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Tonci87

Stuttering and bad performance with latest Dev Build Editions, Testing Thread

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I generally run high/very high settings on my I5 2500K@4,5Gh, 8Gb RAM and GTX 680, this gives me about 40-60FPS most of the time, but in some situations the game is stuttering. This is not an FPS problem, since they stay the same (checked with FRAPS) and happens only in some areas (like the shooting range on the East nd of the Island and in some towns. As soon as I leave the place, all runs well. This looks to me like a RAM problem since the HDD is mumbling, but still after some time all should be buffered, but it's not. This happens on both dev and non-dev version, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. Anyway, looks to me, like Arma 3 has mostly problems in the geometry department when it comes to smoothness of gameplay. Still this is not an issue with FPS and visual detail.

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I don't know if this is relevant but now and again on the runway I've noticed that when certain vehicles explode or are dropped there appears to be a water type splash. Just wondering if the sea is being rendered under the Island?

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I generally run high/very high settings on my I5 2500K@4,5Gh, 8Gb RAM and GTX 680, this gives me about 40-60FPS most of the time, but in some situations the game is stuttering. This is not an FPS problem, since they stay the same (checked with FRAPS) and happens only in some areas (like the shooting range on the East nd of the Island and in some towns. As soon as I leave the place, all runs well. This looks to me like a RAM problem since the HDD is mumbling, but still after some time all should be buffered, but it's not. This happens on both dev and non-dev version, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. Anyway, looks to me, like Arma 3 has mostly problems in the geometry department when it comes to smoothness of gameplay. Still this is not an issue with FPS and visual detail.

i check all mate and this game SHOULD run 60fpd rock solid for the quality of GFX has but dont...

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I don't know if this is relevant but now and again on the runway I've noticed that when certain vehicles explode or are dropped there appears to be a water type splash. Just wondering if the sea is being rendered under the Island?

yes, fly up very high and look down, you'll see z fighting and the water encroaching deep in-land. that's the water that exists under island but is covered by terrain.

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I generally run high/very high settings on my I5 2500K@4,5Gh, 8Gb RAM and GTX 680, this gives me about 40-60FPS most of the time, but in some situations the game is stuttering. This is not an FPS problem, since they stay the same (checked with FRAPS) and happens only in some areas (like the shooting range on the East nd of the Island and in some towns. As soon as I leave the place, all runs well. This looks to me like a RAM problem since the HDD is mumbling, but still after some time all should be buffered, but it's not. This happens on both dev and non-dev version, so I'm not sure if this is the right place to post. Anyway, looks to me, like Arma 3 has mostly problems in the geometry department when it comes to smoothness of gameplay. Still this is not an issue with FPS and visual detail.

What? I'd kill for 40-60 fps and I'm running I5 2500k @4.3/16gigram/Nvidia Titan and i average 35 fps.... What settings are you on? Im talking on the Autodetect Default which generally places everything at either Very High or Ultra. Also are you talking MP with no Ai or SP -Im using Infantry showcase as benchie.

We really need a standard benchmartk test and for settings or else all of this performance sharing is utter waste....

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Infantry showcase is not really good for this - few units and a forest mission with low view distance mostly (you are in a valley). Just tweak your settings. Autodetect is overkill as it sets your view distance to 3800. Try going somewhere around 2000. Also: anisotropic above standard eats a few FPS and does not really provide better quality, textures - no difference between very high and ultra, terrain detail - also very high and objects detail - go with high, this is a major FPS killer as well.

This is all for SP. In MP the framerate drops, but I find that the stuttering there is either due to lag or something else as FRAPS shows good results.

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I haven’t done any of the scenario’s that came with Arma 3. But on the map on my own (editor) in sunny weather lots of shadows etc, mostly Ultra, on my older A2 pc its anything from

60-95fps. I did a scenario where I put 40v40 run straight at each other in the open countryside, I was a bystander, so 81ai in total, more or less all engaged at once with everthing going off, I was still getting 40ish average with more or less the same settings.

The only thing I do change is vd I use 1000 or 1200 on the ground (real fps eater I find), obviously more in the air. The terrain detail I have at standard (another fps eater for me), 2x AA, no pp the rest on Ultra or the highest it will go. Its performing really well with my older pc, I would imagine I’m going to get problems with my new pc, having read on the forums here, people with similar setups, so waiting to put a hard copy into that when the game is released proper, should be better by then (hopefully), also may change the card in there before that..

