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wawa

Switching Arma 3's process to the virtual cores

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NOTE: This Experiment is ONLY for those with 4 Physical and 4 Virtual Core PC's, if you have a total of 8 cores and your CPU is an i7... I recommend you at least try this. It will fix performance to complete smooth on any graphical setting...

So guys, I have ArmA 2 CO and ArmA 3. And one day I decided to open ArmA 2 CO and play with ACE Mod, because I miss the old stuff. Well, the game ran absolutely horrible on almost every mission... I got jerkiness while I was aiming around and shooting at people... and the scopes were very choppy. I finally decided to just experiment with ways of fixing my Performance. Well, I decided to set ArmA's startup parameters to... NoFilePatching, NoSplash, SkipIntro, cpuCount=8, world=empty, maxMem=8192. Now this is important, but not as important as the next step I am about to explain to you.

Start ArmA 2 or ArmA 3 and change your graphical settings straight to max... everything. Then minimize the game, and CTRL+ALT+Delete to bring up your Task Manager. NOW!!! Right Click on the ArmA 2 or ArmA 3 process, and make sure that ONLY THE LAST FOUR CORES ARE SELECTED. These are your Virtual Cores, what this means is that ArmA will only use your virtual cores and not your Physical. Then Right Click on the ArmA process and make sure the Priority is on Normal. Close Task Manager, go into the game... and play a mission. You should, theoretically get 100% smooth performance... now before i was getting horrible performance. But with these settings, I can max ArmA out on a outdated Graphics Card. GOOD LUCK TO EVERYONE!!!

NOTE MUST READ: YOU HAVE TO DO THIS EVERY TIME YOU RESTART ARMA!!! UNLESS YOU USE A AFFINITY SAVER.

Add me on Steam for HELP!

SW33TF34R

MY COMPUTER!

i7 2700k 8-Cores (4Physical\4Virtual), @3.8ghz+

ATI Radeon 6950 2GB DDR5

16GB @1600mhz RazorTeeth Memory

850Watt PSU (Corsair)

85GB Solid State HardDrive

Lotsa Fans and a Cooler Master Case!!!

:yay::yay::yay::yay::yay:

Edited by wawa

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You have my interest, but I'm quite skeptical.

What it sounds like to me that you're doing is limiting the game to 4 cores? Does it matter which?

By the way this may or may not be related: have you tried comparing your hyper-threading performance with non-hyper performance?

In most games according to the tests I’ve seen disabling hyper-threading makes games run better. It sounds like to me that you’re doing basically the same thing here by limiting the game to 4 cores which is something I haven’t really ever heard of before however you’re putting it on the 4 virtual cores instead of the 4 physical cores.

I’m really no CPU master and don’t know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re having better performance and if this could be usable to all i7 users. Sounds somewhat interesting though.

Also, a lot of users have screwed up definitions of maxing and smooth. Are you running the game with all maximum settings including what draw distance and in what resolution and finally in what framerate according to Fraps measured through Showcase: Infantry (only in-game fps*)?

*= Only measure in-game. Stop measurements before opening the menu or when you die and some sort of menu or loading screen appears and absolutely don’t measure when you tab out of the game and such. Use a Fraps hotkey to enable or disable measurements.

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You have my interest, but I'm quite skeptical.

What it sounds like to me that you're doing is limiting the game to 4 cores? Does it matter which?

By the way this may or may not be related: have you tried comparing your hyper-threading performance with non-hyper performance?

In most games according to the tests I’ve seen disabling hyper-threading makes games run better. It sounds like to me that you’re doing basically the same thing here by limiting the game to 4 cores which is something I haven’t really ever heard of before however you’re putting it on the 4 virtual cores instead of the 4 physical cores.

I’m really no CPU master and don’t know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re having better performance and if this could be usable to all i7 users. Sounds somewhat interesting though.

Also, a lot of users have screwed up definitions of maxing and smooth. Are you running the game with all maximum settings including what draw distance and in what resolution and finally in what framerate according to Fraps measured through Showcase: Infantry (only in-game fps*)?

*= Only measure in-game. Stop measurements before opening the menu or when you die and some sort of menu or loading screen appears and absolutely don’t measure when you tab out of the game and such. Use a Fraps hotkey to enable or disable measurements.

It seems to give me 40 FPS on complete max, like all of the settings even view distance. If the View Distance is completely up 100% it is only dropped like 2 frames xD

IDK, it seems as if Virtual Cores may be better for video games... that also is what I am assuming. But my Graphics card is fairly... old compared to a lot of these other guys.

