I give up - Arma 3 not worth playing because of poor FPS

[jumpinghubert 49]

threadstarter don´t give information about settings and other circumstances of low fps..............25 replies and zero question about settings, ssd, mp or sp........lol.....god give brain

[kabong 1]

Hi KaBoNG, i have my old i7 920 set to 3.8...its been like this for over two year's and until recently ran on air no problems..... you have a great system so sure it's frustrating when the game you want to play does not respond well to your expensive hardware... there are other thing's you can try to tweak windows etc which i'm sure your probably aware of. We could go through a list of thing's on teamspeak if you wanted some help... i've only learnt through trial and error(lots!) and patience... most games i just switch on and have no issues with but the ArmA series has always been the same with regard's to tweaking pretty much after every patch in my case but these game's are better than anything i've played so worth it(imo). Also what ram are you using... as i have 6gb of ddr3 (1333) gathering dust here for free if its needed.

KrIxXuS,

I will graciously accept your offer of the ram - thanks so much! Please pm me with details and how we can connect. I am in Chicago, IL btw.

For the others who are wondering what I mean by decent FPS, I would be happy with high 20s to low 30s on a consistent basis, but am stuck in the teens running BIS missions with not overly ambitious settings. For example:

Sampling: 100%

Textures: Very high

Objects: Standard

Terrain: Standard

Shadows: Ultra

Particles: High

Clouds: High

PIP: Standard

HDR: Standard

Dynamic lights: Very high

Visibility: 1600

Resolution: 1680x1050 (native)

Vsync: Disabled

Bloom: 30

Radial blur: off

Rotational blur: off

Depth of field: 30

SSAO: Disabled

Caustics: Enabled

FSAA: 4x

ATOC: Disabled

PPAA: SMAA standard

Aniso Filtering: Standard

Development build: 110425

As a test, I start the Armed Assault showcase, exit the Panther, turn east, advance a few meters, then bring up video options and I'm staring at 16 FPS.

Yes, I could squeeze out a few more FPS by disabling FSAA (which looks ugly and kills fine detail in the distance) and reducing view distance to 1000 (which leaves me staring a wall of fog only a click away - not very becoming for an arid Mediterranean island) but it is not going to get me to the stable FPS range I'm looking for with reasonable visual quality, and getting into a discussion of settings was not the intention of my post - there are plenty of other posts that already do that.

The point is that I wish BIS would focus more on core game performance than minor cosmetics like adjusting character textures or replacing Jay Crowe placeholder voicing for British soldiers (examples from recent change logs - who cares?).

It's a wonderful game, but until they improve performance I won't be spending much time enjoying it (or spending money on future DLC).

Edited September 27, 2013 by KaBoNG

[bad benson 1733]

i personally have violent chopping especially after running the game for a while. it's some weird bug or something. maybe you have the same. my FPS is basically ok but then sometimes the game has an episode and starts chopping until it almost freezes up and then most of the time it calms down after a while.

when i play with friends we all have different problems at different times no matter what settings. i currently run all on low with recommended specs and still get that weird memory leakish chopping. the latest patch made it worse again. sometimes i run smooth and my one buddy has unplayable chops while my other buddy runs half decent. it always changes. i'm sure that lots of other people have these problems too. it has been reported a lot. not sure if you have the same problem though.

@sheepdude: your logic is flawed. "i can run it and others can too so it must be your pc" is quite a ridiculous statement. this ain't Xbox or ps3. we all have different hardware and drivers etc. there can always be problems that only certain people have even with the lowest settings. this ain't like arma 2 but we also far from a bug free stable game. the game isn't final (sorry it just isn't).

anyways. sometimes it's good to just move along, if you have nothing helpful to say. makes you look less like a dick.

[rfxcasey 1]

Shadows can be a bit of a killer, try dropping the shadow quality, I keep mine at ultra just because it looks better and I don't have any performance issues. Some of the other stuff you can turn down without really impacting visual quality just to get a better FPS overhead. You'll have to play around and find what you like. Ambient occlusion quality can be turned down from ultra to very high if you choose and in your Nvidia properties, from quality to performance. Other than that, view distance, terrain detail and anti-aliasing are going to hit performance. Trying running at x2 or x4 AA and turn off AToC except for maybe grass, I personally don't like the way it looks anyway. PPAA didn't seem to hit performance much if at all, personal preference as to which setting you choose. V sync also can be turned off if you don't experience screen taring. Make sure its turned off in your Nvidia control panel as well.

