When will the nVidia Arma 3 optimized drivers come?

[mistyronin 1181]

Kind of embarrassing to read actually given how Maruk is reaching out to us.

IMHO after hundreds of posts in this forums that call everything to the BI team, no wonder that he was not in his best mood. In fact for me it was a surprise that he came here, after all the disrespectful posts this last days.

[vagabond985 0]

Most of you guys have no idea how game design works, yet you know everything about performance and ideal spec or how the game designer should "upgrades" they codes in order to make things work out.. why don't you enroll in game architecture then? plenty of money to be made if you know it all..

[windies 11]

IMHO after hundreds of posts in this forums that call everything to the BI team, no wonder that he was not in his best mood. In fact for me it was a surprise that he came here, after all the disrespectful posts this last days.

Let me ask you something, do you think I was being disrespectful towards Maruk in addressing him and pointing out the flaws in his argument and providing counter arguments? I'm honestly curious, I'm not trying to troll you. I'm also curious if you could point out specific statements that I made in verbatim that you feel construed a lack of respect.

I'm not saying that people aren't being disrespectful, but it's the ignoring the honest feedback and hard questions and the sweeping under the rug that's going on that's really making it hard for me to have faith in the future of ArmA 3. Not to mention some of the statements about addon monetizing, but that is for another thread.

---------- Post added at 03:07 ---------- Previous post was at 03:06 ----------

Most of you guys have no idea how game design works, yet you know everything about performance and ideal spec or how the game designer should "upgrades" they codes in order to make things work out.. why don't you enroll in game architecture then? plenty of money to be made if you know it all..

How does, or would that fix the problems with ArmA 3 currently?

[mistyronin 1181]

I was not talking about you Windies, but I'm sure that you have read lots of posts with rude complains about BI ( from lazy, ignorants, thiefs useless to direct insults ).

That creates a really bad atmosphere, some kind of fight between two sides, and makes the developers to be less willing to accept any feedback. And if to that you add the stress of having been working really hard without getting much results (as Marek says ).

I know and understand that a lot of people feels disappointed, but we should also think a bit how the devs are feeling?

What would you do if in your work they call you everyday lazy, thief, your mom etc. also to your mates? Would you be willing to listen and work for those who call you that?

[mistyronin 1181]

I get that they are stressed, but they really should not have released ArmA 3 in this state. They're only a victim of their own creation at this point. If it was something that had to be, then I guess it had to be, but you can't expect everyone who dropped money on this to accept that the game is in this state. It's not right and nor should it be considered right.

It's your own opinion. You don't know all the data that was involved in that decision. Maybe they were forced to release the game at this stage even knowing that it was not all what they expected ( even that, the game is quite bugs polished compared to other Armas in day 1 ).

In any case, that doesn't matter. Instead of helping and encouraging them to finish the game and to create more content, if people attack/harass them they are gonna get tired and will work less and worse ( it happens to any human being ). And if people keeps that tone, they could perfectly just say enough and stop everything; or adopt another business model less friendly and more profit focused ( after all they work for money, as we all do ).

[Alabatross 1]

Can we go back to actually talking about the technical details rather than arguing?

Most of you guys have no idea how game design works, yet you know everything about performance and ideal spec or how the game designer should "upgrades" they codes in order to make things work out.. why don't you enroll in game architecture then? plenty of money to be made if you know it all..

I work in the game art industry and understand how complicated assets/simulations/LOD scaling works along side performance. Though I can't speak for the actual processing side of things with ai etc.

[theOPO 10]

What comment in this whole post is constructive? At least i gave some statistics based on a specific configuration, and yes i'm talking about MP, not SP (which runs fine).

[mercenar1e 10]

Bohemia Interactive has a track record of releasing games that aren't optimized on both the single and multiplayer components near launch window and a little beyond that. They made great improvements in ARMA 3 but when you have problems that still exist from previous games you know it's the engine. I for one want to see what they can come up with if they decided on creating a new engine but I don't think that will ever happen.

[v8_laudi 1]

http://youtu.be/CpCOqXaQfV0

What's all the fuss, I'm running 2yr old nvidia hardware at 4K and it's fine.

[purepassion 22]

Please limit your posts to constructive posts only and refrain from ending up in personal arguments that are of no worth for others to read. Thank you! :)

[WalkerDown 1]

So yes, it is correct that main bottleneck is singlethreaded performance of the main thread for Arma series, yet it does not have any simple solution (and I do not think Arma is the only game that fails to really benefit from anything beyond dual core very well). Depedning on scenario complexity, the game can scale well on two cores, to some level to four cores but benefit is less visible. With GPU: I do not know, why you simply do not set the GPU settings higher to get best from your PC? If you have powerful GPU, there are many options you can maximize without getting any real penalty on the CPU side.

