When will the nVidia Arma 3 optimized drivers come?

[wtornado 0]

I understand everyone would like the game to run smoother, better, best. In reality, there is no spell that could be used, and many days or weeks of hard engineering work lead into neglible performance increase.

As I read all over again and again posts that seems to say people believe measuring how much of their multicore CPU or GPU is utilized (often by some very generic means) I can only recommend to try to read and understand problems associated with concurency in game engine architecture there is still some good read avaialble here: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

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. Generally speaking, rendering distance and even object detail has some serious impact on the CPU as well (also affects simulation), yet most of the other graphical settings are solely or primarily on the GPU side.

I am not trying to start any flame war and not denying there is not room for optimizations or that it is not important priority, I am mostly tired to read all over again something that just is more myth than reality and that simply uses completely false metrics. All I can do is quote Suma:

God don't tell me this is going to finish like when I bought Cliffs of Dover the first week it came out.I shelved it for 1 year and a half.

[scaramoosh 10]

Why do they even use APIs anymore? Most people have AMD or Nvidia, surely you can just write to metal like consoles?

Why even make your own engine? Cryengine 3, UE3/4 and Frostbite (whatever number they're on no) are all capable of doing what ARMA 3 does and at good frame rates. Surely you could just license an engine and mod it for your needs? Would take less time as well surely.

[Imonars 10]

CPU - 25% usage, GPU - 45% usage. i7 3770k @ 4.5ghz, GTX 780 Dir CU II = 30 fps @ 1080p. Screw this alpha stage game, such a waste of money.

The developer was CLEARLY talking about audience like you sir. Yet you come to this thread, read NONE of its post then post nonsense

---------- Post added at 20:55 ---------- Previous post was at 20:52 ----------

Why do they even use APIs anymore? Most people have AMD or Nvidia, surely you can just write to metal like consoles?

Why even make your own engine? Cryengine 3, UE3/4 and Frostbite (whatever number they're on no) are all capable of doing what ARMA 3 does and at good frame rates. Surely you could just license an engine and mod it for your needs? Would take less time as well surely.

You want CryEngine 3 or the latest FB to run a huge game such as arma? As a programmer I can clearly say that's possible but you would need some of the best hardware out there.. Plus, when making a game with an engine that most of the engineers and programmers are not used to can be clearly an obstacle. Arma's engine is what "makes it" an arma game.

[dwaight 17]

Not true.

there's a game upcoming that will do it with cryengine 3.5 its in alpha right now. released in 2015.

take a look at crysis 1 ( released in 2007 ) gfx wise the same i would say. plus the world is also huge with loads of Ais , tanks , helis.. but ofcourse most of it are missions.

Still, Many big company's can make this happen without this huge framerate drop.

[ric 1]

God don't tell me this is going to finish like when I bought Cliffs of Dover the first week it came out.I shelved it for 1 year and a half.

dear god dont bring that up.....

[NeMeSiS 11]

Not true.

there's a game upcoming that will do it with cryengine 3.5 its in alpha right now. released in 2015.

Could you be a bit more specific and just name the game? :p

[Instynct 1]

I understand everyone would like the game to run smoother, better, best. In reality, there is no spell that could be used, and many days or weeks of hard engineering work lead into neglible performance increase.

As I read all over again and again posts that seems to say people believe measuring how much of their multicore CPU or GPU is utilized (often by some very generic means) I can only recommend to try to read and understand problems associated with concurency in game engine architecture there is still some good read avaialble here: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

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. Generally speaking, rendering distance and even object detail has some serious impact on the CPU as well (also affects simulation), yet most of the other graphical settings are solely or primarily on the GPU side.

I am not trying to start any flame war and not denying there is not room for optimizations or that it is not important priority, I am mostly tired to read all over again something that just is more myth than reality and that simply uses completely false metrics. All I can do is quote Suma:

So you let a game be released that has such core fundamental issues? Sounds like a poor decision to me. Are you guys over there hurting that much for money?

