture settings, the more blurry and unrealistic everything will be.

If you have a new graphic card, with 128MB of video memory, then the performance should not be effected from using the highest settings. If you have an older 64MB graphics card, the lower you should set these textures, particularly Terrain, Rendermap and Lightmap settings.

Decals are the marks left by explosions and bullets, increasing the number of Decals means more marks and greater reality, but more computer power and less performance.

Maximum Decals setting can greatly affect performance when there are a lot of people firing on the screen, or an automatic weapon is firing. Reducing this setting from the default of 100 can help to reduce such lag.

Door Decal setting affects performance if you are close to a door and firing through it, especially when a SAW or RPK is involved. Reducing this setting from the default of 10 ( to 5) can be a good balance of realism and performance.

Fade Door Decals If selected, the decals on doors will disappear after a while. If you have performance issues with door decals, try lowering the number of them first.

None - completely turns off all shadows. Can make things look unreal but is best if you're struggling for fps.

Blob - allows shadows but makes them much less complex and hence improves your fps. A good compromise of realism vs performance.

Detailed - draws shadows in all their glory, but can give a significant performance hit which varies depending on your graphics card and the number of players on screen.

Trilinear: This makes the graphics and colors seem smoother and cleaner, but can reduce graphics performance. Turn this setting off if you have a slower system or older video card.

Triple Buffering: Turn this option on to reduce screen "tearing" (when VSync is off) and improve video performance. This can cause problems for those using older graphics cards, so turn off if you're having problems.

Use Cubemaps: This is a trick used to make some reflective surfaces ( water ) look like they are actually reflecting whats around them in 3D. Leaving it off can improve performance without any noticeable drop in image quality.

Use Compressed Lightmaps: If you have an older graphics card, using compressed lightmaps can improve your graphics performance. Compressed lightmaps are smaller and take up less video memory, however the colors and shadows in the game will not be quite as nice or crisp and you may see noticeable "banding" in the colors.

No Client Side Effects: Turning this on will remove certain features like bullet shells, gun sounds, muzzle smoke, bullet impacts.

Disable Dynamic Lighting: Dynamic lighting allows the various lights in the game to react realistically with objects, shining at different angles off weapons, characters and walls based on the light's position. This makes for great effects but can decrease your framerate, so if you really want more fps click this option.

Detail Textures: Adds a level of detail  to certain textures which makes them look much crisper when examined close up. This can reduce your fps, so unclick for more fps.

Use Projectors: Projectors covers a range of images projected onto textures, like shadows from characters and objects (like tree shadows) and decals. The noticeable effects of unclicking this option include removal of such shadows and decals.

Use Deco-Layers: Use decorative layer textures such as grass. Disabling this can improve performance with reduction in visual quality and atmosphere.

Use Coronas: Coronas are the haloes given off by light sources. Unclicking this option can provide a performance boost for older graphics cards.

Enable VSync: Video Synchronization (VSync) is the synchronization of your graphics card and monitors' abilities to redraw the screen a number of times each second. This is measured in Hz (which is the same as frames per second), and your monitor will have a maximum rating in Hz for each resolution - e.g 1280x1024 at 85Hz. When this option is unclicked, your fps will improve alittle, but you may see some image "tearing" as your monitor and graphics card go slightly out of synchronization when the refresh rate exceeds the monitor's abilities. Turn off VSync for best graphics performance, however if the image tearing is annoying then click this option.

Input

Mouse Sensitivity: The higher the number, the more sensitive your character movements will be to mouse movements.

Menu Mouse Sensitivity: The higher the number, the more quickly your cursor will move in response to a mouse movement in the user interface.

Invert Mouse: Clicking this setting will mean that pushing your mouse forward will make you look down, and pulling your mouse backward will make your character's view tilt upward.

Reduce Mouse Lag: If you have issues with your mouse lagging on screen during play, then clicking this option will help fix them.

Enable Joystick: If you have a joystick and you want to use it click this.

The HUD is the Heads Up Display - the area around the screen which shows information about your soldier and his surroundings.