Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[Sneakson 1]

Obnoxious? I'm asking a legit question...

No, asking a game developer why he has been sitting on his ass not doing anything is obnoxious because that's obviously not the case and uploading pictures of everything they eat isn't really going to help anyone.

[Vadim89 10]

what got in mind ? i have HD7850s ;)

---------- Post added at 19:11 ---------- Previous post was at 19:10 ----------

i'm sorry that he is fixing crashes and optimizing the game instead ... really ...

Hi guys,

In the end of June i wrote those comments in the feedback tracker (if not interested just read my second commend here in the forum):

I think like many people said before me. We just have to wait. Either we are wrong and Bohemia is going to fix this or not.

I just would like to know what it means, now that the status is "assigned". It is also on high priority, this would lead me to think that they are working hard on it. But I also can imagine, that they trying to keep people calm.

What does assigned exactly mean? That they will solve this issue? If yes before the game will launch? I would like to have more communication from Bohemias side to better understand the situation.

To explain my point of view. I bought the supporters eddition. Because I really love to play a game which is realistic, and which forces the people to play as a good functioning team. Only game which can compete with Arma in this regard, is the Project Reality Mod in my opinion. I´ve also played Ofp, Arma1 and Arma2.

Im not trying to be annoying or anything, but I think it´s understandable that I simply demand more info from you Bohemia guys. Im the last one who tries to bash you or anything, but in my opinion this GPU/CPU bottleneck topic is the most important one. No matter what your game may offer, the most important and basic thing is, that it´s possible to play it with acceptable fps in regards of your pc system of course.

So please I´m asking in awareness and full respect for all what you did. Please provide a detailed status update regarding this topic. And dont talk about performance, I want concrete details on the bottleneck issue. Is this really a problem which wasnt fixed so far? If yes will you or will you not be able to deal with it?

My Specs: Radeon 7950 3 gig

Amd 8 cores 3.2 ghz 16 gig ram.

Game uses Max 50% gpu for me (measured with msi afterburner)

Everything maxed out i get 15 frames. Once i turn down obj distance to 1000 i get 25 frames. If i turn it up to 1,2k again 15 fps.

On max settings 29% gpu usage. On low settings 40-50%

Part 2:

Today almost 2 months later, I became older but not smarter in this regard. The game is still running slow for me, and to be honest im not satisfied how this is handled by Bohemia. Im participating in the Beta program, but the patches never affect my performance.

Im not a hater, but I´m not playing it. The performance is so bad, that I just dont want to play. It´s so frustrating for me, because I dont know if this will be improved or not. Please don´t tell me that it´s a Beta and I have to wait. I paid for the supporters edition, and the least thing I deserve is to get information on whats happening. Either I was to stupid to find valuable information (if this is the case I´m very sorry), or Bohemia has a very bad service in this regard (only concerning the gpu bottleneck topic). Its just very noticeable, how well Bohemia comunicates on all topics, but this one. Please, I just want to know if this will be fixed or not, until know its only politics. Providing answers explaining that you are "working on it" is not enough. This is not the defintion of good customer service. Please Bohemia help me out here.

Thank you and best regards,

Vadim

[Sneakson 1]

@Vadim:

What CPU do you have? If 3.2 GHz octa-core is correct it seems you have an Opteron which I've never heard of and can't say anything about other than that it doesn't even seem to be made to play games.

What I can say is that octa-core isn’t always a good thing and low utilization of that many cores is something you should be used to outside of Battlefield 3 pretty much.

Finally a 3.2 GHz clock isn’t very high.

You have all the symptoms of your CPU being too weak for your graphics card!

You should buy a new CPU or overclock.

As I mentioned I can’t say much about your CPU but while it appears to score high in benchmarks this is probably due to many cores which of games mostly will use two.

Your graphics card on the other hand is quite strong.

You should monitor your CPU usage and core distribution and tell us about it and you shouldn’t really blame this one on ARMA/BIS also yet. How does your CPU work in other games?

Oh and wait, you’re maxing the game out? Turn them down! What's your everything minumum fps?

[ric 1]

@Vadim:

What CPU do you have? If 3.2 GHz octa-core is correct it seems you have an Opteron which I've never heard of and can't say anything about other than that it doesn't even seem to be made to play games.

