Zargabad = Lagadad

[jonneymendoza 10]

Hi. I am getting low FPS just on this map no matter what video settings i tweak.

i have a core i7 920 at 3ghz with HT off, 3gb of ddr3 ram, 480 GTX at stock settings and a 1680 res monitor.

I get low 20s in this map with all settings on its highest except for pp being in low, view distance at 2k and video memory at high.

I then turned down all settings no normal and view distance at 1k and still get the same fps at low 20's.

anyone else have this problem?

Its just this map. every other map i get 40-60fps with all settings on its highest except for pp being in low, view distance at 2k and video memory at high.

[ginger mcale 11]

This what you describe is when the CPU does limit the FPS. When you would now overclock your CPU, you would see a FPS increase.

[katdogfizzow 13]

Yes, had this problem...had a slide show going on here

We had to remove some scripts to make a city mission playable...specifically, we had an issue with the Urban Patrol Script near the center of town. Once we removed it, we saw big improvement in frame rates.

[Cotala Studios 10]

also, you should change your memory settings in game from 'high' to default, because in general 'default' seems to be higher than high because 'default' sets it to max capacity. also, if worse comes to worse turning off shadows in a city map will increase performance greatly. also, after you start the game, go to your task manager, processes tab, and find a2oa, and right click and set the priority to either highest or realtime.

[jonneymendoza 10]

This what you describe is when the CPU does limit the FPS. When you would now overclock your CPU, you would see a FPS increase.

jesus so now my i7 quad core 920 clocked at 3ghz is a bottleneck!!! for fucksakes!

i7's is as fast as it gets when it comes to cpus!!!

---------- Post added at 05:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:59 PM ----------

also, you should change your memory settings in game from 'high' to default, because in general 'default' seems to be higher than high because 'default' sets it to max capacity. also, if worse comes to worse turning off shadows in a city map will increase performance greatly. also, after you start the game, go to your task manager, processes tab, and find a2oa, and right click and set the priority to either highest or realtime.

i turned down everything and the fps diddnt even budge.

[ginger mcale 11]

jesus so now my i7 quad core 920 clocked at 3ghz is a bottleneck!!! for fucksakes!

i7's is as fast as it gets when it comes to cpus!!!

Doesnt matter, it changes nothing at the current situation / your problem. I tell you facts, nothing added, made-up or whitewashed. Its simply the problem source here.

Check out how much frames it brought to overclock the i7-920 from 3 to 3.5 ghz out our old chernarus:

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/screenshots/original/2009/06/ArmaA2-CPUs-1280.png

Source:

http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,687620/ArmA-2-tested-Benchmarks-with-18-CPUs/Practice/

[jonneymendoza 10]

damm so i really gotta OC my cpu to around 3.5ghz to get maybe an extra 10fps? what cpu u got mate?

[ginger mcale 11]

Yeah, but it should bring you a noticeable FPS boost in special situations (like on Zargabad). Read yourself into the OC thing before doing it, if you arent familiar with it you could damage your hardware.

I have a dual core E8200. Bought that one a year or two ago because i did know it was a very good OC CPU. Ive overclocked it since then from its default clock 2667 mhz to 3840 mhz.

Ive made a month ago a benchmark session with ArmA 2 to see how much the CPU clock did change the FPS in that benchmark mission ive used (Chernogorsk FPS benchmark). Here are the results:

Lowest Graphic Settings

mhz | min | max | avg | avg min

2000 9 48 37 26

2667 18 65 48 35

3840 11 70 59 44

4080 10 68 59 44

Highest Graphic Settings

mhz | min | max | avg | avg min

2000 5 27 19 14

2667 5 31 24 17

3840 9 41 29 16

4080 9 47 29 16

It shows pretty much, how limiting a CPU could be (ive underclocked my CPU to 2000 in this benchmark session to show it). We just have to find a good combination of CPU / graphic card. Sometimes a CPU is limiting FPS, sometimes its the graphic card. This varies from game to game, from situation / map / mission / level of detail, etc., etc,.

[jonneymendoza 10]

At the highest settings u only get 10fps boost from 2000 to 4080 but on lowest it makes more of a difference.

the thing is, last night playing in zargabad, it diddnt matter what settings i used. i have a 480gtx and your telling me my 480gtx is not being used fully in this game or something?

[NeoHazard 10]

I think the issue here with zargabad is that there is exponentially more clutter used in higher density than any other map created to date. The solution in the future will be further optimization of how objects inside the buildings load according to your position. Right now you may have a ton of small objects loading within a certain radius of you that you cannot even see because theyre inside of buildings while your cpu/gpu is working to calculate all the buildings themselves not to mention the AI routines.

