FPS: SP is great. MP is horrid. Tried several community suggestions. Still lost.

[BLSmith2112 0]

I know MP mission optimization is the biggest factor with question like these, but let me preface by saying: The people I'm playing with who live across the street do not have these frame-rate issues, I built their PCs and the only difference is that they're using an i5 processor. My issue: Single Player FPS is 60+, Multiplayer (Wasteland in this example) is 5-13. The FPS difference in MP between very-high settings and the lowest settings hardly make a difference.

PC Specs:

• GPU: eVGA Geforce GTX 570
  
• RAM: 6GB
  
• CPU: i7 920
  
• SSD: 250GB
  
• OS: Windows 7 64-bit
  

Multiplayer Settings:

• Texture: Low.
  
• Objects: Low.
  
• Terrain: Low.
  
• Particles: Low.
  
• Cloud: Disabled.
  
• PIP: Disabled.
  
• HDR: Low.
  
• Dynamic Lights: Low.
  
• Visability -Overall: 500. -Object: 500. -Shadow: 50.
  
• Sampling 100%.
  
• Vysnc: Disabled.
  
• Bloom: 0.
  
• Radial Blur: 0.
  
• Depth of Field: 0.
  
• SSAO: Disabled.
  
• Caustics: Disabled.
  
• FSAA: Disabled.
  
• ATOC: Disabled.
  
• PPAA: Disabled.
  
• Aniso. Filtering: Disabled.
  

Things I have tried:

• Under: "C:\Users\Victor\Documents\Arma 3\Arma3.cfg" changed GPU_MaxFramesAhead to 1.
  
• Under: "C:\Users\Victor\Documents\Arma 3\Arma3.cfg" changed GPU_DetectedFramesAhead to 1.
  
• Launch Options: "-maxmem=5120" "-maxvram=1024" "-cpucount=4" "-exthreads=7" -nosplash -skipintro
  
• Completely changed graphical settings around for over an hour and noticed hardly any difference in FPS.
  
• Removed all start-up programs. Currently only 39 processes running in task-manager.
  

What can I do? I've tried everything and this game doesn't even budge. Yes it's an online mission that may or may not be optimized by the player that made it but when other people seemingly don't have any FPS issues with that particular mission it just makes me scratch my head.

Edited August 24, 2013 by Victor

[purepassion 22]

It seems like there is clearly a problem related with the server, the mission played or your internet connection since singleplayer performance (game performance) is perfect.

Have you tried playing Sa-Matras wasteland version? What's the ping of the server you are experiencing the problems on?

[windies 11]

It seems like there is clearly a problem related with the server, the mission played or your internet connection since singleplayer performance (game performance) is perfect.

Have you tried playing Sa-Matras wasteland version? What's the ping of the server you are experiencing the problems on?

I just want to reference your post because this is the general response I see whenever someone posts this exact same issue. I've had countless people from A lot of different ArmA groups tell me they experience the same thing.

MP performance is gated by something, and no matter of changing settings will change or fix that performance. I can drop my resolution to 640x480, and I will still get 15 fps with every setting disabled and on low. I'm running a 50/25 mbps connection over fiber optics straight to my house, I've played on every missions possible on every server possible ranging from simple DM to Domination and Wasteland etc...

There is something wrong in regards to the multiplayer portion of the game. I have yet to find a server that is not hindered by this, even servers people suggest on these forums. I don't play wasteland, but I've tried JoSchaap's Wasteland and Sa-Matra's Wasteland and some of the other ones, and they all perform the same.

The only thing I can say that I have noticed that makes a difference is the amount of players in a server. If you go into a server with say 2-3 players in it, performance is bad, but it's not as bad as I have experienced it. Now if you go to a server with 5+ people, the performance just tanks. If it's a server issue, and the servers can't handle the load, then either there's a large portion of this community trying to run A3 servers on Amiga's, or the dedicated server software or this game can't make use of all of the server's resources. I'm willing to bet that the latter is more plausible.