What I can say is that octa-core isn’t always a good thing and low utilization of that many cores is something you should be used to outside of Battlefield 3 pretty much.

Finally a 3.2 GHz clock isn’t very high.

You have all the symptoms of your CPU being too weak for your graphics card!

You should buy a new CPU or overclock.

As I mentioned I can’t say much about your CPU but while it appears to score high in benchmarks this is probably due to many cores which of games mostly will use two.

Your graphics card on the other hand is quite strong.

You should monitor your CPU usage and core distribution and tell us about it and you shouldn’t really blame this one on ARMA/BIS also yet. How does your CPU work in other games?

Oh and wait, you’re maxing the game out? Turn them down! What's your everything minumum fps?

I think he has an 8350 and yes clock to clock intel are better but his FPS should not be that low and i am not sure the CPU is bottlenecking the GPU.

over clocking will help and maybe turning off cores 1,3,5,7 will help (so i have read)

[TSAndrey 1]

No, asking a game developer why he has been sitting on his ass not doing anything is obnoxious because that's obviously not the case and uploading pictures of everything they eat isn't really going to help anyone.

When did I ever say the developer "has been sitting on his ass not doing anything"?! I'm just not buying that he couldn't get 2 hours aside in 2 months to write a blog which they promised twice!

[Zorg_DK 10]

BI, any chance you can fix the issue with vsync where you have to alt-tab every time you start the game to get rid of 30-60 fps cap?

[Tyl3r99 41]

what about the MP improvements?

[Vadim89 10]

Hey Guys,

First of all, thank you very much for your reply!

My AMD is and FX-8120-With 3.1ghz not 3.2 (sorry) But its not a problem to overclock it to 4ghz. I did this, but had no improvment. Im quite shure, that the processor doesn´t bottleneck my graphic card. In every other game, I have 100 percent usage (FIFA 13, BF3, Arma2->80%...)

If I set each setting to minimum (resolution 1920*1080) I get 60 frames, and the gpu usage is constantly at 22%. Since several days the performance has improved a little bit. If I play with everything maxed out, but terrain(standart), objectdistance (2km) and view distance (4km) I get constantly 20-30 frames. As reference im testing every day the combined arms sp mission (after the daily beta patches). At the beginning in the chopper 18-20 frames. Landing 30 frames. Attack 20-24 frames. Defend the base 30-35 frames. Depending on where im looking on the map, I get more fps and more Gpu usage. When I look through a zoomed scope (acog, i.e.), I get almost 100 percent GPU usage, and 40 frames no matter where I´m looking at.

Thank you very much guys. I hope this will be also usefull for some others. By the way, what I´ve read in an other forum and also tested by myself. If I max out Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering, I get more frames, because the GPU usage increases by doing so.

[mobile_medic 43]

Hey Guys,

First of all, thank you very much for your reply!

My AMD is and FX-8120-With 3.1ghz not 3.2 (sorry) But its not a problem to overclock it to 4ghz. I did this, but had no improvment. Im quite shure, that the processor doesn´t bottleneck my graphic card. In every other game, I have 100 percent usage (FIFA 13, BF3, Arma2->80%...)

If I set each setting to minimum (resolution 1920*1080) I get 60 frames, and the gpu usage is constantly at 22%. Since several days the performance has improved a little bit. If I play with everything maxed out, but terrain(standart), objectdistance (2km) and view distance (4km) I get constantly 20-30 frames. As reference im testing every day the combined arms sp mission (after the daily beta patches). At the beginning in the chopper 18-20 frames. Landing 30 frames. Attack 20-24 frames. Defend the base 30-35 frames. Depending on where im looking on the map, I get more fps and more Gpu usage. When I look through a zoomed scope (acog, i.e.), I get almost 100 percent GPU usage, and 40 frames no matter where I´m looking at.

Thank you very much guys. I hope this will be also usefull for some others. By the way, what I´ve read in an other forum and also tested by myself. If I max out Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering, I get more frames, because the GPU usage increases by doing so.