[scaramoosh 10]

Look at GTA V and everything they accomplish on dated hardware and I bet when it comes to PC it'll be running at 80FPS. There is far more going on there, what's going on in ARMA 3? Nothing, it's an empty island filled with like 30 odd players....... well GTA V can handle 16 on consoles and look at everything going on in BF3 with 64 players, heck even Planetside 2 has better performance and there is far more going on in that game. Every engine can do what ARMA 3 does now, there is no excuse, there are so many games out there with massive seamless worlds and they do far more complex things than ARMA.

Why are there CPU heavy games anyways? I've just learnt that means "STAY AWAY" because every CPU heavy game runs really badly. They're never CPU heavy either, they're all singlethreaded and using like 2 cores. You get a few multithreaded games and AMD loves them, suddenly it brings the performance right in line with the I7, I just don't get why games are multithreaded these days.

I guess it'll all change with the new consoles now they're using similar hardware, hopefully we'll see a standard across the board where poor performance wont be so much of an issue any more.

[griffz 1]

;2503365']

1) AI to some degree

While there is optimization of various sorts' date=' each AI needs to do stuff in "each" frame.

So when idling, AI does not have to do much calculations,

yet when moving in combat it has to evaluate lots of stuff for example.

Of course the more AI there are, the more the CPU has to compute overall.

2) Number of entities (players, AI, mission created objects (vehicles, weapons, wrecks, misc stuff, etc))

The more entities there are, the more simulation (of different sorts) the engine/CPU has to do.

[b']If we get above (estimates) 100 players, or 500-1000 AI, or LOTS of objects spawned across the whole terrain,

the numbers will matter in terms of FPS.[/b]

3) (Network) synchronization

The game needs to keep the game state of all clients and the server in sync - otherwise everything would break apart (game stops).

Now if the server is too weak for the given missions/number of entities / there is "too much traffic",

the engine/CPU has to spend a lot of time (of the frame) to keep stuff still in sync and working.

(2 and 3 seem to be the main problem of Wasteland among other problems in that mission)

Now there is/can be of course other sources for low FPS, like GPU as limiting factor, HDD doesnt supply data fast enough,

there is too much data to be cached in RAM (problem of Altis for 32bit OS users - data is put from RAM to HDD back to RAM all the time).

The most feasible "solution"/approach in my view:

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

are you kidding me ? 100 player ? 500-1000 AI??? !!!

just let me place 80 soldiers and 1 player, the framerate drop to under twenty...

[R0adki11 3949]

are you kidding me ? 100 player ? 500-1000 AI??? !!!

just let me place 80 soldiers and 1 player, the framerate drop to under twenty...

Well then i would advise to look at your hardware, as i don't have such issues with my setup. You must have a bottleneck on your PC somewhere.

[KeyCat 131]

...Every engine can do what ARMA 3 does now, there is no excuse, there are so many games out there with massive seamless worlds and they do far more complex things than ARMA.

In your dreams maybe, sorry to burst your bubble :)

/KC

[metalcraze 290]

Look at GTA V and everything they accomplish on dated hardware and I bet when it comes to PC it'll be running at 80FPS.

Yes GTA4 was a pinnacle of optimization

[dwaight 17]

Man i'm tired of people saying, that they have poor performance, everybody knows the game is cpu heavy, Dev knows, we know, but solutions... buy the better proc you can afford...I don't know if people notice, but arma have a view of 2km (average player setting max 15 or 12...) and all other game have 500 m on average, some like crysis (looks good, but have a render of 30 meter....)I think the problem is that, and when you put arma and other side by side, other have a much little vision range even in the bigger maps in bf, cod crysis etc is a joke the render distance, also arma have to manage a LOT of simulation/Ai no other game have ballistics like arma, penetration diversion ricochet etc...and the Ai of arma, is one of the best..(I think)

Stop, please..

" no other game have ballistics like arma, penetration diversion ricochet etc...and the Ai of arma, is one of the best." wrong. many games have it.

and BIS is not the only company that can make a game like this. if they really wanted to.

[griffz 1]

Well then i would advise to look at your hardware, as i don't have such issues with my setup. You must have a bottleneck on your PC somewhere.

that is with my dedi server running on the same computer than my client. i7 sandybridge @ 3.8ghz. with a shitload of ram.

with a REAL deported dedicated server, framerate stay over 25fps with shitload of AI (crcti).

but it's not a comfortable situation , as i need a windows dedicated computer , with a good CPU . as soon as linux server is ready , i will try a shot with crcti (best benchmark ever) and 3ghz C2Q cpu .

