AI related slowdowns

[instagoat 133]

Hello. I have searched, but I haven´t found anything pertaining to the topic. There may be dev tickets at devheaven, but I haven´t checked yet, since I wanted to see what I could get here first.

basically I am wondering why the AI causes such massive slowdowns for me, and how to circumvent this problem. The issue is as follows:

Empty takistan, 50 fps, medium to high settings, pp off, antialias on low, 3500 VD, super AI off in difficulty.

Battle with 600 ish Units (300 on each side), with mods or without (running specifically RYD HAC) causes slowdowns to anywhere from 15 to 1 fps. Fps get particularily low when lots of Units are moving/engaging in battle. Idle/static Units do not seem to cause such slowdowns.

I am now wondering why this happens, and if there are any techy tweaks one might perform to alleviate this issue, outside of buying a hexacore quantum uber processor.

Any Ideas?

[maturin 12]

Because... duh?

Honestly, that's the only answer. ArmA 2 AI is one of the most complex CPU-related tasks in any videogame, and a 600-man battle is massive by any and all standards of shooters. There is absolutely no other way about it.

[chrisb 196]

I think your answers are within your post;

3500 vd (on the ground! better with 2000 or lower when soo many meet) use ‘IVD’ to change the vd on the fly in-game.

600 ai (when they meet and go into combat, well, its really going to slow things down)

I would go for lower ai amounts or design a mission in parts, make missions to suit your pc. Large battles where many meet at the same time will slow things down, also how the ai act can be compromised i.e. they may get dumber, again imo, only from testing ai.

Other than that, it may be upgrade time..

[instagoat 133]

Because... duh?

Honestly, that's the only answer. ArmA 2 AI is one of the most complex CPU-related tasks in any videogame, and a 600-man battle is massive by any and all standards of shooters. There is absolutely no other way about it.

True, however, I am wondering if the performance can generally be improved even despite the complexity. I know some people in the industry discussed dedicated AI cards similar to gfx cards in 2008 (there was an article in gamestar on this). Right now, I´m basically grasping for straws because I´d really love to have a smoothly running battle on this scale.

I think your answers are within your post;

3500 vd (on the ground! better with 2000 or lower when soo many meet) use ‘IVD’ to change the vd on the fly in-game.

600 ai (when they meet and go into combat, well, its really going to slow things down)

I would go for lower ai amounts or design a mission in parts, make missions to suit your pc. Large battles where many meet at the same time will slow things down, also how the ai act can be compromised i.e. they may get dumber, again imo, only from testing ai.

Other than that, it may be upgrade time..

If I reduce VD to 500 (lowest possible), there is -no- improvement in fps. It´s true that the AI suffers as performance goes down, but again, I´m basically wondering where these slowdowns come from (code design and technologically speaking) and wether or not there may be a way to improve this in the future.

For example, the Shogun series has individual pathfinding for every soldier in any formation, as well as individual gunlaying and combat for every single member of any formation, with around 2000 ish soldiers on the battlefield in a large battle, and performance is generally okay even in tweaked battles with around 6000 soldiers on my PC.

Arma´s AI by now is a massive behemoth, so I realize that the comparison is a bit off here, but the general Idea remains. Even small battles with 120 soldiers total in Arma 2 produce significant slowdowns. As an example, Manhattan never goes over 15 ish fps for me, not because of the graphic load, but because of the AI milling around the map. There has to be a way to improve the technology to facilitate smoother running somehow. D:

That said, would more CPU cores/more powerful individual cores on the CPU improve the performance? Anyone with a quad+ core who can give some input on this? For commonality, I would also suggest running as few mods as possible: I am only running RYD-HAC in my example, or none at all.

[MavericK96 0]

Yeah, the game bogs down with a lot of AI, and the weird thing is the CPU usage tanks when that happens. IMO it's an engine limitation/bug/whatever.

Also, in regards to multi-core, the game does not really utilize more than 4 cores effectively, and even barely then. It's more designed around a dual core (server only can utilize 2 cores).

I think all we can really hope for is that ArmA 3 is better optimized for multi-core.

[chrisb 196]

It’s a discussion that goes on in every arma community, cpu/ai/frown. But when one shot is fired the cpu follows that shot to its destination wherever that be, get a thousand shots fired and each followed then, well, you know.

I have four cores in a run of the mill gaming pc that is used just for A2 only, the game uses all four cores very well (high +75 all cores in heavy combat) right across the board. I do get an fps increase when vd is lowered, that’s why I use ‘ivd’ just for those heavy moments. There again I make missions for a group of around 30 of us, and do so to the lowest pc spec (and for a2, that’s mine).

I can have 120-150 ai tops in combat at one time and still run a decent playable game, yes it drops fps to the 30’s but its very playable. The map can have hundreds of ai on there with little effect, its just when they meet, so missions are made to suit the format.

What settings are you running, plus your pc spec ?

I am just imagining 6000 ai on the map in a2, my pc would just say ‘on yer bike’...then blow-up..;)