Low CPU utilization & Low FPS

[TSAndrey 1]

You're being silly again.

Understand that the entire developer team can't spend all their time reading and answering threads about performance issues in their forum.

I’ve seen one or two BIS devs handing out solutions to various performance issues recently and that’s more than enough.

As always the devs should be solving issues and developing the game and that should be their top priority.

Yeah, I'm being totally silly. It's not like they can grab a few minutes to answer in a thread or a few hours in 3 months to write a blog which was promised. It's not like they have paid community managers who get paid to answer threads. Oh wait....

[tonygrunt 10]

Yeah, I'm being totally silly. It's not like they can grab a few minutes to answer in a thread or a few hours in 3 months to write a blog which was promised. It's not like they have paid community managers who get paid to answer threads. Oh wait....

Maybe they have nothing solid yet to share.

Why post about features and optimizations if they are not 100% to be possible?

[mobile_medic 43]

Use this staff tracker plugin button on the thread: at the top left of the thread and click through all the dev posts, here.

Sadly, there is very little of substance. I would hope they would want to actively participate in this thread, given it is no small, or new issue. Their participation here would certainly help steer the discussion in a more productive direction and allow us as customers to provide more informed and targeted feedback to help make progress on the issue (of which I've seen none going back to my experiences on Arma 2). We want to help fix the issue. We want the issue to (finally) be fixed, rather than swept under the rug, so the game can live up to its potential.

But, again, Dwarden indicated over 5 months ago that he had personal knowledge of "some problems" they found with their engine. And, he has said this issue would get fixed. That's the most substantive input from a dev on this issue that we have seen thus far. Sadly, we have not been able to illicit any elaboration beyond that, nor have we seen any notable progress before or since. Since, he does post so regularly (on the forum at large), I'm not sure why getting some additional, and/or specific info from him after all of this time has proven so futile.

Long-standing, widely-reported, well-known issue (and, that is putting it lightly). Our point is simply that we don't find their lack of mention (in or out of this thread), input, request for more targeted feedback, etc, etc, encouraging, b/c it is quite counter to their usual modus operandi with regards to other aspects of the game. Especially, in observation of a number of other facts, and contrary statements in other places by other devs.

Edited August 29, 2013 by Mobile_Medic
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[Sneakson 1]

Yeah, I'm being totally silly. It's not like they can grab a few minutes to answer in a thread or a few hours in 3 months to write a blog which was promised. It's not like they have paid community managers who get paid to answer threads. Oh wait....

No, they can't. They're busy.

The sooner you realize that the better.

They don't care about you.

[ric 1]

look guys save your self some time and accept things are as they are, there will be some tweaking and tuning but the biggest tell of the current overall situation with the engine is when a DEV said the TOH flight model would not be put in because it caused a 10 fps drop (stress on an over stressed engine).

the best thing todo right now is find and read every tweak and tune guide for A3 and get the best possible performance you can out of you server and gaming rig. :)

[mobile_medic 43]

the biggest tell is apparent lack of priority given to this issue.

[Sneakson 1]

the biggest tell is apparent lack of priority given to this issue.

Well I'm having a solid 50 fps on Altis so it seems like they fixed the Altis issue and that's major.

32-bit.

[ric 1]

Well I'm having a solid 50 fps on Altis so it seems like they fixed the Altis issue and that's major.

32-bit.

and i get a solid 50 FPS in single player aswell...however multi player was 25 no matter what settings i had.

---------- Post added at 23:49 ---------- Previous post was at 23:42 ----------

the biggest tell is apparent lack of priority given to this issue.

there was no "priority" ...it was a business decision to go with the RV engine with no major rewrite to enhance scalability across modern proc's..this was decided even before the Alpha came out...there is nothing they can do about it...its not an ""optimization "" issue ..the engine can not scale across cores evenly.

what they are going to do as I mentioned is tweak and tune as much as they can and that is what we will have to play with :) its not perfect but it is here :)

[Opzoleet 10]

Recommended settings for this setup?

CPU: AMD FX8120 @ 3.9ghz w/ Corsair Hydro Series H100

VidCard: XFX Double D Black Edition Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5

MoBo: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+

RAM: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)

Seems to run great in SP @ 50-60 FPS on a combination of Very High and High settings. When I get into MP it drops to around 20 FPS, and at times can get even lower than that. Especially if I'm in the air.

My View Distance is set to around 2200 and Object around 1600.

Any recommendations to get higher FPS in MP?

Thanks.

[Sneakson 1]

Recommended settings for this setup?