[calin_banc 19]

I don't know What type of system you have or what program you have to log your I5 quad core data but my 0 core is running at 60C-62C and my 1 core,2 core,3 core are running at 58C to 60c.

All 4 cores vary and fluctuate equally from 40% to 70% while in game with my monitoring system.

If your running just one core and a bit of your second core and you are running a quad core your are far from being optimized in World of tanks.You better check your system settings you might be using XP and you

haven't activated your 4 cores in your systems configuration.

With the new ''Nvidia Experience'' games are automatically optimized for your games such as Battle field 3,World of tanks,etc....personally I don't like the new system I like my old Nvidia control panel instead.

http://i.imgur.com/XlVUR6U.png (427 kB)

There is nothing wrong with my system and yes, I'm running windows 7 64bit. That's a 4,5GHz i5 2500k. You could have choose better examples like Cry Engine, FrostByte and so on. WoT is just a simple game with a poor engine.

Regarding AI, last time I've checked, if they are not engaging in a firefight or they are not in the vicinity of the player (in Editor, custom mission) is mostly fine, even with high numbers. However, if they start a fight near you, the FPS drops like a stone.

[clydefrog 3]

Yes GTA4 was a pinnacle of optimization

GTA 4 is a 5 year old game, computers are better now than they were when that game came out and massively better than the consoles GTA4 was made for. Also you'd expect Rockstar will have learnt something when porting and optimising GTA4 for PC which means they will probably do a better job this time.

Edited September 17, 2013 by clydefrog

[Leon86 13]

GTA 4 is a 5 year old game, computers are better now than they were when that game came out and massively better than the consoles GTA4 was made for. Also you'd expect Rockstar will have learnt something when porting and optimising GTA4 for PC which means they will probably do a better job this time.

They don't need to, anything that runs on the ps360 will run well on current pc's.

[Baleur 10]

Well then i would advise to look at your hardware, as i don't have such issues with my setup. You must have a bottleneck on your PC somewhere.

No, the game is unoptimized as hell. Just like Rome 2 is. It's the exact same situation with both of these games.

Don't kid yourself.

If you have a computer powerful and overkill enough to prevent you from noticing that, that's all fine and dandy for you. But even if you get 60fps at all times today, you SHOULD be getting 90 if it was properly optimized.

Meanwhile the rest of us get 20fps, while we should get 40'ish at least if it was optimized.

Same with Rome 2. Yet people there also have this twisted idea that "no, it must be your hardware".

Sigh.

[hgfdsa 10]

I understand everyone would like the game to run smoother, better, best. In reality, there is no spell that could be used, and many days or weeks of hard engineering work lead into neglible performance increase.

As I read all over again and again posts that seems to say people believe measuring how much of their multicore CPU or GPU is utilized (often by some very generic means) I can only recommend to try to read and understand problems associated with concurency in game engine architecture there is still some good read avaialble here: http://www.bistudio.com/english/company/developers-blog/91-real-virtuality-going-multicore

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. Generally speaking, rendering distance and even object detail has some serious impact on the CPU as well (also affects simulation), yet most of the other graphical settings are solely or primarily on the GPU side.

I am not trying to start any flame war and not denying there is not room for optimizations or that it is not important priority, I am mostly tired to read all over again something that just is more myth than reality and that simply uses completely false metrics. All I can do is quote Suma:

I apreciate that you are taking the time to explain the situation.

This however is irrelevant for the customers. The fact is that the game is running very poorly on many (if not majority) of PCs. We can all explain why and why not or how the game is what it is but the end user is simply disappointed with the product (in the performance term) and that is just not good enough.

The other fact is that it has been an ongoing trend with the ARMA series and hasn't been fixed. This again is not good enough.

I really like Arma 3 and it had/has much potential but this is simply something i personally can't tolerate as a customer. Nor should you as a developer.

[bvrettski 10]

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 bought this expecting large scale warfare as advertised. If the argument "it's the server" continues, then BI host a few dedicated servers for a short time and SHOW US this 120 player large scale warfare that you SAY is possible. Show us. That is not too much to ask for.

