Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[rogerx 11]

I already posted my speculation on http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=716 , they neglected to compile in multi CPU support, as they also neglected with supporting > 4GB memory support. It's a quite trivial fix.

Also am amazed, they didn't compile in a debugger (ie. gdb) within the game, as most CPU's these days can easily handle this. (ie. I can run flightgear with all eye-candy faster within gdb versus without on my i7 4x3.5G!)

Regardless, they should have compiled in these trivial fixes, and allowed us experience programmer to enable the feature manually via flags for further testing.

Another thought, if you do enable one hardware feature, it's going to cause more stress exponentially on another piece of hardware, so maybe they are throttling resources too, in order to stay focused.

[MrToaster 1]

My i5-2320s are actually pretty decent running this game and they can be over clocked to 3.7 Ghz coupled with my EVGA GTX 650 ti 2gb SSC on editor mode with 50 AI on both sides I can get 30-50 fps depending if i have it on max or high setting.

[Touch Off 10]

Voted, Tested. Seems like there could be inherent performance issues with the engine. I sincerely hope not but I'm losing faith, really.

Editor- 5 squads each side, all GFX on low and my 3570K can't cope. GTX670, 8GB 1600 RAM.

That's 50AI infantry. Doesn't seem good enough.

[wasabi 1]

i was visting my brother yesterday and tried it out on his pc, hes got a i7 2600k and a 660 ti .. i made a zombie sandbox server and via 5 minutes the game went down to 25fps with around 13zombies following me only(on high)

i wonder if the developers are expecting us to simply blow away a thousand and some hundred bucks on a new pc to play it decently ... ? thats outrageous.. like i said, a statement from a dev would be nice.. i like to remember,

Recommended:

OS:Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1

Processor:Intel Core i5-2300 or AMD Phenom II X4 940 or better

Memory:4 GB RAM

Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 or AMD Radeon HD 7750 with 1 GB VRAM or better

DirectX®:11

Hard Drive:20 GB HD space

Sound: DirectX®-compatible

i for myself am above that, and i cant even play it on standart with a acceptable framerate(not talking about mp, but even sp)...

EDIT: sorry, im getting more and more sceptical

INTELLIGENCE

There were unfortunate issues with Store.bistudio.com during the release, and getting access codes to people took far too long. Our apologies! We are very happy on the other side to read the many positive reports regarding performance and the fluidity of movement, and the Alpha in general.

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=716

Yeah right.....

Edited March 11, 2013 by wasabi

[Tintee 10]

My overclocked 2600k is using all 8 threads in game with quite balanced peaks of 50% on each thread and hyperthreading is working fine.

What stuck out most was that gpuz was reporting that the game used a max of 3069MB of video memory in the short 10 minute test i did running at 1920x1080 and most things maxed, but not all. I have a 4GB GTX680. I`m guessing most people run with less than 3gb gpus so this will surely have some negative effect on them? Also gpu max usage was 84%. I started gpuz AFTER the game had loaded and while i was in the game playing. In game fps is not great with a best of probably 40 fps and a norm of about 25-30 and extreme dips to as low as 18 fps. The mission was CO 40 air cavalry 1.1. But i notice wild variations depending on what mission i`m running. Some run really well and some seem to run like crap.

All above was tested by me opening up a small server game. My performance is far better when on someone else`s hosted game, like when my friend runs it on his 5.1ghz, 6 core intel rig. He reports a similar experience to my own.

I`m on the latest beta drivers from nvidia (314.14).

[gwebb417 1]

I was playing around on the SCUBA mission in singlplayer, and noticed that when looking in areas not consisting of many objects or AI, the GPU is around 80-90% usage. Now that I have been moving across the map towards the enemy base, I noticed that the GPU usage went to down to about 40-50% usage, leaving me with 20fps instead of the 40-60fps that I was getting beforehand. I would think that if entering an area with immense amounts of objects, AI, and other things, that it would require more GPU usage, not less.

[CalinTM 1]

I can get much better fps in the editor. I think the AI is the problem and the gpu and cpu usage, and overall optimization.

[Tiglet 10]

Hi guys,

how about posting some performance issues in here considering the game? It's obvious the game needs some serious tweaking on the performance side but what are specific situations where your performance drops?

One that makes my FPS go from around 30 to <10 is when I go in vehicle view (so not third person). It completely destroys my FPS. Especially when I'm in the gunner seat of some kind of APC and the gun has heats sensor view (or whatever it's called).

