Black Screen for 30-45 seconds

[Jacky60 10]

When playing multiplayer after an hour or so the screen will go black for a few seconds. This doesn't happen all the time but does so enough to be annoying. I'm running i7 920 4.2ghz and dual 6990's. Is this a memory 'flush' event or something else?

[pendragonuk 0]

You can manually flush the memory from time to time. Left Shit + number pad - Then type the word flush They are on opposite ends of the keyboard. By doing it yourself at least you are in control of when it happens.

Make sure that in your video settings the video memory is set to "Default" If that doesn't help drop the texture setting. but the video memory is very important as you are running very powerful G/Cards. In your post you say you are running "dual 6990's" do you mean two cards or making reference to the two GPU's on the one card? If you have a pair of 6990's then I wasn't aware of the driver support of quad CrossfireX

Anyhow if you are having issues running the game with such a powerful computer it gives little hope to the rest of us. I can run the game at High/Very High but only 100% fill rate. I would have thought your PC could have every setting completely maxed out. Seeing as your PC is at least twice, possibly four times as powerful as mine!

[Jacky60 10]

I'm running 2 x 6990's as in 2 seperate cards as I stated. I'm familiar with how to memory flush just wasn't sure if this event required one. I'm CPU limited as the cards rarely get above 60-70% usage but if I'm on Cherno and bump AA to SSAO in Catalyst then things start slowing down though this is probably my Intel 320 SSD slowing things down. Video memory is default.

It's definitely using both cards as I noticed frame rate jump a lot after seconds card install, one card was slower than my previous setup. The game just recognises better hardware so draws grass and vegetation much further away (without any intervention on my part) meaning the hardware has to run faster just to stand still. It does look and play a lot better than it did on 5970/5870 trifire though but I still disable postprocessing and keep shadows/aa on high otherwise in forests on cherno things get choppy (choppy is of course relative in this context). I'm pretty sure I'm also limited by server -when lots of players have a lot of AI it seems to slow the server (WASP). Not sure about 100%fill rate never really adjusted it but will experiment now.

Edited June 12, 2011 by Jacky60

[76 0]

Anyhow if you are having issues running the game with such a powerful computer it gives little hope to the rest of us.

So many factors, brand, configuration etc etc

I have Corsair Dominator 1066Mhz 5.5.5.15 (Best in its class)

and brought some...

OCZ Reaper 1066MHz 5.5.5.15 (second best)

The dominator ran quite abit faster than the Reaper according to WEI

and ArmA2 (WEI score was .4 difference, thats a fair bit in WEI, I didn't

get that much variation from a dual 3.33ghz to a quad 3ghz).... if there

is that much difference between top of the line and second... imagine

what happens when you buy middle class kingston etc

[pendragonuk 0]

Well fingers crossed for ArmA:3. I'm sort of hoping the new engine will allow our computers to shine... ArmA:2 is such a tricky game to run right, seriously if a guy running a pair of the the worlds most powerful graphics cards can't get this game to shine then there is no hope for us :)

I like to think my system is doing quite nicely for it's self. It plays "regular" fps games with ease. Everything maxed out and running high fps. I have just been playing and yea it looks nice and runs smooth. It just having spent what I have spent, knowing how well it plays other games you sort of get a little pissed off. I just have to resign myself to the fact that ArmA eats computers and spits them out with contempt.

May be in a few years when computers are 10x more powerful than they are today I will revisit ArmA:2 just to see what the fuss was about and run this game completely maxed. Right now I will have to put up with running it smoothly at lower settings.

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[.kju 3244]

try different video memory settings in the graphic options

[pendragonuk 0]

I have been spending some of this evening reading to forum and messing about with the settings in ArmA:2. Well I tried something and was very much surprised by the results...

Jacky60, run a benchmark then disable CrossfireX in the AMD Vision Engine control centre and run the test again...

[Muerte LOL 10]

Have known numerous people running 2 video cards that have had nothing but trouble, once they switch to a single card they had much better performance. Arma just doesn't seem to like dual video cards.

[pendragonuk 0]

Well I'm very confused, if I turn CrossfireX off the game runs exactly the same. Looking at the ArmA2OA.cfg I can see that with CrossfireX the LocalVRAM is 2GB and with CrossfireX off it's one GB.

localVRAM=2113486848;

I did notice that the second line dose not change, should it in a dual GPU set up?

adapter=-1;

language="English";

adapter=-1;

3D_Performance=31915;

Resolution_Bpp=32;

Resolution_W=1920;

Resolution_H=1080;

refresh=60;

winX=16;

winY=32;

winW=800;

winH=600;

winDefW=800;

winDefH=600;

Render_W=2400;

Render_H=1350;

FSAA=0;

postFX=0;

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1000;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=2;

HDRPrecision=8;

lastDeviceId="";

localVRAM=2113486848;

nonlocalVRAM=2147483647;

vsync=0;

AToC=0;

Windowed=0;

I must admit my ArmA2OA.cfg looks a little odd has I have been messing with the setting a lot in the last few days. but apart from the change in localVRAM I can see nothing about the second GPU. I know that the driver thinks it a CrossfireX game because I have turn on the big icon in the corner of the screen that tells me when it's running CrossfireX

Strange how Fraps can see the fps but not the blooming great big CrossfireX logo in the top right hand corner. Grrr...

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Having done some reading CrossfireX works in one of several way, on of them dose nothing for performance but helps quality. My current thinking is if you are chasing frame rate at the cost of quality and therefore have most of the setting low or off you lose most if not all of the advantages of CrossfireX with ArmA:2. I think but have not confirmed the drivers are using Super Anti-Aliasing not tile or scissor but I need to do more reading on this subject.

What is not helping at the moment is AMD are in the middle of changing the driver control software and their help files have not kept up with the changes. It refers to things that are not there and dose not mention thing that are!

[Jacky60 10]

Pendragon you're right when I disable crossfire on ccc I get half the frme rate in unigine but in Arma2 the frame rate stays exactly the same and it looks exactly the same. Don't know what's going on. Please advise! Actually I'm sure crossfire is working as all the gpu's monitored in Afterburner are showing the same usage between 60% and 85%.

Edited June 16, 2011 by Jacky60

[pendragonuk 0]

Pendragon you're right when I disable crossfire on ccc I get half the frme rate in unigine but in Arma2 the frame rate stays exactly the same and it looks exactly the same. Don't know what's going on. Please advise! Actually I'm sure crossfire is working as all the gpu's monitored in Afterburner are showing the same usage between 60% and 85%.

It freaked me out when I saw it for the first time... I have since run the game an monitored the GPU usage. When running in CrossfireX both GPUs are working. The game cfg file identifies the RAM on both cards.

However there is no increase in frame rate at all. If anything I get a small boost of 5+ fps when running on one card! It's completely counter intuitive.

There are a couple of things, firstly there are several methods CrossfireX can use, one dose nothing for outright performance. I dose a fancy image quality job. this dose nothing for your frame rate but makes it all look nice. I think this is the method being used, ramp your post processing, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and see if your GPU usage goes up and down with the settings.

In most games the work load of rendering the game is shared by the GPU's, using different methods but the 3D work is done by the available GPU's and you get a bump in frame rate.

This is not the case with ArmA, however there was a post on the BIS dev blog today that points to a different issue I wasn't fully aware of and probably lays at the heart of the whole ArmA eating computer issue. Why no one get "Good" performance in this game.

You can read it HERE

I'll be honest, a lot of it went over my head but it points to an issue I have suspected. The image we see on our screen isn't too hard for our graphics cards to draw. I always thought it was due to the massive amounts of data ArmA is asking our computers to move about between Disk, RAM, CPU & GPU. It's not our graphics cards! It's the fact we are playing a simulation as if it were a game. A simulation is not the same as your regular First Person Shooter, this is not Battlefield!

• when the simulation of the objects in the game world is complex, increasing frame rate becomes very hard, as the simulation can be very hard to optimize
  
• when you reduce the frequency of simulation for some game objects to improve performance, the objects start jumping
  
• it is hard to make the rendering to run in parallel with simulation, as it is sharing the same data, resulting in either race conditions or a significant synchronization overhead
  

This looks like an issue they are actively working on, but as it stands now it makes very little difference what GPU you are running once it over a certain level. It's not the choke to performance, I think much the same could be said for most of the hardware. Super fast RAM, SSD GPU even CPU at some point no longer affect game performance. Or at least you face diminishing returns. Your computer is at least twice the power of mine but you don't get twice the performance, you get maybe 10%.

It's the game it's self, the GPU can't be asked to render an image using data the CPU is processing, not at he same time! The data simply can not be in two places at once with this game engine. With the current crop of new hardware we may be getting close the absolute performance of the game engine. We will not start to see the benefits our our hardware without a step change in the way the game works. What we see beginning to happen now it the ground work for solving this issue. My hope is it will be seen to benefit ArmA:2 but with the eventual advancement for ArmA:3

So for you and me with our multi GPU Crossfire systems, as it stands now even if they did update the way CrossfireX worked we wouldn't see much of an advantage. What appears on the screen really isn't that tough for our cards to put there, that are doing all they are being asked to do with room to spare. Heck the CPU's aren't maxed out by this game neither are my GPU's but still it runs slow. My system has spare capacity that the game can not use. It's not like running Prim95 or the Heaven benchmark, my system is warm after an ArmA session but not roasting like running a benchmark cook-in! CPU temp running ArmA on my rig is 40 C barely braking a sweat, jog in the park, but still micro stutters, popping and low frame rate. Good thing I love this game...