Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[MattFromElkford 10]

The recommended specs are completely inaccurate as well. The engine is way too old. This is certainly not acceptable. First and last purchase from these guys unless they fix this issue shortly. I realize the engine is what it is, but they did a lousy job on this game.

[Covert-OPs 10]

Are they likely to make a statement about this? Given that so many of us are talking about it?

[Molay 10]

When is the release of the patch?

[bez 10]

Hello BI,

I am a long time fan of OFP / ArmA, bought all OFP /ArmA games and their expansions (except ArmA 1) since release.

I had high hopes for this title, they are all gone.

This game is having the exact same issues all your previous titles had,

nothing has changed, only cosmetics and a few minor gameplay elements have been added (which are very cool, yes).

But all the serious concerns we had, that you promised will get fixed are not fixed, it's OFP / ArmA 2 (I am guessing ArmA 1) all over again.

If ArmA4 is not a brand new engine (a modern one of course) you can be sure it's the last time I buy any of your products,

sorry for being so harsh, but I am utterly disappointed, and believe me I am full of sorrow when I write this post.

And that is the truth.

Edited September 16, 2013 by bez

[bvrettski 10]

This issue should be the number one, single most important thing that BI works on. It should have been the foundation for the new version of the game and the new engine (if there really is a new version of the engine here).

I see no reason to develop large scale missions for a map the size of Altius, no reason to host a server for more than 20-30 people, and no reason to create additional community content without major improvements to the games overall performance.

The most frustrating part of this is that this issue is nothing new to BI. It seems to have existed in every version of Arma and seems to be low on the priority list for them.

Often times the development community can fix or improve the game thanks to the openness of the architecture but this is one issue that we can't deal with and have no ability to fix.

We aren't buying $300+ CPU's and $300+ graphics cards because we are ok eeking out 15-25 fps.

Set the benchmark high and dont stop till you get there. I would like to see top end systems running 90+fps consistently and low end systems getting 30+ fps consistently...without the constant desync issues we see that also contribute to an inconsistent gaming experience. Otherwise we might as well give up and go game on consoles.

Step one should have been to create the best optimized engine given the size and scope of what BI intended to create. Until that is realized the game will under perform, underwhelm the gaming community at large, and will be nothing more than a playground for the dedicated few willing to overlook its poor performance.

Please BI. Get on it and stay on it until game runs well in both single and multiplayer. Give us highly optimized code for both clients and servers.

---------- Post added at 08:22 AM ---------- Previous post was at 08:14 AM ----------

Are they likely to make a statement about this? Given that so many of us are talking about it?

I doubt it. I think most companies stay unplugged from these types of forums. They create them for us to use but they aren't about to admit the shortcomings of the game they just released five days ago.

If the issue isnt addressed in a month then you know they probably can't fix it because they don't know how. Given that this issue has been around for some time and in previous versions of the game it would seem to be something they dont care to fix or don't know how to fix.

If thats the case then we can all decide if we want to chance another BI game in the future (Dayz Standalone) or if we want to spend our time developing additional content, maps, missions and mods for it.

Why would we waste our time if its not going to run well?

[SunshineLOV1N 10]

I have a brand new PC build, and when I Autodetect Graphics settings it puts it on Ultra everything.

PC specs:

Intel Core i5-3570K OC @ 4.5 GHz

ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA Motherboard

GeForce GTX 680 2GB

16 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 DDR3 SDRAM

I dont know if im just being picky, but 20-40 FPS is not acceptable for a computer that cost this amount of money. Even when i put all the settings on Standard or Standard and Low, I get in about the same range 30-45 FPS. It makes no sense. I goto games with low ping and still low FPS. Also when i play modes offline, the FPS is still not great. It might be 5-15 FPS higher than online, but its still not great. I am looking for 60+ FPS on ultra and I know my PC should be able to handle it. I got 80-100+ on BF2, Planetside 2, Bioshock Infinite, and skyrim.

Anyone know whats going on?

[Speederr 1]

Waiting for a fixing patch!

[stk2008 14]

i think this is terrible.

its been like this since arma2 and that was not possible to fix due to engine limitations so DEVS is it the same for arma3?

i mean we aint heard any thing about what your doing apart from

optimization blog that never got done in the end your reason lack of time.im sorry i think thats a lie.

a few posts saying optimization will never stop but i see nothing it still runs like shit like it has done since alpha.

im sorry to be rude but i have been afan of bis since ofp and tbh this engine should have been trashed a long time ago even more so after a dev said we cant improve performance any more due to the engine limitations so why the hell did you stick with it for arma3.

i think arma 3 was a cash cow for dayz i really do.