[.kju 3244]

http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=12658

[pbishop 10]

The only thing I can say that I have noticed that makes a difference is the amount of players in a server. If you go into a server with say 2-3 players in it, performance is bad, but it's not as bad as I have experienced it. Now if you go to a server with 5+ people, the performance just tanks. If it's a server issue, and the servers can't handle the load, then either there's a large portion of this community trying to run A3 servers on Amiga's, or the dedicated server software or this game can't make use of all of the server's resources. I'm willing to bet that the latter is more plausible.

All I am going to say to your whole post is this.

There are far too many missions being run with horrible scripts. Especially ones that save stats and that spawn items. Because of this, you will always get horrible fps regardless of the number of people. Try running a mission from bis that is included with the beta and add a few people, you will notice its not the same experience. In general, if I play missions (not stratis life or wastelands, etc.., but real missions) this will hardly happen. For some reason it seems their scripts are very badly optimized, as most people edit them without having much thought to performance to suit their wants (after testing on a private server with very limited people, just to confirm this). I don't see how saying its bis fault will change anything, for something that is obviously caused by the mission being run.

Edited August 24, 2013 by pbishop

[k3lt 3]

All I am going to say to your whole post is this.

There are far too many missions being run with horrible scripts. Especially ones that save stats and that spawn items. Because of this, you will always get horrible fps regardless of the number of people. Try running a mission from bis that is included with the beta and add a few people, you will notice its not the same experience. In general, if I play missions (not stratis life or wastelands, etc.., but real missions) this will hardly happen. For some reason it seems their scripts are very badly optimized, as most people edit them without having much thought to performance to suit their wants (after testing on a private server with very limited people, just to confirm this). I don't see how saying its bis fault will change anything, for something that is obviously caused by the mission being run.

O rly? Entering Agia Marina in editor (even worse in MP obviously) without any AI and dropping FPS by half is modders scripts fault too?

[Furret 0]

CPU: i7 920

I have the same CPU myself and have found it overclocks extremely well. Currently I have mine running at 3.66GHz and see a huge improvement in performance. You may need to fiddle with the vcore to get it stable but its not too hard to do that. There's lots of guides to overclocking the 920 specifically.

Regarding your poor MP performance I'll have to echo Pbishops views. There are some horrendous scripts in use right now. One example I read about was a script that polls a value and draws static icons on a players screen. It was being run in a loop hundreds, even thousands of times a second. Awful.

There is very little help with performance profiling in Arma3 right now, hopefully that will change in the near future.

[BLSmith2112 0]

I have the same CPU myself and have found it overclocks extremely well.

Overclocking has always seemed overly complicated and I've always felt overwhelmed before actually going through with it. My CPU is air cooled by a ZALMAN CNPS9500 heatsink, so I'm not sure how much more performance I can squeeze out of that.

As for the poor scripts: I just don't understand how I can be getting such poor performance but others in the same mission at the same place get a very playable frame rate. I can only imagine what missions like wasteland will be like in the future with a 14x larger map to contend with. Anyways I was hoping there was some small change I could make that I might have missed. I guess I'll just have to contend with waiting until after release.

I personally hate these coop-ish missions but it feels like since 95% of the community has decided to go this route, I've got little choice but to conform or play another game. Even the popular king of the hill map nets me 5-7fps on average...

[windies 11]

Overclocking has always seemed overly complicated and I've always felt overwhelmed before actually going through with it. My CPU is air cooled by a ZALMAN CNPS9500 heatsink, so I'm not sure how much more performance I can squeeze out of that.

As for the poor scripts: I just don't understand how I can be getting such poor performance but others in the same mission at the same place get a very playable frame rate. I can only imagine what missions like wasteland will be like in the future with a 14x larger map to contend with. Anyways I was hoping there was some small change I could make that I might have missed. I guess I'll just have to contend with waiting until after release.

I personally hate these coop-ish missions but it feels like since 95% of the community has decided to go this route, I've got little choice but to conform or play another game. Even the popular king of the hill map nets me 5-7fps on average...

