Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[mobile_medic 43]

So, I upgrade my GPU about every 2 years, and it was time. I just moved from a GTX 580 3GB, to a GTX 780 Super-clocked with ACX fan.

Got everything set up, fired up Arma 3. Left the same exact settings as before. Fired up the helicopter showcase (a great place to witness the impact of the poor optimization/utilization of Arma. Do you think my performance changed? Nope. GPU usage tanks, as usual. And, I got 18-35fps on the helicopter showcase... as usual. Game stuck with a max of 2 cores of utilization (and not that efficiently, either, apparently)... as usual.

The only difference is, I can play the non-bottle-necking parts of the game (i.e. empty map, and small encounters like the infantry showcase) at higher settings than before (basically adding in some AA and post AA).

Same ole story. Arma's engine does a piss poor job of taking advantage of modern hardware. If I auto-detect with the new card, Arma maxes every single setting, and gives me a view distance of 3800. Which is far and above what I even play at settings wise. After years of this issue, does anyone actually reasonably expect this nonsense to get fixed in the next 2 months? Or, even after release for that matter... Especially given how quiet the normally interactive dev team continues to be on this fundamental issue. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if they will even fix the stutter that was introduced with Beta, and has been reported by others as well. Just waiting for official release, when there are no more excuses.

[ric 1]

So, I upgrade my GPU about every 2 years, and it was time. I just moved from a GTX 580 3GB, to a GTX 780 Super-clocked with ACX fan.

Got everything set up, fired up Arma 3. Left the same exact settings as before. Fired up the helicopter showcase (a great place to witness the impact of the poor optimization/utilization of Arma. Do you think my performance changed? Nope. GPU usage tanks, as usual. And, I got 18-35fps on the helicopter showcase... as usual. Game stuck with a max of 2 cores of utilization (and not that efficiently, either, apparently)... as usual.

The only difference is, I can play the non-bottle-necking parts of the game (i.e. empty map, and small encounters like the infantry showcase) at higher settings than before (basically adding in some AA and post AA).

Same ole story. Arma's engine does a piss poor job of taking advantage of modern hardware. If I auto-detect with the new card, Arma maxes every single setting, and gives me a view distance of 3800. Which is far and above what I even play at settings wise. After years of this issue, does anyone actually reasonably expect this nonsense to get fixed in the next 2 months? Or, even after release for that matter... Especially given how quiet the normally interactive dev team continues to be on this fundamental issue. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if they will even fix the stutter that was introduced with Beta, and has been reported by others as well. Just waiting for official release, when there are no more excuses.

mobil the die has been cast and you know that...i am a little angry because there are some things i wish to create but i know the engine wont be able to handle it :( that being said i watched 2-3 minutes of a BF4 preview and right back here i came :) its the only show in town at the moment and will just have to deal with the limitations.

Now if i am around for ARMA4 (if there is one) and there has not been a major overhaul of the RV engine then i wont bother protesting...i just wont buy it.

[jurrasstoil 10]

143 days ago this report was submitted, yet no fix.

Unbelievable.

One might even go so far and say, that this was reported 1436 days ago.

I've heard - and absolutely believe it - that this problem is as old as arma/ofp itself. I'm with the Arma Series since Arma 2, so I have no first hand experience with how bad it was in previous games.

It is a bizarre problem in my experience and from my research. I have two different systems. My old rig is an E8400, 8gigs (ddr2) and a GTX260. My newer rig is a PII X4 945, 8gigs (ddr3) and a GTX660. Both run win7x64 on 5.400 HDDs and are connected to the same router.

Logically you'd think the latter system would be able to run A3 and A2 better and more stable than the former system. Well, with this problem, logic has little say apparently.

Let's first take a look at the differences in Arma 3.

Singleplayer. Helicopter showcase.

On my newer rig i can set everything to super ugly and lower the resolution to 640x480 and still won't be able to get past 15-16fps at the very beginning when you are at the airport. Switching over to my older rig, I can play it at low-mid settings at 1080p and get ~25fps. This already makes absolutely no sense to me.

Multiplayer. Various Servers with different missions ranging from CTI, I&A, Wasteland to COOP, etc.

On my newer rig, I'm usually completely f'd and struggle to get above 12-16 fps and on the best servers I might get 20-25fps. Again, settings are irrelevant and won't give me any fps gain whatsoever. Switch over to my older rig and join the same server that was previously completely unplayable on my newer rig and I can get a stable 20-40 fps on low-mid settings. It makes no sense.