[Maj. Gastovski 7]

Straight from the PC Gamer review:

I’m mostly happy with the graphical performance I’ve been getting on the three configurations I’ve been playing Arma 3 on. The caveat being that my framerate varies based on where I am on the map, the number of objects and enemies, and if I’m playing online. On a Core-i7 X990 at 3.47 GHz and two AMD Radeon 5970s on Very High settings, I’ve gotten 17-25 FPS on one single-player mission and 40-50 on another. Multiplayer is where I found the least-consistent performance. On a Core-i7 870 and GTX 780, I can get 55 FPS in a tight, six-player scenario on Very High, but 20 in a large-format mission like Wasteland.

Tinkering with Arma 3’s 25 configurable video settings allowed me to improve these numbers a little, but even dialing down the quality to standard or low on my rigs barely helped while playing large multiplayer missions. The scripting or complexity of some scenarios simply seems to bottleneck performance regardless of your settings. Some specific actions also consistently produced framerate dips for me, like turning 180 degrees with high draw distance, driving at high speed into a city, or right-clicking into gun optics for the first time in an area.

I respect BIS for all they have done so far, and I see the potential in Arma 3 after it has marinated with the community for a while (I've always considered it an investment other than a release purchase) but this is an issue that needs to be addressed and prioritized.

[k3lt 3]

I respect BIS for all they have done so far, and I see the potential in Arma 3 after it has marinated with the community for a while (I've always considered it an investment other than a release purchase) but this is an issue that needs to be addressed and prioritized.

For now they dont even bother to comment on it.

[mobile_medic 43]

For now they dont even bother to comment on it.

That's not true... we do get the occasional "facepalm", and more often than not sarcastic and/or vague statements. :/

[Greenfist 1863]

For now they dont even bother to comment on it.

Don't even bother to comment? Just 2 days ago the CEO of BIS said a bunch on the issue. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?164055-When-will-the-nVidia-Arma-3-optimized-drivers-come

[k3lt 3]

Don't even bother to comment? Just 2 days ago the CEO of BIS said a bunch on the issue. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?164055-When-will-the-nVidia-Arma-3-optimized-drivers-come

So yes, it is correct that main bottleneck is singlethreaded performance of the main thread for Arma series, yet it does not have any simple solution (and I do not think Arma is the only game that fails to really benefit from anything beyond dual core very well).

Yeah, what a shocker. It's not like we are discussing it for almost a year. And he didn't say anything new.

Also it was like first time since pre-alpha where one of the devs from BiS actually adressed it, good timing. (im excluding Dwarden posts which basically kept repeating "we are working on it")

Edited September 16, 2013 by k3lt

[MavericK96 0]

What gets me a little is that this issue has been known about since ArmA 2...it should have started being addressed day 1 one ArmA 3 development. Yet here we are, years later, with the same problem and "no simple solution".

[ProbeEtPylon 1]

Did the new Dev Branch patch increase your performance? ... mine is still unplayably low :(

Running Arma on a Phenom II 4X 955 @ 3.5Ghz

[Greenfist 1863]

Did the new Dev Branch patch increase your performance? ... mine is still unplayably low :(

Running Arma on a Phenom II 4X 955 @ 3.5Ghz

Apparently the dev branch isn't up to the state it was before release so the performance is still even lower than before.

[windies 11]

Yeah, what a shocker. It's not like we are discussing it for almost a year. And he didn't say anything new.

Also it was like first time since pre-alpha where one of the devs from BiS actually adressed it, good timing. (im excluding Dwarden posts which basically kept repeating "we are working on it")

If you read between the lines, he said there's no "simple" solution. Fact of the matter is that a lot of things would need to be rewritten in the engine. We all know this and we all know it's not a simple task, so Maruk pretty much let the cat out of the bag without knowing it. Unless it's a simple solution, it probably won't be fixed. They probably in all honesty, don't really know how to address it or fix it either, and you know, I don't mean that as an insult to them. His statements like we are stupid or wrong for measuring our CPU/GPU utilization by reading the utilization % in the task manager or in MSI afterburner and multicore's not being the answer lead me to believe that it's something that they don't know how to do, or they just don't want to do it for whatever reasons.

It's not like technology is going to go back on itself either and suddenly produce 10-20 ghz single/dual core cpu's in the next few years. We are moving in to more core's = more power and that's what bugs me the most from his statements. It's like he expects us, as the consumer, to somehow buy hardware that does not exist to fix the problem with their software. They either figure out how to get better performance through better concurrency and parallel programming, or they keep releasing titles that can barely run on any hardware out there. Making statements that Multicore CPU's do nothing for the game when the only thing you can buy anymore are multicore CPU's, and then trying to tell us he wants to run infinite loop simulations on every core to simulate better utilization in order to appease the people having performance problems just smacks of trolling.