---------- Post added at 18:31 ---------- Previous post was at 18:28 ----------

I wonder if this will work for my i7 3.8ghz with GTX660?

Probably so! If it doesn't, then it has something to do with your GFX Card being powerful enough to handle the visuals. But I think ARMA doesn't fully support quad core and above as much as it needs. So if you just use your Virtual Cores, it may run better... I actually found this works better for ArmA 2 more than ArmA 3. But it gave me the ability to unlock greater detail and performance in both.

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It seems to give me 40 FPS on complete max, like all of the settings even view distance. If the View Distance is completely up 100% it is only dropped like 2 frames xD

IDK, it seems as if Virtual Cores may be better for video games... that also is what I am assuming. But my Graphics card is fairly... old compared to a lot of these other guys.

Your graphics card decent but indeed not strong.

I’d investigate this with a 4770K, GTX 770 and GTX 560 Ti (6950 with 1GB VRAM) but I don’t think I’ll have my computer done until this weekend with some nice luck.

If i7s could do some trick with their virtual cores that could mean a significant shift to recommending i7s over i5s instead of strongly doing the opposite as I would without having investigated this more and if it could apply to i5s or other CPUs too that would obviously be significant as well as players only interested in ARMA only having to stick with their old graphics cards or buying some cheap 660 would save them some money if correct.

By the way 40 fps isn’t “smooth†really, but with maximum settings it’s quite great.

Again though: in what resolution?

I’ll remain sceptical and tweaks like this usually don’t work universally but if you claim you can play the game max in around 40 fps on a moderately strong CPU and just decent graphics card that sounds very interesting indeed.

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I might want to update this thread, I think that every core runs ArmA 3 well except the first two cores in the list. Those first two cores are the most common to be overloaded with CPU Usage. As most processes utilize Dual Core rather than Quad Core and above... unless updated. ArmA 3 may run better if you disable the first two and use everything else. It seems to increase the performance even more than it did before... I now have 56FPS Max with everything up at it's top settings.

And it appears that the stress on the first two cores may be causing the struggle to run ArmA 3 on Ultra settings, I'm astounded actually. So this isn't really about just the virtual cores now, but the CPU Usage of the first two. I recommend people do this instead of just the virtual cores, it seems to had fixed absolutely everything for me. I couldn't run this game on medium until now rofl!

Edited by wawa

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I might want to update this thread, I think that every core runs ArmA 3 well except the first two cores in the list. Those first two cores are the most common to be overloaded with CPU Usage. As most processes utilize Dual Core rather than Quad Core and above... unless updated. ArmA 3 may run better if you disable the first two and use everything else. It seems to increase the performance even more than it did before... I now have 56FPS Max with everything up at it's top settings.

And it appears that the stress on the first two cores may be causing the struggle to run ArmA 3 on Ultra settings, I'm astounded actually. So this isn't really about just the virtual cores now, but the CPU Usage of the first two. I recommend people do this instead of just the virtual cores, it seems to had fixed absolutely everything for me. I couldn't run this game on medium until now rofl!

Mate, try to show us some Benchmarks comparing the 2 settings. I have seen tons of tips of optimizations everywhere and they all do nothing but a placebo effect.

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Tried for Arma 2 OA with ACE and a bunch of other mods. Created a quick combined arms massive battle benchmark on Zargabad downtown. No real difference to normal (~25-30fps on such a scenario). In fact it seemed a little smoother with all cores selected than just the virtual ones (just to get this straight. you meant Taskmgr->processes->arma2oa.exe->rightclick->affiliation->(select cores) )

What kind of mission did you try to prove your theory? I think the heaviest part in Arma for the computer is handling a lot of AI and streaming a lot of textures. So maybe you should try a setting similar to my test mission.

I will run a test for Arma 3 too when I've got the time.

EDIT: test complete, negative on Arma 3, too. Dont know whats up, maybe youre just lucky or I did something wrong. No significant performance gain anyway. Nothing close to 50fps on max Viewdistance with a metal bashing going on in front of me (lost of AI fighting)

My specs:

i7 3770 @3,40Ghz

GTX 660 Ti OC 2GB

128GB OCZ agility 3 SSD (Arma files on that drive)

Edited by Dar

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Yeah, this sort of tweak always needs some investigating to see who it applies to because it usually isn't everyone.

Playing ARMA on cores that aren’t doing much else instead of the system cores makes some sort of sense however you’re going to have to be a bit more specific.

Is changing affinities the exactly only thing you’re doing? Start game, low fps, enter task manager, set affinity, enter game, high fps?

Also: resolution, background programs and do a serious stress benchmark through Showcase: Helicopters.