Then I start asking around on the servers I'm on what kind of performance people are getting and what their specs are. Of course 99% don't feel the need to reply, but sometimes people are nice enough to answer me. After asking on probably 100s of servers now, I haven't found any pattern. The only pattern I found is that it doesn't seem to matter how beasty or trashy your rig is, there seems to be somekind of bottleneck that will either drag your fps down to unplayable levels or not affect you at all... and for all I know, it seems to be completely random, almost like a curse lol

This post is already too long, so I'll just say that it's the same for A2.

And to the devs (who aren't reading this obviously): I'll be honest, I don't expect you to fix this. Not anymore. I have given up.

[windies 11]

So, I upgrade my GPU about every 2 years, and it was time. I just moved from a GTX 580 3GB, to a GTX 780 Super-clocked with ACX fan.

Got everything set up, fired up Arma 3. Left the same exact settings as before. Fired up the helicopter showcase (a great place to witness the impact of the poor optimization/utilization of Arma. Do you think my performance changed? Nope. GPU usage tanks, as usual. And, I got 18-35fps on the helicopter showcase... as usual. Game stuck with a max of 2 cores of utilization (and not that efficiently, either, apparently)... as usual.

The only difference is, I can play the non-bottle-necking parts of the game (i.e. empty map, and small encounters like the infantry showcase) at higher settings than before (basically adding in some AA and post AA).

Same ole story. Arma's engine does a piss poor job of taking advantage of modern hardware. If I auto-detect with the new card, Arma maxes every single setting, and gives me a view distance of 3800. Which is far and above what I even play at settings wise. After years of this issue, does anyone actually reasonably expect this nonsense to get fixed in the next 2 months? Or, even after release for that matter... Especially given how quiet the normally interactive dev team continues to be on this fundamental issue. At this point, I'm beginning to wonder if they will even fix the stutter that was introduced with Beta, and has been reported by others as well. Just waiting for official release, when there are no more excuses.

Honestly I don't think it's fixable. I think it's a cause of too many issue's that are too deeply rooted in the engine to just try to band aid a fix. The engine wasn't built for current generations of hardware and things like 64 bit addressing and multi-threading and multi-core cpu's. I'm sure it could be implemented to a degree, but at what cost and at what gain? The engine might have to be rewritten from the ground up to make optimaluse of multiple core's, even though getting the engine currently to function across multiple threads and core's is feasible.

It's probably the last BI game I'll buy, Having owned every title since OFP except CC:GM. Realizing that the engine is at fault and it's 99% likely that it will never change just kind of crushes your hope. I really like the game, but it's practically unplayable unless I want it to be ArmA 3 the Ultimate Sunset Simulator or ArmA 3 the Ultimate Land Mass simulator.

[mobile_medic 43]

mobil the die has been cast and you know that...i am a little angry because there are some things i wish to create but i know the engine wont be able to handle it :( that being said i watched 2-3 minutes of a BF4 preview and right back here i came :) its the only show in town at the moment and will just have to deal with the limitations.

Now if i am around for ARMA4 (if there is one) and there has not been a major overhaul of the RV engine then i wont bother protesting...i just wont buy it.

That ship has already sailed for me. If it takes until another iteration (ie Arma 4) to fix what was already long in the tooth when arma 2 came out, they can keep it. Unless they shock us, and release a pile of optimizations that they have been sitting on in the next 2 months leading up to release (or, a promise to *really* fix it within 6 months post-release that is actually delivered on) I'm done with Bohemia anything. Heck, I'd like to check out take-on helicopters, and take-on mars... but, there is no way in hell I'm buying anything else from them. I've all but lost confidence in them, and I don't operate on blind faith. Been fooled more than once by them now...

I mean, geez... My expectations aren't even that high, considering the age on this issue. Fix it within 6 months post-release and I would be happy. But, that won't happen either, most likely. It's long overdue.

[zooloo75 834]

At the state ArmA3 is in right now (and might be for a while), I'd rather just play ArmA2 - better FPS, more content, more realism, more fun.

[Gera_CCT 12]

At the state ArmA3 is in right now (and might be for a while), I'd rather just play ArmA2 - better FPS, more content, more realism, more fun.

