Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[Leon86 13]

Yeah, performance in that mission is pretty bad, pip is disabled I presume?

[langosik 1]

i've tried open Nvidia control panel Managed 3D setting for arma 3 all best quality .....when i run game i have in helicopter plus 5 r more fps and game looks shiny and pretty impressive now you can try it

[punisherITA 1]

Is this really Arma III? Or is it Operation Flashpoint³ or Arma II²?

Yeah, I have all of them (and I bought them of course) and I did it with Arma III Alpha too because I thought Behemia Intercative could learn from past mistakes.

Well, actually I was wrong, I hoped that the "III" in that number meant BI finally started to thought how to make its game (yeah it's just one actually) really a modern game, with full CPU(\GPU) support and whatsoever.

Nothing changed in this front.

Arma III is damn hard as Arma II was, with a little more polished graphics, yeah, but with the same lack of hardware support.

Now, the two screenshots you all know proving it:

http://i.imgur.com/USKkvXQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/R9KuQPR.jpg

As you can see QUAD cores @same frequencies go exactely the same as ESA or EIGHT-cores CPUs.

So the game can at max use 4-cores. And that means that for DayZ standalone too (seeing both Arma II and III have the same support) it will be just the same!

We are in 2013 and we paid for a brand new game, actually it have the same price but also the same limits (great, big limits and I can say it because I played it more than 300+ houres) of your old Arma II.

This just sucks. I won't for sure buy new hardware just for playing your game because you didn't spend any resources in its real optimization. Just I won't buy anything more from you.

Just my two cents and the honest opinion of a disappointed customer.

I am sorry, I didn't see this thread before (and BI of course closed mine). Anyway I think here the argument is a little different.

Here someone of you are trying to understand why you are having low FPS given the game and how to try to optimize it.

This problem from my point of view is really clear:

- the game doesn't bother of core that exceed the number of 4 and we can't do anything to optimize it seeing it's an engine limitation and we can just try to make BI change the things.

Edited April 1, 2013 by punisherITA

[nikiforos 450]

Unfortunately I believe it's too late for BIS to implement better utilization of CPUs.

ALPHA is already out so I guess it's too late. I totally understand people complaining, but I don’t think it will make any difference now.

[punisherITA 1]

Unfortunately I believe it's too late for BIS to implement better utilization of CPUs.

ALPHA is already out so I guess it's too late. I totally understand people complaining, but I don’t think it will make any difference now.

Yeah I know, but since Arma II to Arma III they had all the time to make it and they choose not to do it, so I at least show my disappointment. And all the people that bought the game should do it.

[NeMeSiS 11]

The issue is that your CPU becomes even LESS utilized when AI appears. Does that not seem backwards to you?

It seems PCs are running into some kind of bottleneck other than the CPU, it is the only reason that I can think of that makes the CPU wait on data and thus lowering its use. Though clearly it isn't the GPU(Which wouldn't even make sense), and RAM speed/size barely matters anything, and most certainly isn't a bottleneck. It may very well be something like CPU cache/northbridge/southbridge/hard disks or possible some odd scheduling ingame (though that wouldn't explain why the FPS still drops like a brick). Though it does make me think 'what the hell is the AI doing requesting all that data from somewhere else'...

In that case, making it more multithreaded than it currently is would do shit anyway.

[Leon86 13]

It seems PCs are running into some kind of bottleneck other than the CPU, it is the only reason that I can think of that makes the CPU wait on data and thus lowering its use.

I'm sure this can be explained by how the game behaves when you try complex stuff. on my system arma is usually around 50%.

If you try overclocking the performance scales pretty well with clockspeed. that's reason enough to believe it is really the cpu where the bottleneck is. Of course it would be interesting to test at different memory speeds as well, run armamark 5 times. see what that does.