Other performance issue is ofcourse when there's lots of AI in the game, it will be uplayable.

My gaming PC:

I7 2600K

8GB RAM

660GTX 2GB

Decreasing the resolution or the graphics don't seem to do much about the performance.

[white 1]

The huge discussion thread about the issue was closed on steam, very democratic way to shut people up/solve the issue (when most there were just asking for the issue to be placed on the known issues alpha hub). its not like one could moderate it and erase/ban people with over the top comments in order to keep the discussion alive. oh wait. On the other hand shutting people up usually just makes them find other places to voice their opinions, like gaming sites/other known foruns/twitter/facebook, etc. doesnt solve anything.

if i were to guess i would think that the topic was left unmoderated as an excuse to close it so it wouldnt stay on the front page all the time like it was, because it was kind of an embarassment, just my opinion.

I kind of feel disappointed whenever i see this kind of censorship, wonder how long this thread here will survive.

Edited March 11, 2013 by white

[sqb-sma 66]

That low fps in first person whilst in vehicles is probably due to PIP (Picture In Picture). Try turning that down or off (it's a resource intensive setting, and fairly useless).

[Jimieus 1]

Oh Look! Yet another performance thread! inb4lock

[phoboss 1]

like with crashes, performance also depends a lot on the server and the mission its running atm... I have very poor performance (20+ fps), and a lot of crashes on Wasteland servers, and really great performance (40+ fps) and very little crashes on good blitzkrieg servers...

[tet5uo 4]

I'm really sad about the performance of this alpha.

I'm on this system:

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/K17MnCd7rmICDBA5s7fCUD4

i7 2600k (OC to 4.5gHz)

8gb DDR3

3way SLI of gtx580 3gb

6-disk SSD array w/ dedicated controller

I get as low as 20 FPS in areas while watching my CPU usage barely use more than one thread and the GPU's just starved for draw-calls running at 15% usage each. (so low I had to make sure they were set to performance in the driver so it would stop down-clocking them to 2d speeds)

[Alienfreak 0]

I can get much better fps in the editor. I think the AI is the problem and the gpu and cpu usage, and overall optimization.

It has nothing to do with the AI.

Wastelands has 0 AIs on it but still manages to give me 22 FPS on foot an 15 FPS in a car

[Raklodder 1]

Dwarden (developer) might be the one who forces Valve to close their thread on Steam:

guess enough, this thread is closed, the issue is known, the Alpha is out less than 1 week there is no yet even first update out and the level of outrages by some members is thru roof ...

Then you need to acknowledge this problem, on your main site, tells us the truth, anything less (at least in my ears) would be considered fraud and should be enforced by law!

http://alpha.arma3.com/known-issues

Edited March 11, 2013 by Raklodder

[rasdenfasden 12]

We've had some very non-constructive and aggressive posts in this thread.

Most of them by people forgetting that this is the first version of a public alpha, but frankly many of them by Dwarden as well.

The important thing is that the community has highlighted what probably should be the number 1 issue for BIS to address right now. Remember, it's Monday, and the Alpha has been out for less than a week. With a major issue like this, the developers need time to discuss this amongst themselves before any concrete announcements can happen.

[Overvolt 10]

I have lock, game running very good in my PC. No AA others in MAX above 40FPS

[tet5uo 4]

We've had some very non-constructive and aggressive posts in this thread.

Most of them by people forgetting that this is the first version of a public alpha, but frankly many of them by Dwarden as well.

The important thing is that the community has highlighted what probably should be the number 1 issue for BIS to address right now. Remember, it's Monday, and the Alpha has been out for less than a week. With a major issue like this, the developers need time to discuss this amongst themselves before any concrete announcements can happen.

Yeah, I think there is no excusing the rude behavior and insulting posts... but I guess I can still see why these people are upset.

It's probably due to the fact that we've seen this issue persisting through the entire life of Arma2 and OA, and now it's rearing it's head of course in Arma3... I think people are just becoming frustrated from the ongoing nature of this issue. Still no reason to be childish and nonconstructive, but I guess people's passion for their favorite game can cloud the judgement sometimes.

[k3lt 3]

Yeah, I think there is no excusing the rude behavior and insulting posts... but I guess I can still see why these people are upset.

It's probably due to the fact that we've seen this issue persisting through the entire life of Arma2 and OA, and now it's rearing it's head of course in Arma3... I think people are just becoming frustrated from the ongoing nature of this issue. Still no reason to be childish and nonconstructive, but I guess people's passion for their favorite game can cloud the judgement sometimes.

