should I buy a Video card or pay someone to help me out

[Cobrastrike 10]

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Edited August 21, 2013 by Cobrastrike

[jurrasstoil 10]

Well, at least you used punctuation once.

What's your CPU? It seems like you are experiencing the same bizarre problem that a lot of players are experiencing.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?147533-Low-CPU-utilization-amp-Low-FPS

[ric 1]

your video card is not the problem :)

[chrisb 196]

The card is a good card as said by the other's. Provided its put inside a strong enough good ‘clean’ pc, then it should eat A3 for breakfast.

_______________________________________________

Problem is, many complain, few reasons being, they either expect too much, i.e. they expect 60fps all the time, they run with horrendously badly optimized pc’s, full of stuff updating while they try to play the game, or they use over zealous anti this and that, plus other programs, turn it off if your offline, you don’t need any of the ‘anti’ stuff or indeed many of the other programs in many instances if your SP offline.

Online use a decent server, turn off anything that you don’t need for gaming or your security, whilst your gaming. Then turn it all back on after gaming or when your just browsing.

Keep your pc clean, use ‘CCleaner’ or similar, de-frag often, keep an eye on temps for your hdd’s ‘CrystalDiskInfo’, ‘Speccy’ etc. Use ‘msi_afterburner’ whilst your playing if you want to monitor usage and temps, better if you have a separate small screen, I use the screen on my G19 for that, not my monitor onscreen display, because it can draw down performance a little.

Its just good pc management from the owners side most of the time, it tends to sort most of the problems, in-fact if you do it from the first day of buying a new pc, game performance problems don't usually arise, unless the pc or gpu have a failure of some sort..

Edited August 4, 2013 by ChrisB

[Furret 0]

Try a different server.

[pr0ph3tswe 1]

try posting full system specs first, someting tells me you're using amd cpu or some older intel cpu

[jurrasstoil 10]

Well, even really old Intel CPUs can run arma 3 at okay fps apparently. I've got an older rig with an E8400 which manages a steady 20-40 fps in MP while my AMD PII X4 945 (which has the same single core performance) won't go higher than 12-13fps in MP. A3 uses 80-90% of both cores on my E8400, but not even 40-50% on any of the cores of my X4.

[ZoneTrooper 10]

Has nothing to do with the graphics card,the problem in Multiplayer is the Viewdistance,in most cases you only can change that viewdistance in the player menu when you scrool your mouse wheel.If you change it in the grafik option menu it will have no effect on the FPS.Arma 3 isn´t optimized yet,it will take months until the MP part will run smoothe like the Singleplayer.

Like i say the main problem in ARMA 3 is the Visibility and Object overall these both settings make the difference if you have high FPS or low FPS.

Other settings like Shadows,Terrain,Grass/Trees,Cloudes,Water etc have nearly no effect on the FPS.

It doesnt matter if you play on Low,Medium,High,Very-High,or Ultra the FPS nearly are the same.

If you choose the settings from bohemia like medium settings he will change the visibility to,wich means you will get LOW FPS adjust the visibility and then it should work normal.

But like i say in multiplayer it only makes difference on the FPS if you change the viewdistance in the player menu with the mouse wheel.

[f2k sel 164]

Isn't there an issue with shadows where it's more efficient to set them to high as it reduces the amount of work the CPU has to do by handing it off to the GPU

[ck-claw 1]

Isn't there an issue with shadows where it's more efficient to set them to high as it reduces the amount of work the CPU has to do by handing it off to the GPU

This is what i'm led to believe.

[old_painless 182]

cobrastrike, it is very hard to assess if your gaming PC is powerful enough from an MP setting in Arma 3 at the moment. So much depend on the particular server you connect to.

Your card is just fine, test out your entire system in a SP setting, if that is fine, then look for a good enough server to play MP, ie. one that won't give you bad fps.

View distance and object detail are the two main fps killers, which also means that you can improve fps the most, by turning those down.

And absolutely right about the shadows, with a 2 GB card they should be at High or better to become computed on the GPU (video card)

[Cobrastrike 10]

lol jurrasstoil on the punctuation

[Furret 0]

lol jurrasstoil on the punctuation

It's a valid concern, you're asking for help from the community. People who are not paid to be here. You want to make it as easy as possible for us to understand what's wrong.

I imagine many people were put off at having to read your wall of text.