Hard drive access is another bottle neck, try to run off an SSD if at all possible. Its possible to run a ram drive with extra system memory and preload certain files into it (textures and the like). That's a bit more of a project then some are up for but if you like experimenting, have at it.

Optimizations will come in time, between those for engine and graphics you could be looking at a 50% increase in FPS shortly.

Edited September 27, 2013 by rfxcasey

[maquez 141]

@ruecan

Why should we have to spend hours tweaking to get something playable, many people have far better specs than are recommended and a great amount of money spent, but still ends up poor fps and stuttering, textures not loading, lod popping.

I just upgraded from I7950 to a 3770k and its still bad at times on the dev build even in single player, I don't even go mulitplayer as when we have its utterly unplayable yesterdays update made me go in slow motion when walking or running I had to speed up time to get it back to normal it happened 7-8 times in just 1 mission no reason for it.

when this happens it kills it for me http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/903260606710205109/646988EFB74675159FB34949E1BA1250E2DFEFE9/

Ive had devbuilds were I can max out settings, view and object to max and played fine after release its got a whole lot worse one day it goes fine in sp next update it reverts to being crap again its a rollercoaster ride im getting sick of and like the op just can't see it being playable for a good while yet but hey we still have arma2 to keep busy with

if something like this happen as shown in picture, then something is wrong with your system

I never had any graphic anomalies playing any BIS games.

1. make sure BIOS is updated to latest version.

2. update system drivers to latest versions and make sure to download all Microsoft updates.

3. deinstall existing GPU driver and make a clean reinstall !

4. update directX

5. if you use Nvidia GPU, depends on model do not use Drivers newer than 314.22 !

6. if overclocked, try it with stock clocks

7. control if PC is not overheating

8. if problem still persists make sure GPU or RAM is not broken

hope these little advises can help to narrow down this problem

[valnwt 11]

KrIxXuS,

As a test, I start the Armed Assault showcase, exit the Panther, turn east, advance a few meters, then bring up video options and I'm staring at 16 FPS.

I tried the same and i got about 60+ fps.

My rig:

i7 960 3.2 ghz

gtx 560 ti

12 Gig ram

Win 8 64 bit

With these settings:

Sampling: 100% (1920x1080)

Texture: Very High

Object: Standard

Terrain: High

Shadows: High

Particles: Standard

Clouds: Ultra

PIP: Standard

HDR: Standard

DL : High

Visibility:

Overall: 3500

Object : 1800

Shadow : 100

V-sync disabled

All post process at 100 except bloom (40)

SSAO: Disabled

Caustics: Enabled

FSAA: Disabled

PXAA: FXAA high

Aniso. Filtering : Ultra

Try those settings and see what the result is.

Im currently one of those wondering where all this bad preformance talk is coming from as i havent seen any of it except at launch of (Beta) Altis and on bad MP servers, so there has to be some optimization done right :)

[Gudsawn 93]

In SP I get 40-50 FPS with AI. In MP (on a decent server) I get 30-40 FPS with AI.

More than playable fps, at least for me. My specs are:

i7 2600k 3.4 GHz

ATi 6970m (that's right, a mobile GPU)

12GB RAM

All graphics settings are set to Standard (except textures and objects which are set to High) with SMAA High. I could set all graphics to Ultra/High and still get a reasonable 30 FPS, but I prefer more solid frames.

[-OB-.Monty 10]

Try this .. http://steamcommunity.com/app/107410/discussions/0/864980153116631160/#c864980153159954390 apparently it worked well for most of my fellow clan members.

[pils 49]

I bought a new high end rig lately and even for me AA more than 2x and Shadows on ultra is killing a lot of FPS. Try AA on 2x, Clouds on normal and Shadows down to as much as you can bear ;)

[jumpinghubert 49]

yes oddball.monty, there is something wrong with threadstarters system. Parking cores, downclocking gpu or/and cpu because of wrong settings or overheating.

Please kabong log cpu clock (of all 4 cores) and gpu clock during arma3 gameplay.