Try the helicopter showcase. It is a good one to use as a benchmark for testing improvement (or lack of) on this low gpu/cpu usage issue. Also, you will find that when the bottleneck happens, changing settings will not make much of in impact on (the lack of) performance. unfortunately, the bottleneck seems to happen in a lot of places, beginning with certain areas of an empty stratis (i.e. agia marina). Also, the bottleneck is not your hardware. Nothing you can do. I overclocked from 3.2 to just under 4ghz and there was not really a noticeable difference. I moved from a gtx580 to a gtx 780 and there is no difference in performance in bottle-necking areas of the game (which is a lot of it in my experience). The only difference was being able to increase settings in non-bottle-necking areas and/or higher fps in those areas. But, I still run teens and 20's in a wide range of situations on this game that cause gpu usage to drop (and, that's not even getting into the big turd that is currently the multiplayer experience)

p.s. object view distance seems to be the primary contributor to GPU usage drop (and accompanying fps drop). I can run everything completely maxed (including a 12k view distance) if I keep object draw distance down around 2k or less, and get 40-60 fps in non-bottle-necking areas of the game. It's not a solution though, as Agia Marina will still crap out gpu usage, even with a 500m view distance. If empty Agia Marina is enough to cause an fps killing drop in GPU usage (with minimum view distance), I'm not holding out hope. Especially, given the lack of feedback/input from the devs on the issue. Even though, at least one of them who does post regularly indicated that he had knowledge of the cause(s) over 5 months ago.

[ImNotPOTUS 10]

Also, the bottleneck is not your hardware. Nothing you can do.

I put the BETA on a DUAL AMD Opteron RIG with 32 GB of RAM and a GTX650 Ti Boost 320.49 driver WIN 7 64 bit added all the advanced strings in STEAM -noSplash -cpuCount=16 -high -maxMem=8192 and it can't get past 25 FPS in Single Player. Forget about MP. I tried it all- .cfg change- in-game adjustments. Nothing helps.

View Distance is the only thing that would goose the FPS into the low 30's. I don't have the brass ones to try and fiddle with using more than -maxMem=8192, I can't find anyone else who has tried that.

____________________________________________________________________-

Bok TSAndrey Kaj delas?

[mobile_medic 43]

I put the BETA on a DUAL AMD Opteron RIG with 32 GB of RAM and a GTX650 Ti Boost 320.49 driver WIN 7 64 bit added all the advanced strings in STEAM -noSplash -cpuCount=16 -high -maxMem=8192 and it can't get past 25 FPS in Single Player. Forget about MP. I tried it all- .cfg change- in-game adjustments. Nothing helps.

View Distance is the only thing that would goose the FPS into the low 30's. I don't have the brass ones to try and fiddle with using more than -maxMem=8192, I can't find anyone else who has tried that.

____________________________________________________________________-

Bok TSAndrey Kaj delas?

Most of that stuff should be detected automatically with Arma 3 as far as I understand it. It seems much of it is recycled suggestions from Arma 2 that are no longer necessary. Have you tried without any of that stuff in your launch parameters? Given how finicky it can seem to be with our CPU's, it may not know what the hell to do with dual Opterons :) Or, you might try a lower cpu count. I've never seen the game use more than 2 threads worth of CPU, so... might be worth a shot.

Places that I like to try when testing settings and performance (in SP only)...

On an empty map:

The southern part of Stratis for a generally non-bottlenecked area that gives you an idea of what your FPS are like when there are not issues.

Agia Marina, and around the airfield. Parts of these areas (empty) can cause drops in GPU usage, and crap out your fps.

Showcases:

Helicopter Showcase is a "great" place for watching your gpu usage and fps start low, and stay low.

Combined Arms is a mixture for me of playable to unplayable, and decent to poor GPU usage.

Infantry showcase gives me lower fps than other areas of the map and some other small encounters, but my GPU usage tends to stay at 99%. I tend to use it to see my minimum fps in non-bottlenecking areas of the game.

Object view distance seems to have the most noticeable negative impact on gpu usage and fps(on an empty map). However, even at the minimum 500m there are still areas of an empty map that cause GPU usage drops. The trick is to find the furthest object view distance where you still have good GPU usage in non-crap areas of the map. Crap areas will cause your GPU usage to drop regardless of the setting, so don't try to adjust for those too much, as the performance difference will be negligible in those areas.