Maybe the game is not using the newer upto date cards that well, old tech perhaps working better on slightly older cards, who knows, bit odd at the moment. I only put the DDE version on as I knew I was putting it on my older pc, was originally going to get the supporters edition. Didn’t really expect any performance at all, just really to look around at low fps. Must say its been a big surprise for me, pleasant surprise but in a way unpleasant as well considering, as said earlier, what I have read here on the forums and my new pc spec, not sure now which card to go for if I change the 7970, maybe wait for the 8*** series..

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It's not the graphic cards, it's the CPUs. Now, I have been in this simulation business a long time and I found there is only one sim that utilizes quad-cores: Rise of Flight. The rest (Arma including) uses old engines that were designed ages ago and updated from release to release to provide better visuals. Still, all those engines are CPU-bound and were initially written with one core in mind. The idea was that eventually there will be enough processing power to run everything maxed out, but nobody predicted the market will shift from Gh to power saving and multi-threading. And now we have FPS problems. The devs try to modify the engines, but there is just a limit as to what you can achieve with the current resources (BIS and other sim-making companies, are not EA). The remedy would be to write a new engine from scratch, but nobody can afford it (you need to release stuff to get money to go on). The problem is, the hardware market is more or less slowing down. We will not see the new Intel Haswell provide a significant improvement over Ivy Bridge and Ati and Nvidia will not realease a new GPU generation this year. What is more troubling the whole market seems to focus more on APUs and better GPU - CPU integration so as to avoid memory bandwidth problems (remeber a few years ago, how you needed to OC you'r CPu so that your GPU can run at full speed?).

What I don't get is why simulation devs amp up the graphics with those old engines, when the players don't really have the means to enjoy them. What is the point in making a game that looks great in 2013, when most people will probably be able to play it smooth in 2015, when it's going to look outdated? The future does not look that bright even - we will probably see less power consuming chips with more cores and integrated GPUs. Next year's gaming PCs might as well resemble a PS4, which is sort of a PC mostly. Now I have spent a fortune (by my country's average earning standards) for my machine and all my friends think I am crazy. And here comes Arma 3 and stutters in some cases on mid-low. The latest dev build is completely unplayable and a stutter fest.

That said, this is not a rant against the devs, but I think the current approach to the Arma engine needs some reconsideration. We need to have this optimised for current-gen hardware, as we cannot expect newer CPUs will be an improvement in games.

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It's not the graphic cards, it's the CPUs. Now, I have been in this simulation business a long time and I found there is only one sim that utilizes quad-cores: Rise of Flight. The rest (Arma including) uses old engines that were designed ages ago and updated from release to release to provide better visuals. Still, all those engines are CPU-bound and were initially written with one core in mind. The idea was that eventually there will be enough processing power to run everything maxed out, but nobody predicted the market will shift from Gh to power saving and multi-threading. And now we have FPS problems. The devs try to modify the engines, but there is just a limit as to what you can achieve with the current resources (BIS and other sim-making companies, are not EA). The remedy would be to write a new engine from scratch, but nobody can afford it (you need to release stuff to get money to go on). The problem is, the hardware market is more or less slowing down. We will not see the new Intel Haswell provide a significant improvement over Ivy Bridge and Ati and Nvidia will not realease a new GPU generation this year. What is more troubling the whole market seems to focus more on APUs and better GPU - CPU integration so as to avoid memory bandwidth problems (remeber a few years ago, how you needed to OC you'r CPu so that your GPU can run at full speed?).

What I don't get is why simulation devs amp up the graphics with those old engines, when the players don't really have the means to enjoy them. What is the point in making a game that looks great in 2013, when most people will probably be able to play it smooth in 2015, when it's going to look outdated? The future does not look that bright even - we will probably see less power consuming chips with more cores and integrated GPUs. Next year's gaming PCs might as well resemble a PS4, which is sort of a PC mostly. Now I have spent a fortune (by my country's average earning standards) for my machine and all my friends think I am crazy. And here comes Arma 3 and stutters in some cases on mid-low. The latest dev build is completely unplayable and a stutter fest.

That said, this is not a rant against the devs, but I think the current approach to the Arma engine needs some reconsideration. We need to have this optimised for current-gen hardware, as we cannot expect newer CPUs will be an improvement in games.

This is interesting, so is it a stutter fest for you in the scenario’s or is it also in the ‘Editor’ ?

Also, not sure of your spec’s, but why is it that way for you and not for me ?

Are newer graphic cards therefore pointless where Arma 3 or in-fact this series is concerned, in your view ?

We know its cpu, does it seem that the series appeals to older cpu’s, i.e. have the newer cpu’s gone too far for this series to work properly regards the game not the graphics ?

Edit: What are the solutions for you, I don't seem to need any yet, i.e if you sat down at BIS now for the next month, what would you do to correct it ?

Edited by ChrisB

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Stutters occur in the dev build and are not dependent on FPS. They happen in areas that have buildings and wire fences (like the shooting range). They also appear in editor and MP.

As for MP itself, it runs slower than SP (even if I jus host an MP mission for myself), no idea why.

Newer graphic cards can only improve FPS with reagrds to stuff that is GPU dependent in the game: shadows, shaders, texture resolution (VRAM) etc. The physics, 3D objects and AI seem CPU dependent and therefore no matter the graphic card, you can still set up a mission that will kill your FPS. Also, as with Arma 2, performance significantly drops at during night missions. No idea why, but it's not the dynamic lights.

As for CPU's itself, as far as any simulation games goes, be it Arma, DCS: World, Cliffs of Dover etc, Intel performs better than AMD/ATI. In my opinion this is because AMD went for a more threaded design and most software does not take advantage of that. I think that the current gen Intel CPUs are ok for Arma or any other simulation game, but are still not enough to handle far view distance and hundreds of units. In other words: too many objects and the CPU cannot perform well. Upcoming CPUs do not seem to guarantee better performance, since the idea is to have more processing power with less energy usage and less heat. That means more focus on multi-core rather than single core optimisation. Not really sure how Arma 3 takes advantage of multi-core processors, but during an SP mission I see ma CPU usage around 46% and most activity is on the 1st core, while the other three stay around 25%.

I do not have a solution for this, I am not a programmer, nor a hardware geek. I know DCS got some improvements by going 64-bit, but they still hang on the first core, with the sound in a separate thread. 3D objects seem to be the key for optimising this, if they could be somehow processed by the GPU or other cores... All in all, I think the devs should try to figure out a way the make better use of the hardware. I know it's a game an not Prime95, but there is still power under the hood that is not used.

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The stutter in those areas is most likely missing audio files for walking over dirt.

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=4943

it's getting a few votes a day but there's still a lot of nonsense issues to be overtaken before bohemia will notice I'm afraid. Ah well, maybe they'll figure out those files are missing on their own.

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It's a perfect explanation for what I'm experiencing, mad stutter on patches of dirt, fluent on any other surface. Always. I'd be very surprised if it's something else.

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Infantry showcase is not really good for this - few units and a forest mission with low view distance mostly (you are in a valley). Just tweak your settings. Autodetect is overkill as it sets your view distance to 3800. Try going somewhere around 2000. Also: anisotropic above standard eats a few FPS and does not really provide better quality, textures - no difference between very high and ultra, terrain detail - also very high and objects detail - go with high, this is a major FPS killer as well.

This is all for SP. In MP the framerate drops, but I find that the stuttering there is either due to lag or something else as FRAPS shows good results.

Gave your settings a whirl:

RamDisk: Full Game

Dev Build: ...185

Resolution: 2560x1440

Texture: Very High

Objects: High

Terrain: Very High

Cloud:Ultra

Particles: Very High

AA: 2X

Anisotropic: Standard (good call on this one)

PPAA: FXAA Standard

Atoc: All On

PiP: High

Dynamic Lights: Ultra

PostP: VeryHigh

ViewDistance: 3000 (I know but I like this high)

Object: 1800

Shadow: 115

So overall, I got a pretty hefty 15-40 fps jump here. LOL at the huge discrepancy but thats literally how my alpha plays out: Fps shooting from 38-72-63-44 in matter of seconds. The mission or content is a huge component here -thats why we need a standard. For instance if I just put myself in editor and run around - its 50-80 fps now for the most part. A 30vs. 30 infantry fight on a hillside, 34-40 fps. Infantry showcase got a solid 15-20 fps increase.

And lol at you guys saying your fps ceiling is 90 -are you looking at the sky??? When I do that its 108 :)

Edit: Should also note Ive never once experienced this stuttering.

Edited by froggyluv

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Gave your settings a whirl:

RamDisk: Full Game

Dev Build: ...185

Resolution: 2560x1440

Texture: Very High

Objects: High

Terrain: Very High

Cloud:Ultra

Particles: Very High

AA: 2X

Anisotropic: Standard (good call on this one)

PPAA: FXAA Standard

Atoc: All On

PiP: High

Dynamic Lights: Ultra

PostP: VeryHigh

ViewDistance: 3000 (I know but I like this high)

Object: 1800

Shadow: 115

So overall, I got a pretty hefty 15-40 fps jump here. LOL at the huge discrepancy but thats literally how my alpha plays out: Fps shooting from 38-72-63-44 in matter of seconds. The mission or content is a huge component here -thats why we need a standard. For instance if I just put myself in editor and run around - its 50-80 fps now for the most part. A 30vs. 30 infantry fight on a hillside, 34-40 fps. Infantry showcase got a solid 15-20 fps increase.