Many of us have answered this question many times. For a certain type of videogamers is much important to run the game at a minimum number of fps (I won't go deeply into the reason, it's not a placebo effect, having your game, especially an FPS running at *minimum* 60fps (to not talk about those running with 120hz monitors) makes a big difference. These persons usually have spent much money for their setups, to be sure to cope with the modern games demand, and when the juice isn't enough, they just upgrade their hardware.

With ArmA3 this isn't possible, the game doesn't "scale", so you're stuck with low fps (yes, for me 35fps is on the low side, i'm not used of playing at 35fps with a hardware capable of doing 3 times that speed), no matter what gfx settings you use or what hardware you have.

The user is "trapped" into this situation without any solution (no upgrade, no sets, no tips.. nothing will help), hence the frustration and the "post flooding": we have tolerate this situation by years (it's the same situation of previous titles, and the problem is well known by your company), we just have finished our patience and "exploded".

[rübe 127]

I have been tempted few times to ask engineers to spawn all cores with dummy loops to please this type of audience.

Ahahah :icon_eek:

Core-Useage: to the max!

Speed-Up? Nobody cares (i.e. zero)! :cool:

Come on you guys, if this wasn't funny, I don't know what funny is.

Surely, just watching at the cpu-useage in your task manager is naive. On the other hand, it isn't completely wrong either: people bought these multi-core machines and expect them to be used by the software they run. And if you don't see too much cores being used, there is no need to calculate the speed-up, for obviously not too much stuff has been parallelized.

I wonder.. aren't there still some "benchmark" (min, avg, max, fps) missions around for ArmAIII (yeah, I don't have it yet... :()?

There were some for ArmAII, as far as I remember...

Btw., have you seen this thread (Give-modders-the-tools-to-identify-and-avoid-solve-performance-bottlenecks) already?

I'm pretty sure that something like this would help identify actual bottlenecks way better than having people stare at their task-managers... I.e.: we might need better tools to "see" valid speed-up, instead of looking at irrelevant numbers/charts.

[maruk 80]

Just to avoid more confusion and theories: I am not stressed at all nore I am trying to dismiss anyones concerns or issues related to game performance. I mostly want to give some more insight to the users in hope to allow them focus on what really matters. Does fps matter? Yes it does. Does multicore CPU usage matter? Well, not much to be honest, unless you for some reason like to play the performance monitor game of course. Performance is the goal, not concurrency. It is not that there is no possibility by better multithreading getting more performance, it is just that you can not measure it the way you are trying to do at all.

I apologize diverting the topic in any case, I simply wanted to give this message out for some time already and spontaneously reacted in random topic chosen and also for once wanted to feel just normal part of the forums as in the good old days.

I will try to find out if there is any specific driver optimization incoming in future on Nvidia, as the original poster asked and what is the real point on this thread anyway.

[daze23 1]

But on a side note: I have been tempted few times to ask engineers to spawn all cores with dummy loops to please this type of audience.

that's terrible. I don't think anyone cares what their cpu or gpu is doing IF they're getting decent FPS. we get bad FPS, and we try to figure out what's causing it. when you're getting bad FPS, and you see your gpu is at around 40% usage, it's clear the cpu is the bottleneck. then when you look at the cpu usage, you see even though it's bottlenecking your gpu, it's not being fully utilized. so yeah, that's where "this type of audience" assumes the problems is. "this type of audience" that plays PC games and tries to figure out what is giving them bad performance... smh

[Alabatross 1]

that's terrible. I don't think anyone cares what their cpu or gpu is doing IF they're getting decent FPS. we get bad FPS, and we try to figure out what's causing it. when you're getting bad FPS, and you see your gpu is at around 40% usage, it's clear the cpu is the bottleneck. then when you look at the cpu usage, you see even though it's bottlenecking your gpu, it's not being fully utilized. so yeah, that's where "this type of audience" assumes the problems is. "this type of audience" that plays PC games and tries to figure out what is giving them bad performance... smh

This is my main issue with developers that only make games for PC. They're never *really* forced to do everything they can to ensure the best performance, unless they're like blizzard and aim for family computers. There is no common denominator like consoles create, which is why console-based engines are some of the most efficient I've ever played. They run so well and they look great when you crank the settings up.

As blunt as Maruk is being, he is right. Concurrency won't solve much.

Edited September 14, 2013 by Alabatross

[suprememodder 11]

the game still uses stencil shadows....in the year 2013. something tells me bis isn't the most savvy on these matters.

[aop 1]

Just to avoid more confusion and theories: I am not stressed at all nore I am trying to dismiss anyones concerns or issues related to game performance. I mostly want to give some more insight to the users in hope to allow them focus on what really matters. Does fps matter? Yes it does. Does multicore CPU usage matter? Well, not much to be honest, unless you for some reason like to play the performance monitor game of course. Performance is the goal, not concurrency. It is not that there is no possibility by better multithreading getting more performance, it is just that you can not measure it the way you are trying to do at all.