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Yeah, this sort of tweak always needs some investigating to see who it applies to because it usually isn't everyone.

Playing ARMA on cores that aren’t doing much else instead of the system cores makes some sort of sense however you’re going to have to be a bit more specific.

Is changing affinities the exactly only thing you’re doing? Start game, low fps, enter task manager, set affinity, enter game, high fps?

Also: resolution, background programs and do a serious stress benchmark through Showcase: Helicopters.

I had thought about doing this a few weeks ago, i even downloaded a program that will force selected program to use selected cores because from what i have read even setting them to use core (0,1,2,3) in affinity does not alway guarantee windows will do this, here is the program i found(use at your own risk!)http://www2.robpol86.com/guides/ImageCFG/

My theory was like yours , windows and everything else is using core 0/1 maybe giving arma3 there own cores might boost performance a little :)

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I had thought about doing this a few weeks ago, i even downloaded a program that will force selected program to use selected cores because from what i have read even setting them to use core (0,1,2,3) in affinity does not alway guarantee windows will do this, here is the program i found(use at your own risk!)http://www2.robpol86.com/guides/ImageCFG/

My theory was like yours , windows and everything else is using core 0/1 maybe giving arma3 there own cores might boost performance a little :)

I recommend forcing everything but Core One and Two, that was my current best setup for ArmA 3. But for ArmA 2, I only use virtuals...

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Using that program will modify the exe and thus kick in anti cheat causing more issues in game than its worth...

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I'm no expert but I think that:

1. every core you see in the Task Manager is a virtual core. They are called "logical cores".

2. CPU4 and CPU5 use the 3rd physical core and CPU6 and CPU7 the 4th physical core. So there is no difference to CPU0-3, except that they use the first two physical cores.

3. it should make no difference which cores the games uses except on those core that are used by other programs.

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Gave this a shot... Tried various different arrangements. They all ranged from no improvement to making things worse.

Maybe you have something running in the background that is taking up a lot of cpu resources? That would be the only reason why I would think this would make an impact. I don't, and for me, it did nothing, or made it worse. Tried various possible combinations with no positive result.

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Gave this a shot... Tried various different arrangements. They all ranged from no improvement to making things worse.

Maybe you have something running in the background that is taking up a lot of cpu resources? That would be the only reason why I would think this would make an impact. I don't, and for me, it did nothing, or made it worse. Tried various possible combinations with no positive result.

I put A3 on core 2-3 and the game in showcase was %90 on core 2 and %80 on core 3 and all i lost was about 5 FPS :( I am trying different missions for multilayer from aramholoic and getting some interesting to bizarre results, you should go there mobil and get some of them and stress test your system :)

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Tried on a machine with ArmA 3 installed on a HyperX 240 GB SSD, with a i7 3770k (has 4 virtual cores, 4 physical) 8GB Patriot Viper RAM, and an msi 560ti 1GB. I put every setting including viewdistance and AA on max, got 18-21 FPS average on Showcase: Helicopters. Then I did all of the launch commands and set my affinity to the last 4, and then 6 cores. Each time FPS was between 16-22 FPS. In other words, no improvement. You can't magically make a game that isn't optimized for multi core magically change its ways by setting affinity :P

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i7 860@ 3.5GHz here. Absolutely no improvement. In fact, removing any core only makes performance worse.

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from what i've read win 7 or later does a fine job of managing real/virtual cores...it's -extremely- unlikely any micromanaging will yield any noticeable improvement.

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... everything. Then minimize the game, and CTRL+ALT+Delete to bring up your Task Manager.

... maybe this step is essential part of the described methode?

I do it per default (CTRL+ALT+DELETE and than switching back to arma) at beginning of each arma client session.

This results in an FPS increase from 25.0 to 50.0 (vsync on).

Maybe it helps you too guys,

Fred41

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... maybe this step is essential part of the described methode?

I do it per default (CTRL+ALT+DELETE and than switching back to arma) at beginning of each arma client session.

This results in an FPS increase from 25.0 to 50.0 (vsync on).

Maybe it helps you too guys,

Fred41

You may actually be getting the benefit of alt+tabbing out b/c you have vsync on (and, not benefit from turning off cores). Vsync is bonk on A3. If you start with it off, and turn it on once you are already in game, it seems to work fine now. If you start the game fresh with vsync already enabled in your settings, it will tank your fps and usage even further. But, someone recently posted (and, I verified it as working on my box) that alt+tabbing out and back in the game, will resolve the vsync issue.

So... turn off vsync. then try it. I bet your fps are higher from the start, even before you do any piddling with trying to turn cores on or off.

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