To fix the problems would require an effort like what is being put into DayZ, basically if you run into a system that doesn't fit the design or performance goal of your software, you rewrite it so it does. Like the AI or the physics or the general processing. I'm getting the feeling that isn't something they really want to do with ArmA though.

[Instynct 1]

I saw this coming all the way from closed beta....

1) Receive HIGH amount of feedback of low utilization and bad performance in beta stages

2) Ignore the problem until finally posting something like 'We are working on it' months later

3) Months later when release date comes, still ignore it and release the game like nothing is wrong

4) Flood of angry buyers

5) After release developer states the problem is too large and probably won't be solved

Great development standards there bohemia. All the new vehicles in the world won't help the fact that the game is unplayable for many players in this state.

[sawe 10]

If the problem is that rendering takes the biggest slice in CPU time, let us lower those settings.

Proposal: add couple more graphical setting presets very low and ultra low to the game ?

In that way we could get the multiplayer part to playable framerates, and would buy you time to optimize the game.

Those presets could benefit together the poorest of the CPUs and GPUs.

[MavericK96 0]

If the problem is that rendering takes the biggest slice in CPU time, let us lower those settings.

Proposal: add couple more graphical setting presets very low and ultra low to the game ?

In that way we could get the multiplayer part to playable framerates, and would buy you time to optimize the game.

Those presets could benefit together the poorest of the CPUs and GPUs.

Rendering is GPU based. CPU is for AI calculation, scripts, etc. The problem isn't that there aren't enough graphical settings, it's that changing them between Low and Ultra often has little to no effect on performance, because there are deeper issues with CPU utilization.

[jurrasstoil 10]

That won't help. You can set everything down to low and play in 640x480 and it won't improve your frames. Even lower settings won't do anything. The CPU doesn't get bogged down by the graphics, but by other things like AI, pathfinding and god knows what.

[Bane 1]

I have played warfare mission on Altis. Had to dc because of huge fps drop.

This is why Arma will never be so popular. I am veteran Arma player but it makes me sad to see players leaving this lovely game because of not optimized game. Some1 will say - make your game, then. I will tell him that I have payed and gave money to developers, so they should at least make it playable. As I see it they will never change/improve optimization for this game.

Sad, just sad.

[windies 11]

I have played warfare mission on Altis. Had to dc because of huge fps drop.

This is why Arma will never be so popular. I am veteran Arma player but it makes me sad to see players leaving this lovely game because of not optimized game. Some1 will say - make your game, then. I will tell him that I have payed and gave money to developers, so they should at least make it playable. As I see it they will never change/improve optimization for this game.

Sad, just sad.

I find the game play to be a hell of a lot better than anything out there. As good as that is though, you can't enjoy something that runs as badly as ArmA 3 does on contemporary hardware. Yes it is sad that it will make people leave the game or keep them from buying it.

[Speederr 1]

We have to wait one year.

The time they optimize this game like ARMA 2, and ARMA 2 is not optimized yet...

So buy a new computer in one year, this is the best way.

I'm very disapointed for their work, on the alpha the game was running good bu a little bit laggy, now this is unplayable !!!

And of course no BIS staff answering at us!!! They are like EA or Activision! Maybe they reading our complaining but they do nothing :/

[Blaaarg 10]

So buy a new computer in one year, this is the best way.

I got arma2 a few weeks after the release back in... 2009 (?), at this time i had an E5200 / gtx260 and 2go of ram. I decided to upgrade my computer over the next 2 years, in this order :

-q6600, 4go of ram

-Gtx460, ssd

-Motherboard, I5 750, 8go of ram

The fps went from terrible to bad, the engine / servers were an issue... there was small optimisation from patch to patch and some fps gain after each upgrade but no miracle solution and i decided to cut the loss, i already had a computer able to run most of the games out there flawlessly even if it wasn't a 2000€ rig. Still, i played this game for 1000h (because it's arma2)

4 years later, arma3. My rig can still handle a lot of games but i started to think about an upgrade for the relase while playing the beta. ArmA3 was released, it run comparativly better than arma2 and it's a clear no-match when it come to graphical quality (or even day1 bugs) but... a couple of friends got really good computers, 3xgtx680, another one just got a gtx780, both got the last I5 haswell clocked at 4.5ghz+ and they barly got better fps than i do. Better quality sure, bigger screens but at the end of the day, they got a rig that cost 4 time the one i got but the fps don't scale up, we all got those "30-40fps on a good server but 20-30 is ok"

Upgrading is not going to be a miracle solution. I really hope i'm wrong, but i'm starting to think that for the next 4 years i will have to play arma3 at lowish fps no matter the upgrades.

Edited September 17, 2013 by Blaaarg