CPU: AMD FX8120 @ 3.9ghz w/ Corsair Hydro Series H100

VidCard: XFX Double D Black Edition Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-bit GDDR5

MoBo: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX AM3+

RAM: 32GB G.Skill Ripjaws Z Series DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)

Seems to run great in SP @ 50-60 FPS on a combination of Very High and High settings. When I get into MP it drops to around 20 FPS, and at times can get even lower than that. Especially if I'm in the air.

My View Distance is set to around 2200 and Object around 1600.

Any recommendations to get higher FPS in MP?

Thanks.

Same as always: all maximum and cheap down on visibility, FSAA, ATOC and SSAO and maybe Objects, Terrain and Shadows too if you want a better framerate. And PIP makes a difference if it is completely off.

No other settings make much of a difference on a higher end rig anyways.

Not special tricks for MP that I know of.

[ryaneu 10]

Do you guys think by forcing the game to run on single or 2 cores will solve or improve some of these problems?

like setting -cpuCount=1 or -cpuCount=2

---------- Post added at 03:30 ---------- Previous post was at 03:25 ----------

Same as always: all maximum and cheap down on visibility, FSAA, ATOC and SSAO and maybe Objects, Terrain and Shadows too if you want a better framerate. And PIP makes a difference if it is completely off.

No other settings make much of a difference on a higher end rig anyways.

Not special tricks for MP that I know of.

The problem is, in multiplayer, tweaking any of the video settings have absolutely no effect on fps. At least for me.

---------- Post added at 03:36 ---------- Previous post was at 03:30 ----------

Well I'm having a solid 50 fps on Altis so it seems like they fixed the Altis issue and that's major.

32-bit.

Solid 50 fps in single player is no big deal really. Nobody cares much about single player. If you are getting solid 50 fps in multiplayer too then I will consider that major.

Edited August 30, 2013 by ryaneu

[TSAndrey 1]

No, they can't. They're busy.

The sooner you realize that the better.

They don't care about you.

Me? This thread has 179 pages and you dare to say "me"?! Do you think I'm the only one who has performance issues? This issue has been known for a while. Hell, it was probably present in previous Arma games, not just Arma 3.

"Busy". How busy can they be?

[Leon86 13]

Me? This thread has 179 pages and you dare to say "me"?! Do you think I'm the only one who has performance issues? This issue has been known for a while. Hell, it was probably present in previous Arma games, not just Arma 3.

Arma 3 on modern hardware runs pretty good compared to arma 2 on hardware available at launch.

In time arma 3 should be able to run like arma 2 in multiplayer which isn't stellar, but acceptable, I'm sure they'll get there, even on current hardware.

[xXxatrush1987 10]

Arma 3 on modern hardware runs pretty good compared to arma 2 on hardware available at launch.

In time arma 3 should be able to run like arma 2 in multiplayer which isn't stellar, but acceptable, I'm sure they'll get there, even on current hardware.

good made missions like becti for arma 3 run even faster than than warfare benny edition on zargabad for example, of cause with equal parameter settings.

even fat missions like teatimes warfare run fast as hell on servers, even on altis despite the config errors made by BIS.

i hope one day all the noobs get it that wasteland and so on need much better code and don´t blame BIS for that, teatimes warfare does around 45fps on a full server on altis(remember, despite the short freezes due to BIS)

arma 3 runs much faster than arma 2 on same settings on the same mod map and same hardware.

[jurrasstoil 10]

Well, I "fixed" my MP fps or at least made it less bad. I've now gone from totally unplayable 10-12 fps to a barely playable 20-30fps on the same servers with the same mission and amount of players.

The solution was simple. All I had to do is shell out 300€ to upgrade to a Xeon 1230v3 from my Phenom II X4 945. Sure, I could have paid 50€ less and gotten a 4570, but I'm using the PC for other things as well and they can make use of 8 Threads.

Still quite the joke and far from "great performance".

[war34d 10]

Some people i see are trying to defend dev's and their poor optimized game. People are spending more money to upgrade their pc's and thinking now they will get better performance but I think we forgot the title of this thread, which is "Low cpu utilization and low fps". When im playing in a small multiplayer server i get about 35 fps avg. but when player count goes to 60 i start to get less than 20 fps. Plz dev's don't tell me that i need to upgrade my cpu or gpu, its your game which is not utilizing my processor properly. no matter how low fps i get, my processor utilization never goes more than 53%. I think @TSAndrey is right this thread is 179 pages long and we had this issue in arma 2 as well, Now they should simply say "this is how it is, take it or leave" because only 12 days remaning to release and so far i don't see any fix.

[Sneakson 1]

Do you guys think by forcing the game to run on single or 2 cores will solve or improve some of these problems?

like setting -cpuCount=1 or -cpuCount=2

---------- Post added at 03:30 ---------- Previous post was at 03:25 ----------

The problem is, in multiplayer, tweaking any of the video settings have absolutely no effect on fps. At least for me.