BI has the task of filtering out necessity on what needs to be loaded in priority to your position and line of sight. I'm sure as time goes on they will patch it and optimize it to create more fluidity. While those of us with new hardware such as the 480gtx will see improvements with new drivers since we're only on our 3rd or 4th driver since product release and A:OA just came out recently too.

[tacticalnuggets 24]

hit escape to bring up the menu then hit continue, this might be the exact bug i'm running into in zargabad, similar to a memory leak.

[djdeluxe76 10]

I just tried this map in the Editor by adding a OPFOR squad that I was fighting against. Took about 30 mins. I didn't notice any performance drops.

I would say your RAM is a bit low but other than that you got a very decent rig. Your CPU should work ArmA 2 no sweat. But it is true, ArmA 2 likes a powerful CPU more than a powerful GPU.

Say, is HT off because of the RAM amount?

Also, try tinkering with -exThreads and -cpuCount in your shortcut line.

In my case I used -exThreads=7 -cpuCount=4 (settings for quadcore - there are non for octocore) and it improved performance for me.

(For comparison my rig:

Intel Xeon 8-core @ 3 Ghz, 16 GB RAM, GeForce 285 GTX (1 GB VRAM), 1920x1200 (both), Vista x64

Settings on all Very High, AA set to 5. Using ACE, ACEX, hand-picked mix of sound mods and quite a few units, items, islands and effects addons (like WarFX etc.).

View distance 2000.

Getting about 40 frames average on that map.

Of course it ultimately means nothing.)

Also when encountered stuttering earlier (on random maps) I found that my HD was working like crazy. It felt like FPS was low because the gfx card was too slow and tuning down PP helped a little bit but as it turned out it was the HD all along. Because I mixed and matched several sound mods in their entirety which where configured to play sounds for all the same wepon models basically what was happening was that whenever I fired a M16 it would try to read multiple sound files simultaneously from the same HD cluster. And this for each and every event that had sound playing!

Try turning your speaker volume off and listen to your HD (while walking around or firing some weapons) if that also applies to you in some way (could also be paging issues?)

Anyway that's all I can think of...

HTH

Edited August 7, 2010 by djdeluxe76

[oxymoron 10]

Jonney, the mission we played last night had silly amounts of AI on, when I loaded Zagabad in the editor I get 40-60fps

[cannonouscrash 12]

My standard frames on Zargabad are around 25-40fps.

i dont run everything on high, and when im in the city my view distance is about 2clicks at most, Dont really need to see further than that. Jonney, i pressume you are running at 10k view distance, You should make it a lot less

[NeoHazard 10]

I think they'll find a way to optimize the map. They'll probably reduce the LOD distance of the small objects within the buildings (ie. chairs, stools, beds). This way, within a certain radius of your character, significantly less geometry needs to be accounted for.

It will have to be done in such a way that while scoping into a window from a distance, a unit that would otherwise be hiding behind a sack of onions is not cowering in plain view.

Even on some systems, while turning down graphics options may allow for faster framrates, it still doesnt prevent some systems from suffering hiccups when stumbling across a complex assortment of load calls for an abundance objects due to some shortage in communication between HD, RAM, CPU, GPU. A little optimization will never hurt for anyone. Significantly reducing the original vision is another story.

I enjoy this map. I like the layout. I have a little base up on the peak of of a hill east of the village that I do my sandbox testing from. Gives me a nice look out over the populated area to test performance. Then I float on down in the armor of the day and conduct spec ops missions or deal with whatever preplaced obstacles I throw in.

I generally like to play with my setting maxed sans the terrain detail which is locked at high due to the view distance link. I still get playable frames on zargabad albeit it is more weighty than any of the other maps. I'm tossing in a lot of other units too which is putting the hurt on.

I think the map will get optimized for everyone elses sake who doesn't have supercomputers.

[polar bear 10]

go to your task manager, processes tab, and find a2oa, and right click and set the priority to either highest or realtime.

This is dangerous. You will be raising the priority of the game above everything else running on the machine. Some of the things that will be inherently deprioritized as a result include the OS layer code to access the hard drive and the OS code to access the network.

You may as a result suffer serious lag and jittering in multiplayer games as a result of your game taking priority over the TCP networking layer. In either MP or SP mode you may experience jarring freezes in the game as a result of the game itself pre-empting its own attempt to read the hard drive.

