Bad FPS in Full Release

[limboLIVE98 10]

Hello guys i bought arma 3, when it was in alpha and it was pretty badly optimized(similar in beta), finally now full release comes and its still really bad optimized I have max. 30FPS on high, and i have pretty good rig, i can max every other game, anyone have fix??

My specs:

i5 3470 3.2Ghz

HD 7950@ 1100/1400Mhz

8GB DDR3 RAM

[pappi_man 0]

Just lower your graphics settings. I have same card as you and I have everything on standard except Texture quality.

[Tacti-Cool 10]

Welcome to Arma 3, where almost everyone gets bad frames.

its not just you, im actually getting WORSE frames than Beta. not sure how thats possible

[Rhym3z 10]

Only the devs have a fix, but will they do anything about it?

Not a chance

[dwaight 17]

Just lower your graphics settings. I have same card as you and I have everything on standard except Texture quality.

does not help.

My 2 680s dont even get utilized above 18 / 30% gpu usage.

MP runs at 28FPS.

check steam forums....

everyone is having the same issue.

[dragon01 902]

Altis might be a problem here, it's huge island that really bogged down my computer. Stratis was workable at near-max settings, Altis nearly crashed my computer when I loaded it up. I suspect memory is the culprit (stuck at 4GB... Stupid 32bit Vista).

[Intact 10]

I get 45-50FPS with my 7790 graphics card... except multiplayer where everything goes to shit.

[Gera_CCT 12]

Well, i launched ArmA 2 for some testing and i got similar performance. So now i am sure that it´s the engine and i don´t think this will ever be fixed. ArrowHead has good frames maybe cause of the map (desert).

[nodunit 397]

Three things that will DEVOUR your frame rate.

View distance, object quality (not only does this influence LOD detail, but also the clutter of objects near you), SSAO <- especially this.

Edited September 13, 2013 by NodUnit

[SHARPxSHOOTER 1]

The engine doesn't even utilized muli-core CPUs. In other words, not matter how many cores you have in your CPU, the game will only use 1 core. I highly doubt it will get fix/optimized. Its been almost 6 years and the issues in this game still persist.

[2LT. Tom vd H. 16]

No worries mate, my 8GB doesn't get used passed 60% and my FPS is a t a steady 20...

[Katana1000 12]

Altis might be a problem here, it's huge island that really bogged down my computer. Stratis was workable at near-max settings, Altis nearly crashed my computer when I loaded it up. I suspect memory is the culprit (stuck at 4GB... Stupid 32bit Vista).

I think its Altis because its so much larger.

I have a very decent rig and bought ARMA III Beta about a month ago, naturally I thought I could max things out and I suffered no perceivable slow down trying everything in the Beta ... I don't really do frame rate counting though, if my brain perceives smooth gameplay then it is smooth gameplay ... this is a contentious subject though and we wont go there just now please:) But for sure in Beta I had no performance problems, last night after finishing downloading the full update I tried my favourite Stratis Night Showcase again and it played perfectly smoothly, then I tried Altis for the first time in the Gunships Showcase and my system nearly ground to a halt a couple of times ... after the update I'd already done my usual cleaning, defrag on the WD Velociraptor ARMA III is installed on ETC and rebooted, all drivers are up to date as is my Win 7 64 bit OS, one more reboot and tried Gunship showcase on Altis again and same once more, a slide show.

What i did next was go into options and choose detect for settings and tried Altis showmap Gunships once more and its perfectly smooth now, i dont know what i lost in auto detect? not much, a lot still seems on Ultra, i think its the max AA ansio settings I'd been using perfectly in Stratis before or more probably maxing out view distance? But it still looks good to me so I'll keep these settings ... I'm still on 2560 x 1600 resolution.

Maybe the Altis map could be more optimised in future patches? Maybe future graphic drivers will help?

That was what my performance issues were though.

My PC specs are ...

Intel I7-E 3960 X six core @ 4.2 GHz just now water cooled.

16 GB 4 channel ram

Asus Rampage IV Extreme

EVGA Superclcocked 3GB GTX 780 driving a 30" Dell U3011 @ 2560 x 1600 res

Asus Xonar Essence STX

OS drive is 3rd gen OCZ Agility SSD with latest firmware, Arma III is installed on a Western Digital Velociraptor with plenty of free space and de-fragged after playing once when patched.