Overall view distance is pretty negligible. I've actually started turning it up recently, b/c it doesn't impact my GPU usage on its own (even at 12k and hovering with a view of the entire map). FPS hit is also minimal. Over about 5500 on overall view distance, though, and your terrain quality maximum setting goes down from "Ultra" to "Very High".

Of course, when you start adding in AI and stuff actually going on, things are likely to get worse.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Mobile_Medic

[Vadim89 10]

Try the helicopter showcase. It is a good one to use as a benchmark for testing improvement (or lack of) on this low gpu/cpu usage issue. Also, you will find that when the bottleneck happens, changing settings will not make much of in impact on (the lack of) performance. unfortunately, the bottleneck seems to happen in a lot of places, beginning with certain areas of an empty stratis (i.e. agia marina). Also, the bottleneck is not your hardware. Nothing you can do. I overclocked from 3.2 to just under 4ghz and there was not really a noticeable difference. I moved from a gtx580 to a gtx 780 and there is no difference in performance in bottle-necking areas of the game (which is a lot of it in my experience). The only difference was being able to increase settings in non-bottle-necking areas and/or higher fps in those areas. But, I still run teens and 20's in a wide range of situations on this game that cause gpu usage to drop (and, that's not even getting into the big turd that is currently the multiplayer experience)

p.s. object view distance seems to be the primary contributor to GPU usage drop (and accompanying fps drop). I can run everything completely maxed (including a 12k view distance) if I keep object draw distance down around 2k or less, and get 40-60 fps in non-bottle-necking areas of the game. It's not a solution though, as Agia Marina will still crap out gpu usage, even with a 500m view distance. If empty Agia Marina is enough to cause an fps killing drop in GPU usage (with minimum view distance), I'm not holding out hope. Especially, given the lack of feedback/input from the devs on the issue. Even though, at least one of them who does post regularly indicated that he had knowledge of the cause(s) over 5 months ago.

Alright thanks Medic!

This is really frustrating. I hope Bohemia will fix this, but the way it´s handled so far ist just very respectless towards the customers. This is not how customer service should look like. I´m very dissapointed.

[windies 11]

A couple things that might help are to check your pagefile size and make sure it's set to the recommended size. ArmA 3 by default uses a different memory allocator from the windows system allocator so if you monitor your pagefile it will grow in size, but it will look like it's hardly being written to or read from because it uses a separate memory allocator from the Windows system memory allocator. This was why my tests of the pagefile usage were so skewed earlier on in this thread.

Another thing I've noticed a trend of is that people with SSD's tend to say they have better performance than people who don't specify or say they are using mechanical drives. I don't have an SSD to make a comparison, however it should be pretty obvious that an SSD is 5-10x faster than most mechanical drives. Also where you have ArmA and Windows installed or the pagefile assigned to are important as well. For mechanical drives you would want your pagefile and preferably windows installed on a separate drive from your games/ArmA. For an SSD it really shouldn't matter as long as your pagefile and preferably windows and your games/ArmA are installed on the SSD.

[nikiforos 450]

What if I disable Windows pagefile? I did that and I have 8 GB ram. How does that affect the game?

Until I know I haven't noticed any difference.

Edited August 22, 2013 by Nikiforos

[Leon86 13]

Arma will cause writing to the pagefile but as long as there's memory left it should never need to read from it (as windows will keep everything in standby memory until it actually runs out).

Disabling the pagefile shouldn't do much, the writing is low speed and low priority afaik.

[mobile_medic 43]

I wouldn't recommend disabling pagefile.

[ImNotPOTUS 10]

Have you tried without any of that stuff in your launch parameters? Given how finicky it can seem to be with our CPU's, it may not know what the hell to do with dual Opterons :) .

The clean install with ARMA video auto detect got me a High setting that ranged 18-24 FPS. I was curious if there was anything an Opteron system with huge RAM could brag about and this bottleneck issue is not it apparently. I wonder if the newer generation with all the instruction sets can uncork the bottle, but I would rather get a new i7 than be so curious.