[ManoloCabezaBolo 1]

i just want to add myself to the complain and show my disappointment too, fixing the bottleneck should be priority number one over any other thing at this moment

[daze23 1]

And that means that for DayZ standalone too (seeing both Arma II and III have the same support) it will be just the same!

they're trying to work around these issues with the DayZ standalone by off-loading stuff onto the server. but the fact they're doing that shows that they know these issues will hold back their game. DayZ can afford to do it that way cause it's an 'online-only' game where they can assume they'll have at least 2 computers working together to pull it off

[KingScuba 1]

so just a thought here, why doesn't someone force their gpu and cpu to stay at 80% load, and see if it equals 80 fps?

I can personally get arma 3 up to 120 FPS on lowest settings (across 3 screens), but if I do my ultra gig, I get 30ish.

[Insanatrix 0]

It seems PCs are running into some kind of bottleneck other than the CPU, it is the only reason that I can think of that makes the CPU wait on data and thus lowering its use. Though clearly it isn't the GPU(Which wouldn't even make sense), and RAM speed/size barely matters anything, and most certainly isn't a bottleneck. It may very well be something like CPU cache/northbridge/southbridge/hard disks or possible some odd scheduling ingame (though that wouldn't explain why the FPS still drops like a brick). Though it does make me think 'what the hell is the AI doing requesting all that data from somewhere else'...

In that case, making it more multithreaded than it currently is would do shit anyway.

One of the things you have to take into consideration is that since the RV engine streams from the HDD, you're subject to HDD latencies.

Typical HDD latencies are between 4-16 ms depending on RPM speed and distance between sectors of data. Typical SSD latencies are like .08-.16 ms. Then you have all the inherent latency from buffer to southbridge to northbridge to CPU cache.

With RAM you have a latency of, (CAS / Frequency (MHz)) × 1000 = X ns , so for instance DDR3-1333 with a CAS latency of 7 would be (7/667) x 1000 = 10.49475 ns and since most northbridge memory controllers are on die now, you have little latency from RAM to on die cache.

That's quite a large difference in latency, especially when you consider that when you stream from a SSD/HDD, you're just basically tacking on all the extra latency because the data still has to pass through RAM before it gets to your CPU cache. Now it's not a big issue when you're loading a program for instance because it's not a time sensitive operation. When you are streaming content on demand to your processing threads though, which is a very time sensitive operation, very small increases of latency can have a large effect on overall thread performance.

I suspect it's not an issue of bandwidth but of latency. Very small transfers that take too much time to get from point A to point B and cause the threads to stall and wait for the data to arrive. This is why I believe that the RV engine needs to go 64 bit. I don't think it will cure all the problems, but it would definitely cure the problem of needing to stream data from disk. No matter how you look at it, streaming data from a disk is not a solution but a problem in this situation.

Something that kind of explains the issue. Even though they are talking about it from a perspective of the PCI-E/Hypertransport interconnect between each die, the quote kind of highlights what I'm talking about. In our case, instead of interconnected cores, the chip to chip link would span from HDD/SSD to Southbridge to Northbridge to Ram to on-die Cache. From http://www.hypertransport.org/docs/wp/Latency_Comparison_HyperTransport_PCIe_in_Communications_Systems.pdf

Why Latency Matters

Only a few years ago, the industry focused on the need to increase bandwidth – a bigger

pipe to deliver all types of content including voice, video and data. While advancements

have been made to ensure that systems can handle massive quantities of information, more recently the industry has shifted its focus on the other critical aspect of communications

system performance – latency.

Latency in chip-to-chip interconnects can be compared to the responsiveness of the steering

of an automobile. The time between the driver’s initiation of a turn and when the car is

actually headed in the new direction is inversely correlated to the performance of a car in a

slalom course. A full-sized luxury car typically has a larger engine than a sports sedan, but

that sports sedan will consistently out-perform the luxury car on such a course.

By analogy, many of today’s communications computing applications have the compute

requirements of a slalom course. In such applications, a series of decisions are made based

upon data that is being updated in real-time. Another slalom-like scenario occurs when the

selection of the required data is unpredictable enough to defeat caching strategies. An

example of such a scenario is an application that follows a large linked-list that is located

across the link. In both of these cases, the latency of the chip-to-chip interconnect is a

central determinant of overall application performance.