Overclocking is not hard, you just have to understand a couple basic things. Voltage increases heat and clock speed increases heat. Use common sense and judgement, I.E. no large blanket changes, change things slowly but steadily. You wouldn't go from 1.35v to say 1.65v but rather you would increase in small increments, same thing with clock speeds. If you're not trying to hit the bleeding edge, then you should be fine. Learn the max load temps for your particular CPU and always try to stay 5 degree's Celsius below them.

With that said though, overclocking should never be the answer to performance problems in a game. It's one thing to say that you're getting 60 fps but you want 120 fps so you overclocked the shit out of your rig. It's another to say you're getting 10-15 fps and the only thing you can do is overclock because there's no better hardware currently available. That's when it's the software's problem.

[Furret 0]

An i7 920s default clock speed is 2.6GHz, its rather low for ArmA3.

Have a read of these guides, its easy to overclock, you even have after-market cooling, perfect:

http://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/rmp_i7_920_overclocking

http://www.overclock.net/t/538439/guide-to-overclocking-the-core-i7-920-or-930-to-4-0ghz

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2008/11/06/overclocking-intel-core-i7-920/1

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2008/11/06/overclocking-intel-core-i7-920/3

http://www.techspot.com/community/topics/easy-overclock-for-i7-920.164606/

[KeyCat 131]

All I am going to say to your whole post is this.

There are far too many missions being run with horrible scripts. Especially ones that save stats and that spawn items. Because of this, you will always get horrible fps regardless of the number of people. Try running a mission from bis that is included with the beta and add a few people, you will notice its not the same experience. In general, if I play missions (not stratis life or wastelands, etc.., but real missions) this will hardly happen. For some reason it seems their scripts are very badly optimized, as most people edit them without having much thought to performance to suit their wants (after testing on a private server with very limited people, just to confirm this). I don't see how saying its bis fault will change anything, for something that is obviously caused by the mission being run.

I hope this is the case since my experience with the Alpha/Beta echo's what Windies described in his post. With Altis inbound it would be a shame if A3 is not at least on par with A2:OA in the MP department since such big island needs to be populated.

Unfortunately I don't have a Internet connection allowing a DS but I hope Dorph will set up his machine as soon as Altis is out since his A2:OA server always worked great for me...

/KC

Edited August 25, 2013 by KeyCat

[windies 11]

All I am going to say to your whole post is this.

There are far too many missions being run with horrible scripts. Especially ones that save stats and that spawn items. Because of this, you will always get horrible fps regardless of the number of people. Try running a mission from bis that is included with the beta and add a few people, you will notice its not the same experience. In general, if I play missions (not stratis life or wastelands, etc.., but real missions) this will hardly happen. For some reason it seems their scripts are very badly optimized, as most people edit them without having much thought to performance to suit their wants (after testing on a private server with very limited people, just to confirm this). I don't see how saying its bis fault will change anything, for something that is obviously caused by the mission being run.

I have ran the stock MP missions with large groups on dedicated servers and the performance problem is exactly the same. While I believe that scripts can of course affect performance, I don't see scripts being the sole cause of the issue or even the primary cause of the issue. Same goes for spawned items.

I also don't see how scripts would gate my performance so that changing settings has no affect whatsoever on performance including dropping everything to low and resolution to the lowest setting possible.

[oldbear 390]

I had run Arma3 Single Player on 3 PCs :

i7-3770/GTX670OC = "Ultra", "Visibility: 3800m", 35-60 FPS

CoreQuad 9400/HD 7750 = "Standard", "Visibility: 2000m" 30 to 40 FPS

Athlon II X2 250 / N450GS = "Low", "Visibility: 1000m", 25-35 FPS

As a 1st step, I let the "Auto Detect" do the job, then I add my own custom tweaks : in the AA&PP section, the "bloom and blurs" are disabled.

I am not an expert, but I believe that the issues about MP has nothing to do with your hardware.

As I have also tested MP on those 3 rigs, I will say that, from my point of view, the issue is related to :

- the kind of server you are playing on,

- the missions you are playing

1-If I had understood well, in Arma* the simulation runs on the client and on the server, it's not working along the somewhat classical client–server model .