^This. Just did this yesterday. Reinstalled ArmA 2 and JSRS + BlastCore + ACE and i think that i will stay there for a while :p

[mobile_medic 43]

arma 2 is the same story for me. some things play fine and great fps, but a lot of things don't. Can't even mess with mp over there (and don't bother except for coop over here). just fired it up again a few minutes ago actually to check it out with my new card. was getting 9-18fps on chenarus sp campaign (manhattan mission). same ole story. For me, A3 was the one that I was hoping would finally be playable b/c I never really could get into a2 due to performance issues. Just a disappointment.

[windies 11]

arma 2 is the same story for me. some things play fine and great fps, but a lot of things don't. Can't even mess with mp over there (and don't bother except for coop over here). just fired it up again a few minutes ago actually to check it out with my new card. was getting 9-18fps on chenarus sp campaign (manhattan mission). same ole story. For me, A3 was the one that I was hoping would finally be playable b/c I never really could get into a2 due to performance issues. Just a disappointment.

Don't feel alone, I had the same experiences with A2. That was why I was hoping A3 would really improve upon the series but so far it's just lacking.

[wormeaten 0]

ArmA4?

What ArmA 4 when ArmA 3 will dead before it will be fully released.

You know from my experience with windows OS if you try to fix some problems in your system could spend months to not solve it but usual repair and most efficient is make back up of most important data you need, Format c: and reinstal your OS from scratch and in few days you will not remeber you was having problems at all.

My advice to BIS is ... Format c:

[Asstrole 10]

Just bought this game. HORRID FPS. 16-22. As a comparison, I can run Planetside 2 on ULTRA but ARMA III has to be dropped to STANDARD just to get 30 FPS. Something is very wrong. System is a RAID 0 dual SSD (Intel 320 Series) Core i7, Raedon 6990 (I think) 2GB, and 12GB system memory. Should run better. Wish I'd located this thread prior to buying. No one setting seems to have a heavy impact on boosting FPS. I could swallow it on Standard if it were a laptop, but this is a pretty well equipped workstation.

[Furret 0]

Just bought this game. HORRID FPS. 16-22.

Client FPS is tied to server FPS. A well made mission and competent server machine will make all the difference.

If you get bad fps in the editor then something is really wrong.

[Asstrole 10]

Client FPS is tied to server FPS. A well made mission and competent server machine will make all the difference.

If you get bad fps in the editor then something is really wrong.

I'm just playing the introduction single-player missions. Any suggestions? Thank you

[mobile_medic 43]

... Any suggestions? Thank you

wait and hope.

[wormeaten 0]

I'm just playing the introduction single-player missions. Any suggestions? Thank you

Game should be released and get out from beta in about 2 months. They say will be released q3 end of q3 is end of September, October is already starting q4. but I doubt it will be ready for q3.

So far this problem is reported since alpha release 5th march. So fare in this 5 months there is no major or any improvements of the performances at all. Could they done miracle in 60 days?

So my advice to you is to save your nerves only solution is uninstall it and try in about 2 years. Maybe you will be better luck in two years.

Basically they can't optimize engine they need new one and they don't work on it at all. Engine is to old to be possible to optimize it for new hardware we wll have and it is standard already few years.

[NicotinKickballovich 1]

Just bought this game. HORRID FPS. 16-22. As a comparison, I can run Planetside 2 on ULTRA but ARMA III has to be dropped to STANDARD just to get 30 FPS. Something is very wrong. System is a RAID 0 dual SSD (Intel 320 Series) Core i7, Raedon 6990 (I think) 2GB, and 12GB system memory. Should run better. Wish I'd located this thread prior to buying. No one setting seems to have a heavy impact on boosting FPS. I could swallow it on Standard if it were a laptop, but this is a pretty well equipped workstation.

That's pretty odd, it shouldn't run so slow on your system, which is by far better than mine. I get around 30-35fps on all SP and good MP missions on nearly highest settings, 3000 view distance and such. Got an old Q6600 G0 Stepping OC'ed from 2.4-3.0Ghz (Hoping to get it to 3.6-4.0Ghz after getting a better cooler), 4 Gigs of DDRII 800Mhz RAM, standard 7200rpm hard drive and a HD 7750 1GB GDRR5 graphics card.

Have you tried playing with the config in ArmA's document folder or try different launch parameters for it? If not try finding two lines that say "GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1000;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1000;"

Switch them both to "1" instead of "1000"

And like with all previous ArmA titles it usually needs to be told how many cores you got, how much ram you got, how much threads you got etc by adding -cpuCount=#, -maxMem=$, -maxVram=#, -exThreads=#, -malloc=tbb4malloc_bi to your launch parameters. It might help, or it might not help, but for me it did big-time.