[mobile_medic 43]

I find auto-detect tends to over-estimate optimal settings. You could try turning AA and PPAA off, see what you get, and tweak from there.

When I had a gtx 580 (gaming at 2560x1600) I was able to run ultra on textures, objects and terrain. Other things were a mix, and I had the above mentioned aa settings turned off. I was able to get 40-60 in the ok areas of the map.

Also, if you have it on, turn off Vsync. I am someone who tends to game with it on due to screen tearing (people always say turn it off in other games, but I've found that to be unnecessary), but it is wonky in A3, so I leave it off here. It can, and will, throttle your fps down, and also contribute to lower GPU usage. Recently, it seems I can change to it while already in game and it will work fine... but if I start the game with it enabled, it will only add to the issues. So, I recommend just leaving it off for now, if you don't already, and removing it from the equation while you are trying to find your sweet spot.

[windies 11]

What if I disable Windows pagefile? I did that and I have 8 GB ram. How does that affect the game?

Until I know I haven't noticed any difference.

Windows will always create a pagefile whether you disable it or not. Some programs rely on having a pagefile.

I find auto-detect tends to over-estimate optimal settings. You could try turning AA and PPAA off, see what you get, and tweak from there.

When I had a gtx 580 (gaming at 2560x1600) I was able to run ultra on textures, objects and terrain. Other things were a mix, and I had the above mentioned aa settings turned off. I was able to get 40-60 in the ok areas of the map.

Also, if you have it on, turn off Vsync. I am someone who tends to game with it on due to screen tearing (people always say turn it off in other games, but I've found that to be unnecessary), but it is wonky in A3, so I leave it off here. It can, and will, throttle your fps down, and also contribute to lower GPU usage. Recently, it seems I can change to it while already in game and it will work fine... but if I start the game with it enabled, it will only add to the issues. So, I recommend just leaving it off for now, if you don't already, and removing it from the equation while you are trying to find your sweet spot.

ArmA doesn't use DirectX triple buffering which is why the FPS with vsync is so limited and drops to 30 or 15 if you can't maintain 60 or 30 fps.

[tonygrunt 10]

Windows will always create a pagefile whether you disable it or not.

That's false. Once you disable pagefile, it doesn't return until you enable it.

I stopped using pagefile with Vista when I first got 12GB RAM and have never used it again, 4+ years now.

[Vadim89 10]

One should not disable the page file. Here is an interesting article :)

http://www.howtogeek.com/126430/htg-explains-what-is-the-windows-page-file-and-should-you-disable-it/

[Vadim89 10]

Sorry to say it like that, but the all the discussions are p** me off. Why are the users forced to investigate that much, just to have a "normal" performance. This is completly ridiculous. BOHEMIA! Just provide the info we are all asking since 6 march, and FIX IT!!!! I paid money, and I want the service I deserve. I even bought the supporters edition. WTF is wrong here?? Im very curious how the performance in the final game will be. This is a real disgrace.

[nikiforos 450]

Do you think that 8GB RAM is enough to disable pagefile?

[Brain 12]

Sorry to say it like that, but the all the discussions are p** me off. Why are the users forced to investigate that much, just to have a "normal" performance. This is completly ridiculous. BOHEMIA! Just provide the info we are all asking since 6 march, and FIX IT!!!! I paid money, and I want the service I deserve. I even bought the supporters edition. WTF is wrong here?? Im very curious how the performance in the final game will be. This is a real disgrace.

Even though the optimazation is terrible and performance is really low at the moment, you can't expect to get too many wonder-fixes from Bohemia. ArmA is a really hardware-using game, just keep in mind what's getting processed in the background. It'd be happy with either improving frames around 15-25 % or improving the techniques at current frame rate.

[mobile_medic 43]

ArmA is a really hardware-using game

Most of us have plenty of hardware sitting available for use. If it is such a hardware-using game... then, perhaps it should actually make more proper use of the available hardware. Then, maybe we could say it is hardware intensive.

If they could fix, or greatly minimize the cause of GPU usage crapping out, I'd be happy. I'm not holding out hope though. People have been talking about this for years, and this is the one issue BIS has little to say about.