OS is Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium SP1.

For what should matter and i run a lean mean rig for flightsim mostly, its well optimised.

Hopefully we can get more optimisation out of the Altis map but I'm happy enough for now.

EDIT: The more i think about it the more i think its view distances i was being to greedy on with the sliders, these would be fine on Stratis but struggle on Altis just now as its so many times larger and perhaps the PC (CPU or GPU) is being asked to calculate view distance if we can see it or not.

Edited September 13, 2013 by Katana1000

[nodunit 397]

Maybe your resolution is too high. I play on 1920x1080 and my rig is weaker than yours, yet I've had great peformance with Altis. Though I tend to play with no SSAO, normal object quality and around 8 kilo VD max unless I'm flying.

[Katana1000 12]

Maybe your resolution is too high. I play on 1920x1080 and my rig is weaker than yours, yet I've had great peformance with Altis. Though I tend to play with no SSAO, normal object quality and around 8 kilo VD max unless I'm flying.

I dont think so mate or I'd have had these problems on Stratis too, no its definitely view distance and perhaps really greedy AA settings ... i just noticed somebody mentioned this in this thread before me, I'm not losing that res as its the native res of my 30" Dell U3011 and my 3GB vram is more than enogh for a single monitor.

One utility I use is Nvidea Inspector, hopefully we can get a good profile for this game soon, but I've done a fair bit of beta testing in my time and feel sure its view distance slider that is the killer considering the new island is so much larger and its only there i got performance problems.

[yxman 90]

its not just you, im actually getting WORSE frames than Beta. not sure how thats possible

same over here...

[antoineflemming 14]

I dont think so mate or I'd have had these problems on Stratis too, no its definitely view distance and perhaps really greedy AA settings ... i just noticed somebody mentioned this in this thread before me, I'm not losing that res as its the native res of my 30" Dell U3011 and my 3GB vram is more than enogh for a single monitor.

One utility I use is Nvidea Inspector, hopefully we can get a good profile for this game soon, but I've done a fair bit of beta testing in my time and feel sure its view distance slider that is the killer considering the new island is so much larger and its only there i got performance problems.

View distance does very little for me when set at like 2000 or less. Above that, and it's a large drop in performance. But anywhere from 100 to 2000, and it's barely noticeable. That said, I get bad performance. Everything on low is no different from everything on standard + no aa/pp. Strange. It's not the island or MP. At this point, an empty map is slower than expected, which is weird.]

What pisses me off is that BIS acts like it's not an issue and that they don't care. And, as in the past, they'll say "it's an engine limitation", but then why is it an engine limitation and why won't they then try to fix their engine?

[Katana1000 12]

same over here...

Are you both getting worse frames on Stratis island after update or are you only seeing worse frames on Altis island?

Do me a favour as an experiment take note of your view distance slider setting in options, then try your view distance low on the new Altis map and work up, it should be better set lower now, right?

[horrorview 10]

I've been sort of "lucky" thus far, and getting 30-35 fps on my rig (i7 2600k oc'd to 4.5ghz, 16gb RAM, Radeon 7970), but I just took a tip from this thread and set SSAO to Standard (it was Ultra) and dropped my view distance from 3800 to 3000, and was getting between 55-60fps, with only occasional drops into the high 40s! That's back to my Stratis levels! To be fair, I tested it on a very small mission I made with a single 5 man recon squad, three CSAT rifle squads, and tpw's civ/vehicle mod on (in Kavala), so it wasn't a super resource-intensive mission. I've surely messed about with the settings before, but I've always left SSAO at what my "auto detect" settings picked. Like others, here, I've messed about with all of the other settings and didn't see any difference whatsoever, so this pairing of SSAO and view distance may have done the trick.

[Katana1000 12]

View distance does very little for me when set at like 2000 or less. Above that, and it's a large drop in performance. But anywhere from 100 to 2000, and it's barely noticeable. That said, I get bad performance. Everything on low is no different from everything on standard + no aa/pp. Strange. It's not the island or MP. At this point, an empty map is slower than expected, which is weird.]

What pisses me off is that BIS acts like it's not an issue and that they don't care. And, as in the past, they'll say "it's an engine limitation", but then why is it an engine limitation and why won't they then try to fix their engine?