Here's some guidelines how to do that here http://www.realitygamer.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=186&Itemid=217, also can try disabling multi-threading for your i7 or try to overclock it if you got the knowhow's and a good cooler.

[xXxatrush1987 10]

Just bought this game. HORRID FPS. 16-22. As a comparison, I can run Planetside 2 on ULTRA but ARMA III has to be dropped to STANDARD just to get 30 FPS. Something is very wrong. System is a RAID 0 dual SSD (Intel 320 Series) Core i7, Raedon 6990 (I think) 2GB, and 12GB system memory. Should run better. Wish I'd located this thread prior to buying. No one setting seems to have a heavy impact on boosting FPS. I could swallow it on Standard if it were a laptop, but this is a pretty well equipped workstation.

well what i7? i7 920 will struggle if settings on ultra, you will need 2xxx/3xxx/4xxx i7 at at least 4,6ghz to crunch 12km view and object distance on ultra at over 30fps.

also 6990 is a dual gpu card, is crossfire working? if not its just as fast as a oced 6950, and then ultra should be very slow for a reason. also intel 320 series are not the most fastest ssd when it comes to streaming duties, and raid also cripples ssds because trim doesn´t work on ssd raid right now(just special dedicated raid controllers or on board pcie ssd can do it.

without trim, the horrible controller of the 320 just cripples it selfs performance over time.

28fps on ultra all max(in editor) on this system:

2700k@ 4.4ghz

8gb 1866mhz ram

7970ghz@ stock

samsung 830 ssd

[Tyl3r99 41]

look at my setup..

I have everything on ultra and 6000m distance and 3500 ODDistance

[WalkerDown 1]

Why are still talking about the "fps in the editor" when the (final) game is around the corner and 99.9999999999999999999% of ppl will only be interested into playing this online? I can do 900 fps offline, but it does mean nothing if then i'll not-PLAY (online) at 20 fps. Or someone here believes they are gonna do the magic one day before the launch, releasing a patch that will magically triple our fps (coz doubling it won't even be enough!). It's months that i'm reading: "we're optimizing" ... but i'm not sure what they are optimizing exactly, I do almost the same FPS as the first alpha day.

[TSAndrey 1]

Why are still talking about the "fps in the editor" when the (final) game is around the corner and 99.9999999999999999999% of ppl will only be interested into playing this online? I can do 900 fps offline, but it does mean nothing if then i'll not-PLAY (online) at 20 fps. Or someone here believes they are gonna do the magic one day before the launch, releasing a patch that will magically triple our fps (coz doubling it won't even be enough!). It's months that i'm reading: "we're optimizing" ... but i'm not sure what they are optimizing exactly, I do almost the same FPS as the first alpha day.

People won't play in editor after release? What a joke... Everyone will try the editor when the game releases.

[Dwarden 1125]

why people think PlaneSide 2 on ULTRA setting equals Arma 3 settings ...

(PS2 has only some km viewdistance and quite low object viewdistance)

sigh ... (facepalm)

[mobile_medic 43]

why people think PlaneSide 2 on ULTRA setting equals Arma 3 settings ...

(PS2 has only some km viewdistance and quite low object viewdistance)

sigh ... (facepalm)

With all due respect, for a PR guy, you sure do seem to practice a lot of condescending behavior towards your paying customers, and often seem to be dismissive towards people's problems. (i.e. when you posted the -nologs "fix" [workaround], and *asked* for feedback, was given feedback that it did not resolve the stuttering that was introduced in Beta for some players, and outright dismissed it as my computer being either too good, or too bad. How is that useful to anyone?).

Not like we can play Arma with a big view distance anyways. But, you are right. There probably isn't much comparison to a PS2 map with hundreds of people playing at once (in an online environment) with all sorts of things going on... when, compared to walking around on an empty map at agia marina, or the airfield, for example (in an SP environment)... which seems to be enough to begin to bring Arma to its knees and cause gpu utilization drops, and fps drops. And, it only gets worse from there.

Crucify if you like, but I just don't see how it would be possible at this point for Arma to even handle (for example) 64 players with an equivalent view distance to an armored kill map on bf3, and an equivalent amount of action going on (in a mp or sp environment, for that matter). I certainly can't on this machine which handily exceeds the recommended specs. And, there is no shortage of other people reporting the same.