It's even more frustrating because Arma 3 itself is an amazing game with unmatched potential, but in this case performance can be a deal breaker..

If the performance issues are dealt with for low/med pc specs it would not only make actual player base happy but also you can expect sales sky rocket which would yield bigger income for BIS and also increase player base tremendously which is win-win for everyone.

I really hope this will be #1 priority.

Edited March 11, 2013 by k3lt

[CalinTM 1]

And if they aren't able to fix this ? Ubisoft has a similar problem on Assassins Creed 3, in spite of thousands of complains on the forums aboud fps drops, ubisoft didn't even acknowledged the issue.

[Leopardi 0]

We've had some very non-constructive and aggressive posts in this thread.

Most of them by people forgetting that this is the first version of a public alpha, but frankly many of them by Dwarden as well.

The important thing is that the community has highlighted what probably should be the number 1 issue for BIS to address right now. Remember, it's Monday, and the Alpha has been out for less than a week. With a major issue like this, the developers need time to discuss this amongst themselves before any concrete announcements can happen.

Negativity is understandable, since this problem has been out there for years unfixed.

[tremanarch 6]

what would be really helpful if we could find out the real bottleneck here.

I found out that Destruction of buildings / houses has a huge fps hit! Smoke does also have a huge fps hit. I can only comment client side.

Would be nice if somone with a server could comment how the server fps is dependant on several values / scenarios And how the client fps is dependant on server fps also!

the arma engine has some unique features / way of doing stuff. For example guys with a high fps have also a higher round of fire etc etc.

--

if the CPU / even one core isnt at 99% and the GPU either there must be something else we are forgetting - its the combination of many factors maybe and somewhere lies the bottleneck!

Guys with a good RAM, could try and just switch memory settings to very high and to very low and see if this has an impact?

I found out that by using an SSD I got a huge fps increasee in ArmA 2! << this could be a hint to whats the real fps bottle neck here.

is there someone with a extremely fast SSD RAID System who could try and play the same scene on SSD RAID and then on a normal HDD and tell if its a huge difference. try different scenarios as well.

give prove with a short video / screenshot showing FPS.

lets be constructive guys, we are sitting in the same boat. we the players and BIS wants a3 as best as possible! let us help here! we have the manpower to test out stuff on so many different PC Machines - I guess we have a much higher chance to find the bottle neck!!!

We participate in the alpha not only to play - but at least I said to myself that I will help and do my best in my free time to help and streamline arma 3 that it gets the props it really earns.

Edited March 11, 2013 by tremanarch

[ast65 10]

I was playing around on the SCUBA mission in singlplayer, and noticed that when looking in areas not consisting of many objects or AI, the GPU is around 80-90% usage. Now that I have been moving across the map towards the enemy base, I noticed that the GPU usage went to down to about 40-50% usage, leaving me with 20fps instead of the 40-60fps that I was getting beforehand. I would think that if entering an area with immense amounts of objects, AI, and other things, that it would require more GPU usage, not less.

it´s your CPU that can´t cope in those situations so your GPU´s running 50% idle basically

[Raklodder 1]

It's even more frustrating because Arma 3 itself is an amazing game with unmatched potential, but in this case performance can be a deal breaker..

If the performance issues are dealt with for low/med pc specs it would not only make actual player base happy but also you can expect sales sky rocket which would yield bigger income for BIS and also increase player base tremendously which is win-win for everyone.

I really hope this will be #1 priority.

Indeed. Let's be honest: we all love ARMA (includes me) but it's just that this issue should have been addressed earlier, and not more than four years past A2's initial release.

[asd123 1]

This is what i posted on steam forums.

Hello, i'm having trouble with my fps rate in ArmA 3 and its weird because my computer specs are much better than the recommended ones.

I'm using

Core i5 3570k 4.3 GHz

Sapphire Radeon HD 6850

8GB Ram 1600 Mhz

OS: Win 7 Ultimate 64bit

When im running the game on like default Standard/High (1280x1024) i'm having about 20-35 FPS (Unless im in clean fields and such)

Which is weird because as i said my computer should'nt run the game laggy on Ultra.

Thanks in advance

btw, sometimes it goes to even 1-15 fps

I hope BI posts a sticky thread for the solution if there is one, or just make this problem disappear, because im not gonna check this whole thread for different solutions. :mad: