Arma III is very laggy

[killerwhale 1]

BF3 is for kids

[Sneakson 1]

BF3 is for kids

Why? It's a lot more fun than ARMA at the moment -_-

[Bryce23 10]

I get it. Arma is superior to BF3 and I agree, I cannot play other FPS games anymore as Arma simple ruined them for me lol but to hate on BF3 because it does performance right, just isn't fair. Not for nothing Arma 3 is a 2013, possibly 2014 release game. The fact that their engine is still so CPU bound and not properly taking advantage of realistically more than 2 cores, is rather saddening.

Couldn't agree more. I think it's too early to say that I'm disappointed with Arma 3's performance, but I'm definitely at the edge of my seat when it comes to hoping for performance fixes. I just bought a brand new GTX670 FTW, overclocked my i7 to 3.66 GHz and got some sweet new RAM and an SSD just for Arma 3. When I first played Arma 3 after installing these upgrades I immediately put the game on all ultra assuming it would play it just fine. Nope. Had to lower most things (terrain quality especially) to standard or high just for it to be playable. And have my view distance <3000 and object distance <2000. Very disappointing. I have played dozens of games on my new setup and I've been able to play every single one at their highest settings without my frames ever going below 60 (my monitor's refresh rate) I even overclocked my brand new, nearly $400 dollar GTX670 and barely got a performance boost. Performance is especially poor online, although that is something I have a bit more confidence in that it will improve as we don't have much battleye/dedicated server support at the moment. Fine.

It really bothers me when people say "It's still an alpha, bro" or "You will get better performance in BF3 but it's so much more basic than Arma". Come on. Saying things like that is totally counter productive. And so is complaining a million times about the blatant and serious performance problems Arma 3 is currently is facing. I think what people want to see, and what would be more productive, is more of a response from Bohemia about exactly how they plan on fixing these issues. Their sitreps and what not are helpful but they don't seem to cover the major game engine issues. A few days ago I was reading a long thread about how A3's lack of multiple CPU core use and people seemed to be begging for answers, and others just used the "it's an alpha, just ignore the problem til the game is fully released" excuse.

In my opinion at least, it's depressing to spend over 600 bucks on upgrading to the latest hardware and still not being able to play the game without having to deal with performance problems, let alone serious ones. You shouldn't have to have an 8 core processor running at 6Ghz with a GTX Titan in order to play the game (semi)smoothly.

I'm desperately hoping these issues will be fixed but my hopes aren't too high because we're seeing the same issues that plagued Arma 1, 2, OA, etc. Arma is by far my favorite game and It's pretty much all I play since no other game can compare. But I want to enjoy it without having ridiculous performance issues.:pray:

*crosses fingers and hopes for more info from the devs*

Edited May 1, 2013 by Bryce23

[smokedog3para 365]

one of our gu members spent 4k on a rig says it plays fine maxed out lol dual titans watercooled asus extreme 5 mobo and a 2011 cpu unlocked 32gb ram kickin out on six cores.

I was getting 60fps with my asus extreme3 i7 @3.1 sd hard drive and 12gb ram x2 ati 6970 runs on ultra with high view and object, seems random to what parts you have to the results you get in game in my view a3 runs more smoothly than a2 ever did and looks better and has 2000m more on the view distance to play with.

You cant compare an arcade game with a milsim full stop.

[Brain 12]

Why? It's a lot more fun than ARMA at the moment -_-

Why? Ice-hockey is a lot more fun than chess at the moment -_-

Really, you can't compare ArmA vs. BF as much as you can't compare Ice-hockey to chess.

Whole different genre, whole different target audience, whole different aims.

[nodunit 397]

BF3 is for kids

Please don't bring that high and mighty attitude here, we really don't want that kind of image, people are entitled to play whatever game they paid for.

[AlexanderJ 1]

The community has been arguing profusely about the game engine's performance since the release of the first Arma. I don't understand why the developers cannot simply acknowledge that there is an issue or tell us all to piss off; I would be happy with either response as opposed to being stuck in this limbo state hoping the game will be optimised.

[marcai 1]

Why? Ice-hockey is a lot more fun than chess at the moment -_-

Really, you can't compare ArmA vs. BF as much as you can't compare Ice-hockey to chess.

Whole different genre, whole different target audience, whole different aims.

BF3 is for kids

One game is an fps based around infantry soldiery with large maps and an array of different weapons and vehicles. The other is.. well the same, but with an increasingly arrogant pretentiousness amongst its community, it seems. Trying to defend a games poor performance by saying "well that other game is for kiddies and isn't as complex as mine. So what if it's only 20fps, I don't need to be able to see or smoothly aim to enjoy it" isn't helpful in the slightest. I personally average about 30-40fps, but it drops to as low as 8 in certain areas, which can be lethal in a game such as Arma. People dying because of performance hits from the game isn't fun, hence what I assume Sneakson means.

No matter what people on the forums like to believe, Arma is first and foremost a game, made for enjoyment, and is the exact same genre as games like BF3, just with increased complexity. We heal ourselves from bullet wounds in 5 seconds, we can have a helicopter as good as new in the same amount of time, we aritficailly stunt our view distance per computer, meaning certain players will see things that others can't- these are incredibly 'gamy' aspects of Arma, which people overlook in order to degrade other shooters. Starcraft is as much an RTS title as Total War, Dawn of War, Age of Empires or Stronghold, despite them all being very different; in the same way, Arma is the same genre as other shooters. Arguing that Arma is a different genre to BF3 is like arguing that an apple and a pear are poles apart. Ice hockey and chess? More like downhill skiing and slaalem skiing. At the end of the day, you're still skiing down a snowy hill through flags, you're just turning faster in one than the other.

As for them being aimed at different audiences, I believe the fact that people keep bringing it up as a comparison implies that a lot of the people who are alpha testing Arma are in fact, fans of the Battlefront series. Shock horror, this implies they have the same target audience. Now that doesn't mean you specifically -I myself have never played Battlefront 3 simply because I was playing other games when it was in its hayday- but obviously a lot of Arma players have done, and enjoyed it. It has more complex damage models than Arma, it has arguably more impressive graphics than Arma, but let's simply say its worse because we can pick and chose which features we discuss make a game realistic.

I love the Arma series and fully support BI improving the strong base they've made in the Arma 3 alpha, but fans need to stop pretending that you can't compare it to other games out there. If we can't compare a game to other games, all we'll ever get is stagnation and a closed community, where people can continue to sing praises about a series as it adopts things that other games did years ago as if it were a brand new feature. Running smooth shouldn't be a privilege to the rich few who buy the best bits for their computers, but should be available to all who play. Alpha players ignoring that fact and making excuses for it are actually causing a stagnation in the games development rather than helping it in any real way. Your 'job' as an alpha tester is to say "Hey, this feature could be better. See how [x game/ y mod] did it? That was more impressive, we'd like that please!"

[Bryce23 10]

I can't express how much I agree with the last two posts...:cool:

[Touch Off 10]

Spot on Marcai

[Bryce23 10]

Another SPOTREP/full alpha update today. Seemingly no (noticeable) performance fixes or news on performance improvements to come. Getting the same performance as before the patch. :k: Would be nice if they fixed the game's core performance issues before adding new stuff like the fog.

[dwaight 17]

Another SPOTREP/full alpha update today. Seemingly no (noticeable) performance fixes or news on performance improvements to come. Getting the same performance as before the patch. :k: Would be nice if they fixed the game's core performance issues before adding new stuff like the fog.

To date, not a single Bohemia dev has acknowledged the atrocious FPS or abysmal performance as an issue. We all secretly know what that means: nothing will get fixed. When the powers that be willfully ignore an issue, that means a decision has already been made...and in this case that means it wont be fixed. Ever

[kremator 1065]

It's not just one guy (or girl for political correctness) coding 'all teh thingz'. It is a team of people, each of whom will be working on specific things like animations, balance, graphics, fog etc etc. There will of course be someone tasked with performance, but everything will take a hit on FPS.

Take Arma3Mark mission that was brought out recently. I don't amazing numbers on it, however my performance SEEMS to be fine. I'm not anal about FPS numbers, as long as the game is smooth for me.

So don't sweat performance yet .. give it time, keep putting information onto the tracker and it will be sorted out. Arma3 is already running much better on my system that Arma2 did at the beginning (and after a huge amount of Arma2 tweaking too!)

What DOES annoy me is people that have only been around this alpha for a MONTH commenting like they know the game inside out. Perhaps we need a tracker issue to sort them :p

[Leon86 13]

dont go expecting it to run similar to bf3. There are issues with a lot of ai fighting, where arma2 performs better, those situations will probably improve.

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

It's not just one guy (or girl for political correctness) coding 'all teh thingz'. It is a team of people, each of whom will be working on specific things like animations, balance, graphics, fog etc etc. There will of course be someone tasked with performance, but everything will take a hit on FPS.

Take Arma3Mark mission that was brought out recently. I don't amazing numbers on it, however my performance SEEMS to be fine. I'm not anal about FPS numbers, as long as the game is smooth for me.

So don't sweat performance yet .. give it time, keep putting information onto the tracker and it will be sorted out. Arma3 is already running much better on my system that Arma2 did at the beginning (and after a huge amount of Arma2 tweaking too!)

I think the real problem is, over the years I've learned that not all games are created with the same performance concepts in mind. For instance games like console ports and old PC titles like Half Life, were built to run at high performance in mind. They cut back on going over the top and crossing certain thresholds that pretty much bottom out fps no matter how fast your hardware is.

Then you've got games like Arma that at times ignore performance conscience limitations. Same can be said about Assassin's Creed 3. The developers aimed for putting as much "stuff" into the world but didn't hold back to any particular performance targets. Even on my 4.6Ghz 3770k that game is still heavily CPU bound far worse than Arma 3 is, and that's a console port.

The point I'm trying to make is I don't think we can hold Arma 3 to the same levels of accountability in regards to performance as we can to other games. I agree that with a top end PC we should expect reasonable performance, but not all games are created with the same performance targets. It's a choice the devs make, I'm certain they're aware of how this game gets bottlenecked, and they know that the only way to fix it would be to re-write the entire engine or cut back on in game content. As player's it's easy to say "yeah re-write the engine for better multithreading" but I know that from the developers perspective that just isn't much of an option.

[Bryce23 10]

As player's it's easy to say "yeah re-write the engine for better multithreading" but I know that from the developers perspective that just isn't much of an option.

And in my opinion at least, staying with the same broken game engine forever is also not an option. It either needs to be fixed, or scrapped in favor of a better game engine.

Nobody is saying that everyone, regardless of the system specs, should get 60 FPS. My main issue is how the framerate is so inconsistent. For example, when I'm standing at the airport and looking towards the ocean I get a steady 60fps but If i turn around and look toward the buildings and mountains, it drops to about 40-45. The real issue with framerates is not necessarily that they're low all the time, it's that if your framerate is inconsistent it makes the game feel even choppier and it multiplies the effect of having low(er) FPS. One of the reasons I bought the GTX 670 FTW a couple weeks ago is its adaptive vsync feature. In every other game when I run vsync it locks my fps at 60. Never goes above or below. I love it. In arma 3, it struggles so much to keep the framereate steady.

Again, what's making so many players upset is not only the performance issues. Nobody is expecting the game to be fully optimized yet. The issue, that has been stated many times in this thread and others, is that Bohemia has not acknowledged the issues and/or let the community know if they plan on fixing them or not.

On another note, I plan on upgrading my OC'd i7920 to a Haswell 4670k next month (meaning I have to get a new mobo too) and overclocking it just for this game. It doesn't bother me that I have to upgrade my PC to play the newest games. But to spend a lot of money on the latest hardware to play the latest game only to find that the game has the same issues as it did 5 years ago and it won't even use a good portion of the hardware's power - that's worrisome to me.

Saying "Use a 6Ghz CPU & GTX Titans in quad SLI or just deal with it" to the same problems we see time and time again is not a sustainable concept.

*I really hate ranting. I'm just really passionate about being able to play my favorite game at an enjoyable framerate.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Bryce23

[gossamersolid 155]

I'm not sure why people bother continuing to talk about this.

BIS has their own set of plans for the game's development and nobody's opinions or "suggestions" to re-write the engine will cause them to change their minds.

Get used to how the game runs, or stop playing. Nobody forced you to buy it and nobody is forcing you to play it.

[AlexanderJ 1]

I'm not sure why people bother continuing to talk about this.

BIS has their own set of plans for the game's development and nobody's opinions or "suggestions" to re-write the engine will cause them to change their minds.

Get used to how the game runs, or stop playing. Nobody forced you to buy it and nobody is forcing you to play it.

If it wasn't for their customers there wouldn't be any 'BIS'. Aren't we entitled to discuss our opinions and suggestions? Isn't that why they allowed us to test the game in alpha and even created a feedback tracker?

Nobody forced you to read this thread and nobody is forcing you to participate in development discussions.

[Tonci87 163]

I think it´s quite fascinating that the people complaing about the engine are the people that joined these forums a month, or two, ago. It makes me wonder if they are just spoiled by casual playerscentric fast paced stupid FPS out there, or if the veterans on these forums have adapted to the shortcomings of the engine?

One thing I know for sure: Everybody who shouts "scrap the engine, it sucks" doesn´t have a clue about the RV engine, it´s limitations and massive advantages!

Yes the engine has it´s problems, yes it needs to be tweaked but it still is the best engine available for a game like Arma. No other comes even close to it.

[gossamersolid 155]

I think it´s quite fascinating that the people complaing about the engine are the people that joined these forums a month, or two, ago. It makes me wonder if they are just spoiled by casual playerscentric fast paced stupid FPS out there, or if the veterans on these forums have adapted to the shortcomings of the engine?

One thing I know for sure: Everybody who shouts "scrap the engine, it sucks" doesn´t have a clue about the RV engine, it´s limitations and massive advantages!

Yes the engine has it´s problems, yes it needs to be tweaked but it still is the best engine available for a game like Arma. No other comes even close to it.

This is my exact thoughts.

I started playing the series back in the OFP era. The game never really ran the best, but I learned to accept that I'd have to take a performance hit. If there was another game out there that rivaled ArmA's engine in what you could actually do with it and do it better, then I'd be complaining.

Also, a lot of people here don't seem to understand concepts of software development and what happens and what point in time. They AREN'T going to re-write base technology (engine) this late into the development of ArmA 3. There's just too many potential problems and time required to make massive changes to the underlying code.

[MayAnneNaze 10]

For me, personally, changing GFX setting to high / off helped with the lag. As far as I am aware Medium and below settings default to CPU. Whereas as High and above default to GPU. So I have things like post-processing - clouds etc off. Textures, object to high. (Terrain at medium (difference of medium to high was about 7fps for me)). But yeah; Alpha is Alpha.

[ephant 10]

Get used to how the game runs, or stop playing. Nobody forced you to buy it and nobody is forcing you to play it.

Yeah they should really don't bother with optimisation at all. I mean, deal with it or stop playing.

I think it´s quite fascinating that the people complaing about the engine are the people that joined these forums a month, or two, ago. It makes me wonder if they are just spoiled by casual playerscentric fast paced stupid FPS out there, or if the veterans on these forums have adapted to the shortcomings of the engine?

One thing I know for sure: Everybody who shouts "scrap the engine, it sucks" doesn´t have a clue about the RV engine, it´s limitations and massive advantages!

Yes the engine has it´s problems, yes it needs to be tweaked but it still is the best engine available for a game like Arma. No other comes even close to it.

Yes, I joined the community a few months ago but I'm playing the "Arma" series since OPF (skipped Arma 1 though because my PC sucked back then).

The thing is: People got used to performant engines. Just look how many people complained about the performance when they bought Arma 2 just for DayZ.

[jw custom 56]

Why? It's a lot more fun than ARMA at the moment -_-

Seriously?? If you are playing BF3/ArmA to get the same kinda experience then i get your point!

I have played a lot of BF3 but i've NEVER experienced anything close to what i do in ArmA(3).

[danny96 80]

@Sneakson

@JW Custom

Discussion starting with ArmA 3 being laggy turned into fight between BF3 and A3? Chill guys.

[Bryce23 10]

I think it´s quite fascinating that the people complaing about the engine are the people that joined these forums a month, or two, ago. It makes me wonder if they are just spoiled by casual playerscentric fast paced stupid FPS out there, or if the veterans on these forums have adapted to the shortcomings of the engine?

One thing I know for sure: Everybody who shouts "scrap the engine, it sucks" doesn´t have a clue about the RV engine, it´s limitations and massive advantages!

Yes the engine has it´s problems, yes it needs to be tweaked but it still is the best engine available for a game like Arma. No other comes even close to it.

I have been posting about the performance issues of the game...I joined the forums 4 years ago and I've been playing Arma since Arma 1. Labeling everyone who is trying to voice their opinion about the awful performance issues of this game as "noobs who don't know what they're talking about" is childish, false, and unproductive.

Nobody is denying that it's the best engine for a game like arma 3. It has extreme advantages, and without the engine a game like arma would probably not be possible. But it also has extreme disadvantages too. And they're the same ones that have plagued arma 1, arma 2, and operation arrowhead and now Arma 3.

Asking why these issues are still present, and if they will be fixed or not, does not seem like a bad idea to me. If everyone had the mentality where issues should be brushed aside, justified or ignored, nothing would get done. I really do believe that BI is trying to fix these issues - hence the feedback tracker, sitreps, etc. But they have yet to give us a statement as to how the core performance issues will (or won't) be fixed and if some of you guys think that asking for an answer is stupid/pointless...then I guess everyone is not interested in seeing Arma 3 reach its full potential.