I know that "set your application to higher priority" SOUNDS like it should speed up your application but in many cases you simply wind up shooting yourself in the foot.

A better strategy would be to identify the processes on your computer that you feel are competing with the game and set them to lower priority, rather than trying to push the priority of the game up. You can find what these processes are by setting the display fields in Task Manager to show you additional columns like total CPU time and total IO. Take a screenshot, then go play the game for an hour or so. Come back and review task manager again and see which apps grew their total CPU time or IO while the game was running--good candidates for having their priority lowered, or even disable/stop them.

I don't know that this actually happens with the ArmA games, but I am also a counter-strike player, and on counter-strike you can definitely cause jitter and lag by pushing your game priority above the OS for these reasons.

So be careful.

Edited August 8, 2010 by Polar Bear

[jonneymendoza 10]

Jonney, the mission we played last night had silly amounts of AI on, when I loaded Zagabad in the editor I get 40-60fps

Ahh ok. it was really bad for me no matter how low i dropped my settings down :(

My standard frames on Zargabad are around 25-40fps.

i dont run everything on high, and when im in the city my view distance is about 2clicks at most, Dont really need to see further than that. Jonney, i pressume you are running at 10k view distance, You should make it a lot less

The thing is, how come its only this map that sufferes? the other maps are fine and 10x bigger :(

Its a shame because this map is great for PVP and CQC.

[76 0]

jesus so now my i7 quad core 920 clocked at 3ghz is a bottleneck!!! for fucksakes!

i7's is as fast as it gets when it comes to cpus!!!

I have a E8600 oc @ 4GHz and I have no problems with any of the boring desert maps from OA.

Its a shame because this map is great for PVP and CQC.

OA is killing PvP... OA with its desert only maps and infantry camping with FLIR have ruined PvP for ArmA.

[minimalaco 30]

same problem this way, i7 920, 6 gb ram 1600 mhz and gtx 480 = low fps in lagabad.

agreed me of chernogorsk in arma 2 1.01.....

Edited August 15, 2010 by Minimalaco

[jonneymendoza 10]

I have a E8600 oc @ 4GHz and I have no problems with any of the boring desert maps from OA.

OA is killing PvP... OA with its desert only maps and infantry camping with FLIR have ruined PvP for ArmA.

What GPU you got?

[-=seany=- 5]

Like we have known for ages, Buildings take up lots of CPU time for some reason, they have done since Arma2.

Test it in the editor with nothing else, even on Takistan. Going near a cluster of buildings will drop your FPS considerably. Actually the best test is to use the Desert map. Take note of your FPS, now use the Town generation module and see how many FPS you loose.

It was the same in Chenogorsk (sp?) on Chernarus. I would loose 50% of my FPS on my own in the editor just by driving from the country side to the centre of the town.

Doesn't surprise me that Zargabad runs so badly. I do hope the can work more on optimization though. It would be nice if our GPU's actually had something to do when we are near buildings.

[jonneymendoza 10]

Yea when theirs buildings it does take a fps hit for some odd reason. why? the buildings are not as if they are tall high rest buildings. most buildings are no bigger than my local newsagent shop.

GTA4 however has huge buildings and has a larger map then zagrabad but yet the fps seems a bit better in that game.

[maddogx 13]

Yea when theirs buildings it does take a fps hit for some odd reason. why? the buildings are not as if they are tall high rest buildings. most buildings are no bigger than my local newsagent shop.

GTA4 however has huge buildings and has a larger map then zagrabad but yet the fps seems a bit better in that game.

You are equating large buildings with increased complexity. This is false.

Consider the following:

1. Buildings that have fully modelled interiors are far more complex than buildings that do not.

2. Large buildings take up more space than small ones, therefore you can fit less of them into the same area.

3. Big, square buildings like in GTA4 can be modelled with fewer polygons than small houses.

Now compare Zargabad with the city in GTA4. How many buildings in GTA4 have fully modelled interiors (that are not accessed via loading screen)? How many are nothing more than simple square blocks? And how many buildings are there per km² compared to Zargabad?

It all adds up.

Btw., performance in Zargabad increased for me with the latest beta patch. Maybe it would be worth a try, for those who haven't done that yet. :)

[jonneymendoza 10]

In Arma 2 hardly any of the buildings had interiors on it yet still suffer fps drops when you go near them.

[R0adki11 3949]

In Arma 2 hardly any of the buildings had interiors on it yet still suffer fps drops when you go near them.

well maybe you need a better computer then? or lower your graphics settings in game.