Fps lag on good pc

[Warsteiner 1]

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry, this has probably been posted over a hundred times but I just can't really seem to

find a solution for it.

First of all.. I really love ArmA 2. There are so many possibilities in the game and so much

realism. I really like the gameplay and the way people coöperate in squads and play together.

Unfortunately I can't play without some issues here and there. For example: I've just started a singleplayer mission

and me and my squadmates are walking towards a village with some hostiles in it. When I come a little closer the village, my fps starts

dropping increasingly (to around 27 or less). But the weird thing is, when I look away from the village, the fps goes up to 50-60 again.

This is weird because I recently bought a pc that can handle Hitman: Absolution, Black ops II, Guild Wars 2 and borderlands 2 without any lagg. :S

Is this maybe because of my processor? Or is it the graphics card? Because from what I know, my graphics card isn't that bad at all.

Here are my specs:

AMD FX-6300 Six-Core Processor (6 CPUs), ~3.5GHz

8192MB RAM

AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB

Windows 7 Home premium

64 bits

I hope you can help me on finding out what's causing this lag.

[SnowSky 12]

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Your system seems fine, may I ask you for your visual settings ingame?

Did you overshoot the settings perhaps?

Whats your 3d Resolution, and fillrate or display resolution?

What's the Distance view? and whats the rest of the settings?

There are still some settings that are hard to max out without a high performance loss.

I won't compare ArmA with other games as the engine has to work quite a bit different to them, especially regarding the distance and amount of objects.

[babyloncome 3]

The best way to reduce FPS drop in Arma 2 is install a SSD drive, before I got mine I would be getting about 20fps in towns, after I am now getting 40fps plus (btw - any thing over 40fps in Arma is awesome). A 120 Gb SSD are now only 60notes with 64Gb ones about 30notes... You have to remember that all those textures are being constantly streamed from your hard drive and it's this that can cause low fps. To be honest 27fps isn't that bad, remember that animated cartoons are only 24fps.

[chrisb 196]

Its how your system is set up, I think.:)

Will of course depend on your settings, in heavy areas such as ‘Podagorsk’ the following, with lots of tree’s etc, 2000vd.

With aa and atoc enabled as here

With aa and atoc disabled as here

If you go onto some terrains it can be great as here, again 2000vd. Of course there are 100’s of building’s, mainly arma ones, but virtually no vegetation (city 34, 51km desert terrain).

But on the whole its system specific, I don’t have an SSD nor will I bother to get one for my A2 pc, if your pc is optimized well, there should be no need really, certainly for your system there.

These examples are, with a 4000vd third person, first person & zoomed.. Not sure where I took those, looks like an 'Ace' pack island..

In Cherno itself you should aim for; a single unit stood in the city ‘Editor’, with a mixture of highish settings, here & here, again 2000vd, reduce it to 1000vd which is more than enough for cities etc and you should get higher fps.

These are only my examples and of course imo. Run your system lean and clean, my A2 system is a gaming pc with only A2 on it, probably makes a difference..

Look in Q&A under stickies: 'Can my system run this' and Troubleshooting' in stickies 'Tweak guide', there should be something there I would have thought.

Edited February 5, 2013 by ChrisB

[Warsteiner 1]

Alright, thanks for the replys. I might consider getting an SSD drive then.

Also, I have no problem with looking at huge landscapes or something. It's mostly towns and places where lots

of hostiles/players are. Is there maybe a chance that it might be my processor? Since that's the thing calculating the movements..

Btw, I have the graphics all on highest because I checked my system requirements on www.canyourunit.com and it told me I could

handle it all on highest quality.

[Neopas 10]

Btw, I have the graphics all on highest because I checked my system requirements on www.canyourunit.com and it told me I could

handle it all on highest quality.

Your pc is fine (better than mine anyway) but not THAT good.In Arma2 increased view distance and lot of AI`s can stress much beefier systems.According to my experience a ssd drive makes texture streaming smoother and reduces potential stuttering but will not increase framerate.

Check the stickys at this section of the forum for more info.

[maddogx 13]

Take the view distance down to around 6km and reduce post processing to medium - you should see a massive frame rate improvement without much loss in visual quality.