Edited April 2, 2013 by Insanatrix

[Razorman 10]

@ Above, excellent & informative.

I use a ram drive & load A3 into that before running it, I allocate 8gb of my 16gb system ram to the ram drive.

The performance is lightning fast & is far faster than an ssd.

The difference is night & day performance wise, 0 pop ups, no hdd thrashing which seriously affects all of the Arma series.

If anyone has + 16GB of system memory it's well worth the effort & once setup is a breeze to use, see here for exactly how I set it up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CKbbqOpeIE

[nikiforos 450]

What if I only have 12gb of system memory? Is this a problem?

[Razorman 10]

Yes, you need 16gb for this to work effectively, A3 uses all 8gb of the ram drive (nearly) & I like to leave 8gb for system.

W7 uses 2gb just to stand still, then if you run other games you'll need more ram for those.

Having said that if you only intend running A3 & W7 you should have enough.

[jumpinghubert 49]

@ Above, excellent & informative.

I use a ram drive & load A3 into that before running it,..[/url]

before you used HDD or SSD for a3?

[Razorman 10]

before you used HDD or SSD for a3?

HDD & SSD tested before ram drive, ram drive much faster.

[maddogx 13]

Unfortunately I believe it's too late for BIS to implement better utilization of CPUs.

ALPHA is already out so I guess it's too late. I totally understand people complaining, but I don’t think it will make any difference now.

I'm not so sure. Most of the improvements in Arma 1 & 2 happened after the game was already released. Think of the "breaking the 32bit" barrier patch in Arma1, or the one where they optimized the grass on northern Sahrani making it perform much better (northern Sahrani was previously avoided due to it being almost unplayable). Or the addition of threaded asset streaming in Arma2 which fixed the massive stuttering in large towns like Cherno. One of the recent alpha dev patches also improved performance related to object instantiation, which certainly improved my framerates in certain situations.

What I'm really hoping is that they will be able to utilize the multithreaded rendering functionality introduced in DX11. It's far too early to lose hope. ;)

[daze23 1]

it's been more than 2 weeks since we've had an 'official' response in this thread

[mighteemouse 1]

Informative post insanatrix

[Leon86 13]

A ramdisk will not increase your framerate, only decrease stutter if something wasn't able to stream from harddrive in time. It will improve gameplay but not fix the main issue (low but steady fps) Sure, if you have a massive ammount of ram go for it, but I recommend doing it like you do with mods. Less of a hassle.

Copy the AddOns folder to the ramdisk and add -mod=R:\ to the launch options. assuming ramdisk is R.

[jumpinghubert 49]

@Razorman

I asked because you haven´t a ssd in your signature, only HDD and ramdrive. But I will try it because I get minimal stuttering when running or turning around even with high fps (55-70).

[prod1gy 1]

Same here. Very low fps (about 10-20) on multiplayer. The lowest FPS i get on Westland. It's unplayable.

Here are my specs:

CPU: Intel Core Quad Q6600 ~ 2.40 per core

GPU: GTX 460 SE

RAM: 8192 MB ~ 1333MHz

I tried cpucount, im playing all on low and on resolution 1280x1024.

Any help?

[simjedi 10]

The lowest FPS i get on Wasteland.

Any help?

If you are getting low fps with MP it most likely is because they have the server setup for a view distance that your computer cannot handle since it is set server side. If your computer can only handle say a 1000m view distance and the server is set at 3000m view distance you will get low fps. The best thing to do is ask the server owner to turn it down. If they will not (as I believe it is their choice) find one more suited for your PC specs.

This can be only one of many causes though. The next biggest one is servers who allow those with high pings. If you look at the lobby and notice pings over 200, find another one with more respectful pings.

ETA: Ya, fixed the view distances.....:o

Edited April 2, 2013 by SIMJEDI

[Razorman 10]

A lot of servers have a player menu that allows you to set your own view distance on the fly in game, look for a player menu, also never use a server with a ping more than 50.

He means meters not kilometers above ;)

[tet5uo 4]

I wouldn't judge performance based on a mission-file that's been ported from a2 and probably doesn't work entirely yet.