It seems that the needed synchronizing data job uses enough CPU resources to have an impact on client FPS and this synchronization is impacted by communication quality to/from server .

Since I play Arma* games, I had always get a loss in FPS while playing MP, but I have also experienced a large range of loss related to the server I was playing on.

If I play a mission on a server hosted by a pro, such as the one my Clan use, this server being hosted on a high performance rig connected to Internet backbone by a fast symmetrical connection, the loss will be minimal.

If I play a mission hosted on the old Core2 Duo of my Team mate behind an asymmetrical DSL connection, the loss will be huge even if it's a mission from BIS

2-Arma3 missions are ATM very often using methods and scripts ported from Arma2. Crude port of scripts is generating a huge amount of errors. You can have a look at these errors in the .rpt file if it's not erased by the -nolog command.

I have already seen 20MB of errors generated during a short mission ... short because it became unplayable very fast, I was getting 1/2 FPS with my more powerful rig, even if this mission was hosted on a pro server.

[windies 11]

I have yet to connect to a server where I have not been dropped to sub 15 fps in almost any scenario. Normally in SP I can get anywhere form 40-70fps depending on many factors like AI count and object view count. I agree with you about it not being hardware dependent for the client.

My issue is that, whatever it is there is no way to alleviate it or work around it. I'm stuck in ArmA 3 multiplayer at 640x480 with everything on low and still getting 15fps which quite frankly is unplayable. I've experienced it with missions that I have personally made and uploaded to a server and I use next to no scripting whatsoever for my missions. That's why I don't believe that it's just scripting that is causing it or that scripting or scripting errors are the primary reason for it.

[fabio_chavez 103]

same here, most muliplayer games are unplayable, im only intressted in PVP without AI.

Im not an expert but i dont get why it shouldnt be possible to play 30vs30 with a halfway decent framerate, it should be nr1 priority to overhaul the netcode.

---------- Post added at 23:55 ---------- Previous post was at 23:18 ----------

p.s. http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=1264

[ric 1]

I had run Arma3 Single Player on 3 PCs :

i7-3770/GTX670OC = "Ultra", "Visibility: 3800m", 35-60 FPS

CoreQuad 9400/HD 7750 = "Standard", "Visibility: 2000m" 30 to 40 FPS

Athlon II X2 250 / N450GS = "Low", "Visibility: 1000m", 25-35 FPS

As a 1st step, I let the "Auto Detect" do the job, then I add my own custom tweaks : in the AA&PP section, the "bloom and blurs" are disabled.

I am not an expert, but I believe that the issues about MP has nothing to do with your hardware.

As I have also tested MP on those 3 rigs, I will say that, from my point of view, the issue is related to :

- the kind of server you are playing on,

- the missions you are playing

1-If I had understood well, in Arma* the simulation runs on the client and on the server, it's not working along the somewhat classical client–server model .

It seems that the needed synchronizing data job uses enough CPU resources to have an impact on client FPS and this synchronization is impacted by communication quality to/from server .

Since I play Arma* games, I had always get a loss in FPS while playing MP, but I have also experienced a large range of loss related to the server I was playing on.

If I play a mission on a server hosted by a pro, such as the one my Clan use, this server being hosted on a high performance rig connected to Internet backbone by a fast symmetrical connection, the loss will be minimal.

If I play a mission hosted on the old Core2 Duo of my Team mate behind an asymmetrical DSL connection, the loss will be huge even if it's a mission from BIS

2-Arma3 missions are ATM very often using methods and scripts ported from Arma2. Crude port of scripts is generating a huge amount of errors. You can have a look at these errors in the .rpt file if it's not erased by the -nolog command.

I have already seen 20MB of errors generated during a short mission ... short because it became unplayable very fast, I was getting 1/2 FPS with my more powerful rig, even if this mission was hosted on a pro server.

Very well I said :) like you i also have 3 (5 really) 1. 2500K @4,2 2.QX9650 3. Phenom II TRI core and I suspect i would get the same differential as you. One thing I would like to add to your comment is this "a chain is as strong as its weakest link" the more people on a server the more stress and when there is more stress the weaker systems become even a bigger factor in dsyncs and overall quality dropping for everyone :(.

one thing that has always helped in this regard is to put a ping cap on..i always limit my server to a ping of 100 max.