[Warsteiner 1]

I have the view distance at 3 km, post processing to medium. but I just came back from playing a little dayz and I had the same issue. When I looked at the town, my fps dropped MASSIVELY ( to around 7 fps ). Then I looked away to some huge ass landscape, and it was fine :S

[maddogx 13]

I have the view distance at 3 km, post processing to medium. but I just came back from playing a little dayz and I had the same issue. When I looked at the town, my fps dropped MASSIVELY ( to around 7 fps ). Then I looked away to some huge ass landscape, and it was fine :S

At 7fps there is definitely something wrong. However, from what I understand DayZ currently requires the latest beta (101480), which reportedly has some performance issues, even on low settings. It's possible that you are suffering from those issues.

With any luck, the next beta will fix this situation.

[kklownboy 43]

well he needs to tell us his real settings. My guess is he has a 19/10 display, and that is tuff with his card, 3kVD and med PP, not to mention the grass....

[Neopas 10]

Since the problem is mostly in towns, reducing object detail and using less AA may help (if the problem is in the settings). Definitely try the latest beta ,as suggested, especially since you are playing DayZ.

[Warsteiner 1]

Yea but Its kind of weird because I have a lot of things on medium already. Can you tell me what to upgrade? Wether its a new video card or processor?

---------- Post added at 11:34 ---------- Previous post was at 10:46 ----------

I SHOULD be able to run ArmA 2 on medium settings smoothly when I can run crysis 2 on highest graphics without any problems?? :S

[maddogx 13]

I SHOULD be able to run ArmA 2 on medium settings smoothly when I can run crysis 2 on highest graphics without any problems?? :S

In theory, yes.

Can you please post a screenshot of your video settings screen with the advanced settings visible?

[doveman 7]

From what I've been told, it's just a limitation of the engine where AI can have a bad impact on framerates https://dev-heaven.net/issues/59932#note-17

Apparently it also works a lot better on Intel rather than AMD CPUs for some reason :(

I vary between 50fps down to 17fps or lower on some missions, I guess it depends on how much AI is being processed and the amount of scripts.

I tried running from a RAMdisk by the way, which was several times faster than any SSD and that doesn't help. As someone else has already said, an SSD will probably help with any stuttering when loading textures but not the framerate.

[kklownboy 43]

@Doveman A RAMDISK has to be really big, or your still using the HDD. A SSD is better than a RAMDISK. A RD can be ( and is) cached on the HDD... sooo you still have that bottleneck. In my usage of RDs, I found that it was really helpfull in loadtimes, if i had all the islands and objects in my RD.

AMD CPUs are fine(ish) its the platform/mb_chipset-IO that is problematic to certain instructions. It seems that when alot of different stuff is going on AMD cpus stall... but that is kinda BS of me to say that. Need some real benchmarks on the IO and size of L3 cache when playing ARMA.

4.2+ GHZ on a CPU will help alot for AI, but if the rest of the platform is just as importation. But for me the single biggest improvment on FPS was a 7970. And for my friends it was there 680. They are just so much better than my 6970, not to mention my pair of 4870ocX2's.

For stutter and loads, using a SSD fixed all that, but "frames ahead" for your vidcard can fine tune that also. Then there is inputlag... which gets worse when you get low frames.

---------- Post added at 09:51 ---------- Previous post was at 09:47 ----------

@ Warsteiner; There was/is a issue with 7870s that had there clocks drop to @2D speed, it is fixed on newer versions, and there maybe a Bios upgrade for it. In your CCC under performance, set your power to 20%.

[metalcraze 290]

OP, your CPU is the weak link when it comes to combat. Top of the line i5 or i7 are what you need to handle bigger battles and more soldiers with smooth FPS.

Although FPS shouldn't drop hard even with AMD CPU...

[Warsteiner 1]

Ok, thanks a lot for the replys. I will post a screenshot of my advanced settings :)

---------- Post added at 12:23 ---------- Previous post was at 12:21 ----------

http://i1323.photobucket.com/albums/u582/coen454/ArmA2OA2013-02-0811-44-20-86_zps1cd83abe.png (848 kB)

---------- Post added at 13:14 ---------- Previous post was at 12:23 ----------

but even when I put everything on normal/low, I still get lag when I look at villages, or when Im in villages :S doesnt matter if there arent any AI's in it..

