arma 2 not utilizing FX processor

[hiddengearz 1]

I made a new rig about 5 months ago and when i first installed all my games i realized there was a big improvment in the cpu usage compared to my old rig. Games that would take 70-100% of my cpu usage would only take 10% on the new one. Especially arma 2, i would have to close almost everything to play it on my old rig.

My current rig is:

FX-8120

4 X 2GB Ram

HD Rade 7770 1GB Direct CU

Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 AM3+ mother board

There was an improvement in fps on some games when i upgraded but only like ~15 fps on arma 2. I thought my old graphic card GTX 430 may have been bottle necking the CPU so i went out and bought the 7700 to see if that was the case and i got a like a 10 fps boost but arma 2 was still only using ~20% of my cpu even during high stress situations. Everywere i go i see people saying the fx chips are garbage but why is arma 2 using such little cpu usage? Is it because the game is just that old or is this a fx 8120/8150 issue? This has been happening for a while and i thought it was just because the cpu was that good but its starting to bother me.

I'm curious if this happens with any other fx user's and whats the cpu usage like on the intel chips? Also arma2 only takes up like 1.2gbs even when i try to force it to take more in the mod line.

P.S my mod line looks like -maxMem= 2047; -cpuCount= 4; -exThreads= 8;

I've tried disabling 4 cores as well.

[max power 21]

Perhaps your bottleneck lies elsewhere.

edit: I don't know much about your graphics card but I would guess that it could be there, depending on your graphics settings.

Edited November 14, 2012 by Max Power

[hiddengearz 1]

Perhaps your bottleneck lies elsewhere.

Don't know where it could possibily be ram is at 1333mhz I can oc it to 1800mhz if I wanted to. I have 2 HDD's, one with my games on it and the other with the OS & and other applications. Cpu runs @3.4ghz so I don't see where the bottleneck could be. Do intel cpu's have low cpu usage when running arma?

[max power 21]

The devs have stated in the past that cpu usage is not generally a good measure of anything in Arma.

I would imagine your bottleneck is on your graphics card.

[metalcraze 290]

If CPU isn't being used much but you get low FPS you should lower your graphics settings since that's obviously GPU. Especially viewdistance and antialiasing with ATOC on grass enabled since they are what's killing frames.

With 7770 you should try ~3km VD

Also arma2 only takes up like 1.2gbs even when i try to force it to take more in the mod line.

That commandline parameter doesn't increase RAM usage - on the contrary you limit RAM usage with it (and it's at 2047 by default). If ArmA is not using more than 1.2 GBs that's because it doesn't need more.

[SnowSky 12]

Also the harddisk could be a bottleneck - what reading speed does the harddisk with ArmA have? A lot of people reported they gained better performance by putting arma on an SSD, so if you have one or perhaps a friend of you - you might give it a try and see if it changes something

[hiddengearz 1]

Everything is on high except shadows, AA & AA filtering. Ill post a screen shot later on. The HDD that arma runs on is @7200 rpm and the other one is @10000 rpm.

Edited November 14, 2012 by hiddengearz

[kklownboy 43]

Soo, your on a 1080p Display? Your CPU would need a faster GPU and SSD to get more usage... I would think its waiting for info from the slower parts. Also there seems to be a bit of evidence that AMD CPUs just run slower in Arma. My 7770 in my Dev box is to slow for my large displays, it gets best usage with 1024/768 for Arma. My Intel CPU (on my game box) will get to 90% on a couple of cores while the other two are in the 70%+. Just depends what mission/map etc is running.

[chrisb 196]

I think its your 7770 its not quite fast enough, would have been better with a HD7850 or similar. Then again they do overclock quite a lot, have you considered oc’ing it. I have a HD5850 2gb Toxic card and run that at 7850 stock clock i.e. 860 & 1200.

CPU wise, the four cores I have in my A2 pc are running around the same as ‘kklownboy’ 90% for the one and 70-80% for the other three, the game works them hard and really well. Worth looking at oc'ing the card a little possibly, use msi_afterburner take it up a little at a time, see if you get any improvements..

Maybe best research online anyone that may have already tried oc'ing a 7770, got to be some out there, may help you decide, because if its new, you will blow any warranty by oc'ing it..

[RSF TheCapulet 59]

The 7770 isn't a fast card. It's simply enough to run, but not run well. Unfortunately, we're well past the days of affordable high-performing mid-range cards.

OC the hell out of all of it, and start saving up for your next upgrade.

[DualJoe 10]

I've got a fx8120 clocked at 4 Ghz and my GTX560TI is the bottleneck on my system as well. I've also never seen close to 100% usage in a game on any of the cores. At least Arma2CO taxes parts of the cpu somewhat, whereas it falls asleep idling for things like BF3.

You could try installing MSI afterburner and turning on some gpu-statistics in the osd.

I agree that people saying the bulldozers are shit cpus are indeed talking crap.

(There are some benchmarks painting a different picture)

That being said I seriously doubt you'll ever see close to 100% cpu usage on a game.

According to one of the Bis-devs Arma3 with DirectX11 should be able to utilize more multithreaded hardware-power on modern systems, which might increase both framerate and cpu-usage.

Edited November 14, 2012 by DualJoe

[kklownboy 43]

I've got a fx8120 clocked at 4 Ghz and my GTX560TI is the bottleneck

...yeah the 560ti is your issue if you play on 1080p display.

I agree that people saying the bulldozers are shit cpus are indeed talking crap.

(There are some benchmarks painting a different picture)

? a linux benchmark? Not one game there.As stated in your previous line about BF3 getting low usage...typical of this gens AMD CPUs/or platform when gaming. But I didnt say it was crap, but i dont own one.

That being said I seriously doubt you'll ever see close to 100% cpu usage on a game.

According to one of the Bis-devs Arma3 with DirectX11 should be able to utilize more multithreaded hardware-power on modern systems, which might increase both framerate and cpu-usage.

I have seen 100% on a core, but thats a short high, really just 90~/75~ on all four.

[DualJoe 10]

Point was to show the performance of the fx-cpu when using benchmarks that don't have inbuilt favorites.

The benchmark-suite itself is mostly cross-platform actually, so you could run it on windows as well.

The nice thing about that benchmark-suite is that you can install and run it on your own machine and not have to take the sponsored words of popular review-sites for granted. Just like the OP I'm having serious doubts about the claimed inferiority of AMD FX cpus and I share his believe that the cpu is just not utilized to it's full potential. Don't know if the same holds true for an Intel cpu or not.

As for the BF3 idling the cpu, I grant you that was a bit irrelevant, comparing that to the complexity and scope of Arma2 is completely ridiculous. It would have been strange if BF3 did indeed tax the cpu.