Sounds like a reasonable request to make of BI to me.

What do we want from them? Say 3, 120 player servers running an optimized multiplayer mission (with some AI) on Altius. One in the US. One in Europe and one in Asia.

This way we all have an agreed upon benchmark. Yes pings and systems will vary we all know that but when you can host a 120 player server (as BI suggested was possible with A3) and it can run consistently across time then your goal is reached and we will have the game you advertised.

I'm even willing to pop for a 4 core VDS, US server for the first month.

Please consider it.

Edited September 23, 2013 by Bvrettski

[dmarkwick 261]

No, the game is unoptimized as hell. Just like Rome 2 is. It's the exact same situation with both of these games.

Don't kid yourself.

If you have a computer powerful and overkill enough to prevent you from noticing that, that's all fine and dandy for you. But even if you get 60fps at all times today, you SHOULD be getting 90 if it was properly optimized.

Meanwhile the rest of us get 20fps, while we should get 40'ish at least if it was optimized.

Same with Rome 2. Yet people there also have this twisted idea that "no, it must be your hardware".

Sigh.

Where do you get these number from, the ones that say what FPS you should get? How can you possibly know what FPS you should get? Simply referring to another game cannot be the answer, because as we all know ArmA treats its game world rather differently than other games. It's non player-centric, so all things on the map need to be given CPU time, not just stuff surrounding the player. IMO the engine is already highly optimised because it often surprises me with what it can do. Last night I had nearly 300 units on foot, transport & armour, and all of them required pathfinding & engagement logic. And it was playable, with not much appreciable slowdown.

[Schoff 10]

I saw a nice gain with the new NVidia drivers that supported SLI.

i7-3770k @ 4.4 GHZ

GTX 670 2GB FTW x2

[griffz 1]

i , for one, like stencil shadows. not everywhere, but it is elegant. better than pixel shimering on the face of soldiers ...

[Rhym3z 10]

I apreciate that you are taking the time to explain the situation.

This however is irrelevant for the customers. The fact is that the game is running very poorly on many (if not majority) of PCs. We can all explain why and why not or how the game is what it is but the end user is simply disappointed with the product (in the performance term) and that is just not good enough.

The other fact is that it has been an ongoing trend with the ARMA series and hasn't been fixed. This again is not good enough.

I really like Arma 3 and it had/has much potential but this is simply something i personally can't tolerate as a customer. Nor should you as a developer.

Couldnt have put it better myself.

[dochollidayxx 10]

I apreciate that you are taking the time to explain the situation.

This however is irrelevant for the customers. The fact is that the game is running very poorly on many (if not majority) of PCs. We can all explain why and why not or how the game is what it is but the end user is simply disappointed with the product (in the performance term) and that is just not good enough.

The other fact is that it has been an ongoing trend with the ARMA series and hasn't been fixed. This again is not good enough.

I really like Arma 3 and it had/has much potential but this is simply something i personally can't tolerate as a customer. Nor should you as a developer.

I very much agree with this, it's been hard to sell my friends on buying this game when they see how it runs (and how angry I get at how it runs). I can't exactly tell them, "well, this is the type of game that requires a $4000 computer to play" because it's really not - my buddy with his 3 year old laptop can play it with medium/high settings singleplayer scoring about the same as I do on ultra. I've simply learned to avoid larger multiplayer games, of any type, which disturbs me. Hitting 15-25 fps with my rig makes me feel like something is wrong, especially on relatively "simple" no/low-AI maps like TDM setups or custom 10-man missions. I've recently switched back to the dev-branch since it has seemed to help my FPS in a major way when I'm on Altis maps.

My non multiplayer FPS is 45-50 (reasonable, but not what I expected), and the game definitely is CPU bottlenecked in some way I can't figure out. Never gets good utilization even out of a single core (and I realize video isn't the problem, as switching from low through ultra doesn't change squat in terms of my FPS - and you name a game that even barely challenges one Titan and I'll call you a liar :P)

i7 3970X (6-core) @ 4.4 Ghz

32GB RAM (1900Mhz)

GTX Titan 6GB

POST NOTE: I do love the game, I just would prefer it if continued optimization was the focus for a while - so I can convince more of my friends that it'll be worth playing!