[domokun 515]

warsteiner: the link to your advanced video settings doesn't work

also, try these tweaks:

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?85124-ArmA2-OA-%28low%29-performance-issues&p=2081466#post2081466

and let us know how you get on!

But basically 2 things kill framerates on A2, draw distance and anti-aliasing.

In terms of hardware, a REALLY powerful (4+ GHz) quad core and SSD are essential.

[chrisb 196]

@warsteiner

I know it’s a nuisance, but can you list down what you have tried, I can see you have tried listing your setting’s, although the link doesn’t work.

Its tempting to say 'I’ve tried everything', but you will be surprised at the amount of players who just keep repeating the same tweaks and thinking ‘I’m getting nowhere’.

List down yourself what you have tried, you may have to go back to some to mix them with other tweaks to get your game working. But if you have a list, then you know what you have tried already and where the tweak info is.

One thing is for certain, your system should run this game..;)

[Warsteiner 1]

@ChrisB You are right. I haven't tried anything yet, but what I have tried is basicly putting the Post prossesing on low and the draw distance down and the draw distance had the biggest effect on my fps.

I'll also make a list ,as you mentioned, with everything I've tried to make the game run better.

@Domokun Alright, Ill try putting down the the anti-aliasing then (since I have that maxed out :S). But about that SSD you are talking about, will it improve my fps that much? What does it do?

O, and ill try the tweaks you've sent me.

[RadicalAtHeart 11]

You are being CPU bottlenecked. Monitor GPU usage. If your FPS is <60 and GPU usage is <99-100% then you have cpu bottleneck

Your best bet is to decrease view distance to 2000.

I never use post processing because I want my gpu power to go to object details or maybe grass or shadows.

Reduce view distance and overclock that CPU by 20-30% if you can

[Leon86 13]

Yeah, cpu limited most likely.

Settings that stress the cpu the most are viewdistance, objects detail and terrain detail (not sure about that one). Also set shadows high or off, otherwise it'll use the cpu for shadows, that stuff is best left to the gpu.

[Warsteiner 1]

Yea exactly. View distance, terrain detail and objects detail indeed make a huge difference in fps! But the problem is, I already have the view distance to 2020. At least in DayZ. But what do I against the cpu bottleneck and how

can I check the GPU usage? Sorry, Im not that great with computers :(

Edited February 14, 2013 by Warsteiner

[chrisb 196]

This (centre one) monitors most of the what you would want to see being used in-game. I have it for cpu monitoring, but I prefer MSI_afterburner for gpu monitoring, but MSI doesn’t monitor amd cpu usage, well my addition doesn’t, may have changed.

Both of these applications will show you in-game monitoring, so you can keep an eye on what and where your worse areas are, plus will give you an idea of what costs what (fps wise) when changing settings etc in-game.

I would always recommend having an fps counter available in-game anyway, even if not on show all the time, ‘dfs_fpscounter’ mod (armaholic), is a good one, only for fps mind.

Once you have what you need information wise sorted out with the other applications, using dfs mod will be a good idea, just to keep checking every now and then, plus it has no hit to performance. Has to be said the other two applications and most applications of this nature, do have a performance hit, whilst using them, “but need’s mustâ€, as they say.

[Warsteiner 1]

Ok, Ive made noted some things that increase and do not increase fps. Heres the list:

Antialiasing (highest to none) = 20 fps gain

Objects detail (very high to very low) = 20 fps gain

Terrain detail = 0 fps gain

Post possessing = 12 fps gain

Ppa = 0 fps gain

texture detail = 0 fps gain

shadow detail = 0 fps gain

Hdr quality = o fps gain.

View distance = huge fps gain

(view distance is currently under 2000)

I still have a lot of lagg in cities and when zombies spawn (in DayZ).

---------- Post added at 18:31 ---------- Previous post was at 18:08 ----------

I also checked my gpu usage in game. It's from 22 to 40 % when Im having around 20-30 fps :)