[kabong 1]

Minor break through: I had forgotten that a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I had moved my video card from my x16 PCIe slot (x16 mode) to my x16 PCIe slot (x4 mode) to avoid a noisy PCIe sound card (it was causing mouse tracking to be heard). This was several video cards ago when it didn't really matter that it was only running in x4 mode. I moved it back to the x16 mode slot and now my FPS is in the 20's with FSAA at 4x, plus the mouse tracking noise is gone (the sound card drivers were since updated which may have taken care of that problem).

While I'm not getting the 60+ FPS DanielV is reporting above (how in the world does that happen?), at least it's playable again. There is still room for improvement though and I'm hoping that BIS continues to optimize the engine.

JumpingHubert: clocks are as follows during game play:

Each CPU core is running at 3498.0 MHz

GPU is running at 1215 MHz (stock out of the box - I have an EVGA superclocked GTX 760)

Reducing the clock on either or both reduces my FPS.

[Fushko 59]

I have a 550 Ti and I can run this game on ultra with a view distance of 5500 at 60 FPS in the editor. It must be your PC. It's IMPORTANT to download SlimDrivers and let it update everything, it really helps a lot.

[Tulkor 10]

^^ exactly. If your still having frame rate issues after these suggestions its your PC. Again, try a good server as I can play on 64 person wasteland sa-matra server with around 60-80 frames.

It is definitely not my PC. This game runs flawlessly in SP. It is the multiplayer end that has bad performance. There is less teleporting friendly units but the framerate generally runs around 25-35 in open, unpopulated areas, and around 15-20 in major towns. I've yet to come across a server where my framerate went up. If anything, I stumble upon a completely crap server and my FPS goes down even further.

[big_t 1]

Try lowering your view distance. It can really help in some cases.

Also I'm sure you could squeeze a few more Mhz out of your CPU , that 930 should be able to clock to 3.8 with even a modest after market cooler. Every chip is different and no guarantees, but from what I gather Arma 3 is fairly cpu intensive so it might be worth a try. Close all other running programs.

[ric 1]

I have a 550 Ti and I can run this game on ultra with a view distance of 5500 at 60 FPS in the editor. It must be your PC. It's IMPORTANT to download SlimDrivers and let it update everything, it really helps a lot.

sorry mate i had to highlight that, go play on a MP server with those settings or the helicopter showcase and come back and tell us what you FPS is.

---------- Post added at 22:32 ---------- Previous post was at 22:15 ----------

to the OP, I know you don't want to hear this or do this but it is important and will help to rule out a whole bunch of possible problems.

#1 remove and reseat all hardware (ram,VC,) make sure all connections to MB are solid and make sure Heatsink is clean, make sure case fans are clean and case has proper air flow.

#2 Update the bios on your MB to the latest stable offering.

#3 do a fresh install of windows (yes i know it is a PIA)

I tell you this as a person who has built and repaired soooooo many PC's and has to track down problems that were not even related the problem they were causing, for instance on my own personal rig i had a USB hub go bad (or so i thought) then i thought my game pad was going (device plugged in sound kept going off) this along with a weird type of latency in games that i had never seen before.

turned out that when i bought a new case and moved all my stuff i decided to upgrade the BIOS. problem disappeared ...my BIOS had a bug.

:(

I have also encountered over the years how mis seated memory can lead to all kinds of system corruption or a HD with the connection not %100 in causing all kinds of havoc so it is really good idea to make sure from the ground up that everything is sold before you spend hours pulling your hair and screaming ...this makes no sense!

[jimbob6661 20]

On 9/26/2013 at 1:38 AM, stevoau said:

Optimization isn't really the problem here - it is just an outdated engine that isn't coded properly to modern hardware.

Hopefully, if there is an ArmA 4, BI will ditch the RV engine and start again with something that...works properly with modern hardware, instead of updating the 12ish year old RV engine.

Truth, And the thread is still relevant.

[Gunter Severloh 4054]

3 hours ago, jimbob6661 said:

 BI will ditch the RV engine and start again with something that...works properly with modern hardware, instead of updating the 12ish year old RV engine.

It is

Quote

Although a large part of the original Arma 3 development team is now working on Bohemia's new Enfusion engine

https://dev.arma3.com/post/sitrep-00231

[R0adki11 3949]

6 hours ago, jimbob6661 said:

Truth, And the thread is still relevant.

 

Closing - no need to dig up an old thread from 2013