OK, fair enough. I hope you guys can get some more performance soon with better optimisation, this sim really should have been coded for multi core better i guess? I cant imagine anyone here trying to run this on a single core PC.

[aoshi 1]

The engine doesn't even utilized muli-core CPUs. In other words, not matter how many cores you have in your CPU, the game will only use 1 core. I highly doubt it will get fix/optimized. Its been almost 6 years and the issues in this game still persist.

i'm sorry, but the engine use 4 cores for sure...

[nodunit 397]

AI, ballistics, something else and something else. Which is also the reason why things get wonky when you hit VERY slow frames such as the AI becoming literally brain dead with next to no movement.

[Katana1000 12]

i'm sorry, but the engine use 4 cores for sure...

Well I've read that it doesn't on this very forum ... and no need to be sorry, I'm happy to be proved wrong :) But even it were there is always room for more optimisation over multi cores ... always.

As you may have noticed I'm on six cores just now with hyperthreading so effectively 12 too but for what its worth and this rig was built mainly for FSX that on initial release could only use 1 core, then after its SP1 and later SP2 upgrade was apparently in theory be able to use 20 or more cores if they existed, Microsoft lied of course but in some tests it did look like it was using up to 20 cores, after years of extensive testing by enthusiasts it was found that FSX with SP1 and SP2 could use 1 core very efficiently but it was diminishing returns on each core after that where we now believe a six core system is the peak for its old engine and even then using the affinity to detail tasks within that simulator.

I'm no programmer but i've read its extremely difficult to code for really efficient multi core coding in PC Games from a single CPU system that has multi cores and even more difficult on a multi CPU system like a twin CPU XEON processor, but these don't exist for the gaming market, they work with more dedicated and arguably easier to code applications that we as gamers dont use.

[Atomicdeath10 10]

Im running a I7 3770, 16g DDR3, GTX 660 (non TI) standard clock. And i get a solid 40-50+ even in multi, depending on how many onscreen units and how long a server has been up. Before you start crying wolf do this. start the game, go to the editor, put youself on a mountain top. Set the graphics to medium 1080P. Drop your draw distance ALL the way down, turn off AA and all the extra shit, Vsync off, Look around, if you are getting good frames, bump your draw distance up to 1000, If its still good, up your settings a little bit, if its still good, increase your draw distance a little.

People MUST realize this game is not like Crysis 3, Farcry or Skyrim. Yes they look pretty, but you can see maybe 700m, More in Far Cry. Yes you can actually SEE further, but there is virtually no rendering, so you are seeing it, but its not rendering anything other than mountain outlines or Forrest tops. In Arma 3, if i jack my Draw distance to full and place a unit within that distance, as long as you have a clear line of sight on it, you will see that unit. (Given a powerful enough scope.) Unlike most other games on the market where it only renders whats 400> meters in front of you.

The reason i say this, my rig is meh at best. The Gfx card is midgrade and i still do great with the game, with most settings at Ultra or High, but my View distance is only 1300m, and Object distance or w/e its called is only 800.

Also, some things are more CPU intensive, while others are more GPU intensive, you just need to play with your settings and find a good balance with them. (Try launching in windowed mode, then hitting ALt+Enter to fullscreen it. Dont know why but that helped me in beta.

(One more thing to try, are the launch parameters, you can probably find them here or on the Steam forums, -nosplash -skipintro -world=empty maxMem=8192 -cpuCount=4 -exThreads=7, Thats my launch parameters, use it at your own risk.)

Hope Something i blabbered on about helps. I love Arma and want everyone else to love it too! Peace

[SHARPxSHOOTER 1]

i'm sorry, but the engine use 4 cores for sure...

Nope, Its been proven by other players and by me. I monitored my CPU (AMD PII X6 @4.0GHz) while playing and core #1 was at about 60%-70% at full load while ingame and the rest or the cores we chilling at about 20%-30%.

[Leopardi 0]

The engine doesn't even utilized muli-core CPUs. In other words, not matter how many cores you have in your CPU, the game will only use 1 core. I highly doubt it will get fix/optimized. Its been almost 6 years and the issues in this game still persist.

And multiplayer FPS is dependant on server FPS. This is really sad, BF3 utilizes over 90% of my 6-core CPU and BF4 will even more.