I apologize diverting the topic in any case, I simply wanted to give this message out for some time already and spontaneously reacted in random topic chosen and also for once wanted to feel just normal part of the forums as in the good old days.

I will try to find out if there is any specific driver optimization incoming in future on Nvidia, as the original poster asked and what is the real point on this thread anyway.

Are there any huge performance improvements expected in near future?

The problem with this game is that no such hardware exists that could run it even at 30fps in almost all situations. No matter how much money you have, you just can't even buy your way to smooth fps. Considering how this game is completely bottlenecked by single-threaded performance it might be that there will not be hardware capable of getting smooth 60fps out of ArmA3 during this decade.

The reason why people are asking you devs about multicore support is not because they would like their quad or octa core CPUs to be used 100% all the time but because they can see that the game is bottlenecked by one or two cores and it runs so bad there might never be hardware capable of running it smooth so going parallel seems to be the only option. Problem seems to as you devs have said many times that it's much easier said than done and perhaps even impossible for ArmA series.

It makes the future of this game look very bleak IMHO, I'm pretty sure even less people are willing to put up with 15-30fps when next gen of consoles come out and set the standard to 60fps even for casual players.

[maruk 80]

when you're getting bad FPS, and you see your gpu is at around 40% usage, it's clear the cpu is the bottleneck. then when you look at the cpu usage, you see even though it's bottlenecking your gpu, it's not being fully utilized.

Problem here is that you are simply using wrong logic here. I am not sure how you exactly measure GPU usage and what does it technically mean but as I said before: the bottleneck most likely is the main thread on the CPU in any such scenario. You may try to lower settings heavy on the CPU main thread (view distance could be one of the most important here) and you can safely up some of the graphics settings that have not that big impact on your CPU usage (e.g. texture resolution, supersampling, post process quality etc.).

In any case, I am running the game on three different nvidia GPU computers and I am getting performance that is quite good for me (generally better than Arma 2) so I am probably not suffering the way some other users may be, hard to tell.

[Alabatross 1]

You guys have to remember how complex multithreaded game engines are, many AAA titles won't even go that route, you just don't notice it as much because they're more optimized overall (so everyone is getting good fps, no reason to go monitor usage)

But it doesn't seem the biggest perfomance hit is the graphics itself, it seems like its the AI.

If I run a blank map on ultra I can easily keep 60 fps on a 2.8ghz quad and 560 ti, but if I join a showcase that has ai I can't get over 38, even on lowest settings.

Why not spread the AI over the cores?

[suprememodder 11]

Problem here is that you are simply using wrong logic here. I am not sure how you exactly measure GPU usage and what does it technically mean but as I said before: the bottleneck most likely is the main thread on the CPU in any such scenario. You may try to lower settings heavy on the CPU main thread (view distance could be one of the most important here) and you can safely up some of the graphics settings that have not that big impact on your CPU usage (e.g. texture resolution, supersampling, post process quality etc.).

In any case, I am running the game on three different nvidia GPU computers and I am getting performance that is quite good for me (generally better than Arma 2) so I am probably not suffering the way some other users may be, hard to tell.

are you using a quad core cpu?

[maruk 80]

are you using a quad core cpu?

Yes, there are quad core CPUs in all my computers.

[Alabatross 1]

In any case, I am running the game on three different nvidia GPU computers and I am getting performance that is quite good for me (generally better than Arma 2) so I am probably not suffering the way some other users may be, hard to tell.

Most developers consider 30-50 fps playable, to actual PC gamers 55 is where it starts to be playable

And not to mention in multiplayer lowering the settings does absolutely nothing, it almost seems like its locked (yes vsync is off). I get 35 fps on lowest and 35 on ultra

[Vigil Vindex 64]

Problem here is ... the bottleneck most likely is the main thread on the CPU in any such scenario.

Is there any progress on improving the threading system? I think the AI path finding stuff should be in a separate isolated thread, as this is what seems to start the problem for me.

[suprememodder 11]

to be honest, the cpu optimization, ie multie thread implementation was the first thing they should have worked on for the game. i'm seeing almost no improvement from arma 2 oa.

[maruk 80]

Is there any progress on improving the threading system? I think the AI path finding stuff should be in a separate isolated thread, as this is what seems to start the problem for me.

Well, I guess I just should repeat the same blog for people to bother to read before they get involved in the threading discussion: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

In short: Path finding is multithreaded since Arma 2 (in that blog you can hover your mouse over the image to get user friendly description about what each thread is doing in that situation profiled there).