And lol at you guys saying your fps ceiling is 90 -are you looking at the sky??? When I do that its 108 :)

Edit: Should also note Ive never once experienced this stuttering.

Wich settings did you change to get better FPS?

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Viewdistance/Objects/Shadows all lowered. All of my textures were previously Ultra for the most part. Anisotropic was Ultra and is now Standard. AA was X8 now is X2 and FXAA was also maxed and is now down to standard.

I also have to admit I just mounted game on RamDisk last night though that has never given me an FPS in the past but Im not completely sure that hasn't helped at least a part of the increase. Also if I do drop my VD further down to 2000/Objects 900, the increase is even larger (obviously) and really makes the game play smooth even during very large AI vs AI battles.

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Gave your settings a whirl:

RamDisk: Full Game

Dev Build: ...185

Resolution: 2560x1440

Texture: Very High

Objects: High

Terrain: Very High

Cloud:Ultra

Particles: Very High

AA: 2X

Anisotropic: Standard (good call on this one)

PPAA: FXAA Standard

Atoc: All On

PiP: High

Dynamic Lights: Ultra

PostP: VeryHigh

ViewDistance: 3000 (I know but I like this high)

Object: 1800

Shadow: 115

So overall, I got a pretty hefty 15-40 fps jump here. LOL at the huge discrepancy but thats literally how my alpha plays out: Fps shooting from 38-72-63-44 in matter of seconds. The mission or content is a huge component here -thats why we need a standard. For instance if I just put myself in editor and run around - its 50-80 fps now for the most part. A 30vs. 30 infantry fight on a hillside, 34-40 fps. Infantry showcase got a solid 15-20 fps increase.

And lol at you guys saying your fps ceiling is 90 -are you looking at the sky??? When I do that its 108 :)

Edit: Should also note Ive never once experienced this stuttering.

Hi, thanks for the info but could you possibly add your computer setup/build to your sig radius so that we can compare it to what we have and see if your comment is relative to us. Thank you pal.

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PP = off

AA = 2x

Terrain = standard

VD = 1200

The rest at maximum, no use using v/high against ultra, for me there is no difference.

Here's the sky

---------- Post added at 15:46 ---------- Previous post was at 15:38 ----------

Stutters occur in the dev build and are not dependent on FPS. They happen in areas that have buildings and wire fences (like the shooting range). They also appear in editor and MP.

.

I don't have any problems with buildings/fences, only a slight stutter as said earlier in the thread, same type of ground as @leon86, no grass soil type ground. The only thing it was doing is dropping my fps by 30 to top 50's, that's sort of sorted a little now, in that area now I get mid 70's but thats still 10 or so lower than I did get which was in the top 80's at the airfield on that ground.

Edited by ChrisB

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I just went back to standard build, maxed out all settings and cut view distance to @2000. It's still not a solid 60 which I am used to from my Quake 3 days lol, but runs above 30 most of the time and with PP maxed out, view distance cut-off looks really cool, beautiful even. Still, all the eye candy except object detail and view distance seems GPU dependent, which makes anything above 3200 VD hardly playable, and gets worse with a lot of AI.

Also, I think the start of the Helicopter Showcase is a good benchmark. Unfortunately, the dev build suffers from the mentioned stutters and is unplayable for me, so cannot really compare and I don't think this is due to sound files missing, but than again I haven't tested that extensively, it's just so time and patience consuming...

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Just confirming that, went to the same spot and took pic here running smooth.

Great BIS, not sure if that was the ticket or just one of those things...:)

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I just went back to standard build, maxed out all settings and cut view distance to @2000. It's still not a solid 60 which I am used to from my Quake 3 days lol, but runs above 30 most of the time and with PP maxed out, view distance cut-off looks really cool, beautiful even. Still, all the eye candy except object detail and view distance seems GPU dependent, which makes anything above 3200 VD hardly playable, and gets worse with a lot of AI.

Also, I think the start of the Helicopter Showcase is a good benchmark. Unfortunately, the dev build suffers from the mentioned stutters and is unplayable for me, so cannot really compare and I don't think this is due to sound files missing, but than again I haven't tested that extensively, it's just so time and patience consuming...

I max my view distance and objects, no problem playing online, all settings to standard thoug and AA, VSYNC off.

i5 2500k and ati 6950 2 gb gpu.

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Just confirming that, went to the same spot and took pic here running smooth.

Great BIS, not sure if that was the ticket or just one of those things...:)

Still bad fps drops for me runs great at first then drops.

Windows 7 64 bit

15 2500 3.3ghz

580gtx

8gb ddr3

Raptor 300 gb 10000rpm

Raptor 120 gb 10000rpm

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