[.kju 3244]

Vote: Give modders the tools to identify and avoid/solve performance bottlenecks

Edited August 28, 2013 by .kju [PvPscene]

[fabio_chavez 103]

;2481520']Vote: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=12658

done!

[gihzmo 10]

I am having major issues in MP on Altis. On Stratis in SP i get 60 FPS, in SP on Altis, I get 40. When I go into MP on Altis, I get between 8 and 20, depending on the server.

My system:

Windows 7 X64

Phenom II 965BE x4 3.40Ghz

8GB RAM

ATI 7950 (Latest Beta driver)

Arma running on SSD

I hear from people with lower end systems running the game better on MP servers. Is this a case of Altis just not being optimized, or do I need to do something else?

I have

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

set in the cfg and I have

-cpuCount=4 -high sets -maxMem=4096 -noPause -noSplash

in the launch string

Any suggestions?

[Sheepdog 4]

Honestly it comes down to the server and the missions. Wasteland is a great example, hop on any wasteland right now on Atlis and you get terrible frame rates. Sa-matras on the other hand runs smooth and perfect. I get easily 80-100 frames on SP missions, on multi I get usually 30-40 depending on the mission and server with it dipping down to 25-30 depending on how bad the server really is.

Honeslty, there is nothing you can really do at the moment because settings dont effect performance per server, its server side at this point for sure.

[opjohnny 10]

Same issue here. Great FPS in SP and horrid FPS on most MP servers. Some servers have barely acceptable FPS that gradually drops over time until the server is rebooted. I have tried all of the possible solutions with no luck. I can seriously drop my settings down to the bare minimum while in game and see no change in my FPS.

The fact that low/stuttering FPS is still a significant and widespread problem this close to release has me very concerned. I'm honestly starting to wonder if they're just not going to address it and instead just try to sell us content. It wouldn't be the first nor the last time a game dev has screwed us.

CPU - AMD PhenomII x6 1100t Black Edition @ 4.0GHz

GPU - XFX Radeon HD6970 @ 900/1425MHz

OS - Windows 7 x64 Ultimate

[fabio_chavez 103]

it would be unforgivable if this issue remains part of the arma series... before 1.6 patch arms netcode was utterly garbage and not even suitable for basic pvp multiplayer... if they can overhault dayZ SA netcode "by the exact same people that created the original code" -rocket

why do they not seem to recognize this issue as a major gamebreaker for their original arma3 game?!

somehow i had the vain hope that this issue will somehow magically dissolve before release... now that we are closing in i kind of abandoned all hope

[windies 11]

Honestly it comes down to the server and the missions. Wasteland is a great example, hop on any wasteland right now on Atlis and you get terrible frame rates. Sa-matras on the other hand runs smooth and perfect. I get easily 80-100 frames on SP missions, on multi I get usually 30-40 depending on the mission and server with it dipping down to 25-30 depending on how bad the server really is.

Honeslty, there is nothing you can really do at the moment because settings dont effect performance per server, its server side at this point for sure.

Sa-Matra's still runs as terrible as all the other wastelands missions out there for me. I'm not trying to knock their work, but I've never experienced the "glory performance" of Sa-Matra's wasteland. I really don't think it's an issue of his/her work but more an issue with the RV engine and people's modifiable expectations to fit the situation.

[gihzmo 10]

Have any devs talked about the performance issues with Alits? Other then the 32 bit issue? The only thing that seems playable right now is Stratis. If I turn all my settings to low, I can squeak out 15fps on Altis. This seems like a pretty major problem.

[BLSmith2112 0]

Overclocked my i7-920 from 2.4ghz to 3.0 and exact same sub-10fps on nearly all online missions. Even some of the lower scripted DM missions give me horrible fps. I'll be back to Arma3 in 6-12 months when maybe they'll address it.

If its the i7-920 in general, what additional $200+ do I need to spend to make sure this game at least runs well...