---------- Post added at 03:36 ---------- Previous post was at 03:30 ----------

Solid 50 fps in single player is no big deal really. Nobody cares much about single player. If you are getting solid 50 fps in multiplayer too then I will consider that major.

Singleplayer is the only interesting thing to benchmark right now because multiplayer depends on a lot of things and has shown to for example depend on poor scenario scripting.

[Dwarden 1124]

i'm not posting on the subject

because for now there is nothing 'worth it' to mention

(only minor and slight performance updates (if you read changelog you noticed them)

we're still working on these bigger / major ones...

as it's not simple task like some of You trying to claim...

[TSAndrey 1]

i'm not posting on the subject

because for now there is nothing 'worth it' to mention

(only minor and slight performance updates (if you read changelog you noticed them)

we're still working on these bigger / major ones...

as it's not simple task like some of You trying to claim...

Finally some good news! Hopefully we get those major updates soon!

[Furret 0]

as it's not simple task like some of You trying to claim...

Hearing developers' musings while working on these optimisations would likely satiate people in threads like these, people hungry for information on the topic, regardless of how small the changes may be.

I personally just want to learn about the inner workings of the engine.

[ric 1]

i'm not posting on the subject

because for now there is nothing 'worth it' to mention

(only minor and slight performance updates (if you read changelog you noticed them)

we're still working on these bigger / major ones...

as it's not simple task like some of You trying to claim...

I think a lot of people are under the assumption that there is fine "tuning" to be done that will alleviate there issues with the game but a lot of us already know this is a core issue with the engine being unable to scale across multi core effectively :( at some point you are going to have to come clean like i think you did with A2...I cant remember the exact quote from one of the dev but basically it was stated that it would cost to much or take to much time to fix the performance issues with A2. if some one has the link please provide.

[jurrasstoil 10]

I think a lot of people are under the assumption that there is fine "tuning" to be done that will alleviate there issues with the game but a lot of us already know this is a core issue with the engine being unable to scale across multi core effectively :( at some point you are going to have to come clean like i think you did with A2...I cant remember the exact quote from one of the dev but basically it was stated that it would cost to much or take to much time to fix the performance issues with A2. if some one has the link please provide.

With pleasure:

One would expect that the server should offload most/all the AI calculation

and that the AI numbers have little effect on the client FPS.

One would expect wrong. This is not how MP works in our engine. While path-planning and some decisions are done owner-side only (which is server side for most AI), the simulation itself needs to be performed everywhere (the only optimization done is that simulation of far away units is done much less frequently).

I am sorry to disappoint you, but some things are really too hard and we are not willing to spend the time on them.

From this dev heaven bug report.

[windies 11]

i'm not posting on the subject

because for now there is nothing 'worth it' to mention

(only minor and slight performance updates (if you read changelog you noticed them)

we're still working on these bigger / major ones...

as it's not simple task like some of You trying to claim...

I know I've never insinuated that the performance issue's are simple tasks. I know they are big tasks and they consume a lot of developer's time and resources. All I've ever wanted is simply more transparency on the issue. Whether it be a "Sorry guys but the next couple of months are going to be rough...." versus *crickets chirping*.

I'm glad you guys are working on it, I hope to see improvements in the future.

[Dwarden 1124]

mixing apples and oranges, AI simulation being calculated on both client and server != scaling on multi cpu/core via multi threading ...

for the AI simulation in MP

you can try imagine that DayZ netcode/server architecture complete rewrite is aimed on reaching solution to that problem ...

MP performance is very tricky, all you need is miserable scriptcode in mission/server addons, server FPS going down to single digits

then add some more than small amount of AI and you have unplayable game state ...

for the multithreading, the engine already does it, but not as you (nor we) want ;( yet ...

be multithreaded everywhere isn't just about slicing the complex operations into 10s sub-threads and hope it works ...

...

[windies 11]

mixing apples and oranges, AI simulation being calculated on both client and server != scaling on multi cpu/core via multi threading ...

for the AI simulation in MP

you can try imagine that DayZ netcode/server architecture complete rewrite is aimed on reaching solution to that problem ...

MP performance is very tricky, all you need is miserable scriptcode in mission/server addons, server FPS going down to single digits

then add some more than small amount of AI and you have unplayable game state ...

for the multithreading, the engine already does it, but not as you (nor we) want ;( yet ...

be multithreaded everywhere isn't just about slicing the complex operations into 10s sub-threads and hope it works ...

...

Do you think it will be possible though to get the engine to use more threads or make better use of more core's than it does currently without having to do extensive rewrites to the engine? I'm not looking for a promise, but do you think it's something feasible within ArmA 3 or would it be something that would be reserved for say ArmA 4 or a next gen title?