For all the talk about how massive Arma is and how it shouldn't be compared to other games, it is quite frustrating that I (and many others) can't play missions that even begin to approach the level of action of these "smaller" games. Helicopter showcase still runs like a complete turd. Small missions with minimal AI, in an SP environment are enough to bring the game (not our systems) to its knees. And it certainly isn't our systems, when much of our available horsepower is sitting idle while our fps takes a bath. And, when it happens, it doesn't matter if we are on a cell-phone resolution with a 500 view distance, or maxed with a 3k view distance at 2560x1600. But, you already know this don't you?

Surely, a walk-through of an abandoned agia marina (or a fly-over) should not be more demanding on my system than a 64 player MP match in BF3, or a big MP match in PS2, or a mission in DCS World (completely maxed out at 2560x1600 with draw distances out to 15k and still playing at 50fps), etc, etc. What game/scenario would you consider an acceptable comparison?

Having this "big, epic" game and being relegated to playing it like a simplistic sp game, having to largely avoid missions that exceed the scope of the infantry showcase... that's a ton of fun... Especially, after having done that already in your previous Arma release. </sarcasm>

I surely hope that an empty Agia Marina, or the Helicopter Showcase (as two ready examples) is not somehow more demanding on our systems than a full on 64 player MP environment on a more highly detailed map larger than the view distance I even play Arma at. Of course, I know it is not, b/c we can all monitor and compare our hardware utilization in any of these scenarios. There is a big difference between not needing and not using available hardware resources in order to accomplish a task.

[WalkerDown 1]

I never complained about the "power" (overall) needed to run ArmA3, I'm complaining on the fact that no matter what, the game will never "scale" good on a powerful PC.

So what you are saying (dwarden) isn't accurate: our configuration are used for 1/3 of their power, 2/3 of my CPU and my 780s are "sleeping", it's a waste of resource.

If it would have been only a matter of "super-uber PC", i'll buy 3 titans and i'll OC my CPU to 5ghz to expect to expect to run the game at 120fps constantly ONLINE ... but this WON'T happens, why? Because it's a problem of the engine, not a problem of our "poor" configurations. We can't do anything to run the game smoothly.. YOU must fix the game (how.. it's your problem).

[Asstrole 10]

Thanks for the help. I tried the parameters and that gave a few more FPS but not many. I haven't OC'd this machine in a while because it's mainly for work. But I OC'd it again from 2.6 to 3.6 (it's an older i7 920). I had noticed SpeedStep wasn't getting kicked off by Arma so it was running 1.7GHz. Forcing SpeedStep off and OCing to 3.6 Ghiz showed no improvement in FPS at all. Anyway, with Dev attitudes like that I'll move on to something else. Thanks folks.

[ric 1]

why people think PlaneSide 2 on ULTRA setting equals Arma 3 settings ...

(PS2 has only some km viewdistance and quite low object viewdistance)

sigh ... (facepalm)

simple answer is people by nature compare apples to apples oranges to oranges hotrods to hotrods and FPS's to FPS's.

and I assume by the facepalm that you think the RV4 engine is capable of creating an identical environment as PS2? if so what are you waiting for? seems to me that a PS2 clone (free to play) might attract a larger audience (more money) then "take on mars" (i do think the TOM is kinda of a interesting idea).

You me and everyone else would love to see the performance of the engine double...which is all you would get at %50 parallelization...but thats still double...Dwarden you were good enough to give me a quick response to a question i had a while ago but i have yet to hear back on this http://www.texasmulticoretechnologies.com/products/ from what i have read it really sounds like exactly what RV4 could use :)

@mobil medic and walkerdown , well said mobil and while i agree with you guys this is the only show in town in terms of this genre but worse that that is the changes going on in the industry in general...COD and BF3 have set a new tone in the game world basically saying the "sheeple will buy anything as long as we make it pretty" BF3 and COD are closed games basically all you get are the scraps from longshanks table (DLC) and i fear with the rise of the new console architecture it will just get worse....PC's will become the unwanted step child in the industry and studios will no longer write games that don't have an "expiration date" (see BF3).

As for BIS I am starting to wonder what there plans are in general...will they get into the console market? will they stay with the PC market? I do know one thing for sure IF there is a ARMA4 It will have to be on a "brand new" engine or a massive overhaul of the RV one because what is happening now with ARMA3 is not subtle but but profoundly stating EOL for the RV engine in terms of trying to power something like the ARMA series.