Frustrated annoyed and desperate for help (poor fps)

[phil0sophy 10]

I have been in Arma 3 since the alpha and have had no success whatsoever in pushing this game above 40fps unless I am willing to sacrifice visual quality, now that would not be a problem whatsoever If my PC was outdated.

However when the game has autodetected that I should be using "Ultra" settings but is giving me as low as 5 fps in towns and never any higher than 40 fps anywhere else I have to question what is actually wrong here and how can I fix this before it drives me away from the game.

Hence why I am here and looking for some insight into these issues and hoping somebody either from the Dev team or anybody with any relevant knowledge can help me remedy these problems.

Ok my specs are as follows..

Processor: Overclocked Intel® Six Core i7-3970X @ 4.6GHz

Graphics Card: 4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 690 DUAL GPU

Motherboard : ASUS® RAMPAGE IV EXTREME: INTEL X79, SOCKET 2011, R.O.G

Memory : (RAM) 32GB KINGSTON HYPERX BEAST QUAD-DDR3 2400MHz X.M.P (4 x 8GB KIT)

1st Hard Disk: 240GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)

2nd Hard Disk : 2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

3rd Hard Disk : 2TB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD2002FAEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

Power Supply: CORSAIR 1200W PRO SERIESâ„¢ PLATINUM AX1200i DIGITAL MODULAR PSU

Processor Cooling: Corsair H100i Hydro Series High Performance CPU Cooler

Now at first maybe I thought it was an overheating issue, however my cpu never goes above 80 degrees and my gpu working at its very hardest barely touches 84 so I know that is not the issue.

Then I thought maybe its a driver issue of some sort, however after trying multiple drivers I am not seeing any performance improvements whatsoever.

I literally have tried so many other things so much so I could be here all day listing them, does anybody have any suggestions whatsoever on how I can get this running at a stable 60 fps or just even 30 as long as it does not dip below a playable framerate I am literally pulling my hair out over here and if this is simply down to poor optimisation then I really think that is just not good enough.

In my mind at least my specs should be more than enough to work this game on ultra and a playable framerate, maybe I am wrong? Either way can somebody here enlighten me.

Many Thanks.

[phil0sophy 10]

Anybody?

[das attorney 857]

Few things to consider as well..

What's your view distance?

What's your Terrain and Objects settings?

Do you have pagefile enabled?

Do you have Hyperthreading enabled?

Also, are you doing testing in the editor, or on MP?

Something sounds wrong here (not saying your setup is bad). You should easily be getting better frames than this. Your CPU is much faster than mine and I'm not having problems like this.

[verstand3n 13]

try playing scenarios and see what fps that gives you.

[jurrasstoil 10]

List all of your video settings.

[phil0sophy 10]

Few things to consider as well..

What's your view distance?

What's your Terrain and Objects settings?

Do you have pagefile enabled?

Do you have Hyperthreading enabled?

Also, are you doing testing in the editor, or on MP?

Something sounds wrong here (not saying your setup is bad). You should easily be getting better frames than this. Your CPU is much faster than mine and I'm not having problems like this.

Ok guys thanks for the replies, this is what I am going to do, take a picture of my settings and my NVidia control panel settings also and then I will record my framerates with fraps (min,max,average) and I will update the thread.

Pagefile is disabled because of my ram amount, Hyperthreading is enabled, and I was testing in both MP, editor and scenarios by the way

[Fushko 60]

Do you keep your drivers updated? Try SlimDrivers and see if you notice an increase in FPS.

[iceman77 18]

I was testing in both MP, editor and scenarios by the way

In any of the 2 editor mode preview, on a bare map, you should be getting 100+ fps with your monster of a rig. I've a very mid range machine that yours would gobble up and swallow whole, and I get an easy 70fps+ (that's a conservative figure) in the editor preview. I agree with Das, something is very wrong.

[phil0sophy 10]

In any of the 2 editor mode preview, on a bare map, you should be getting 100+ fps with your monster of a rig. I've a very mid range machine that yours would gobble up and swallow whole, and I get an easy 70fps+ (that's a conservative figure) in the editor preview. I agree with Das, something is very wrong.

What is really weird is that I am having no issues in any other game whatsoever, anyway I will post up some of my results in 10 or 15 mins and then you guys can take a look and see what you think.

[oldbear 390]

Have a look at :

- RAM : verify all the ram is well set and recognized, run MemTest,

- Mother Board : verify that no energy saving process turns on while you play,

- Mother Board : verify that the 2 connectors from PSU to MB are well set,

- GPU : verify that all the connectors from PSU to GPU are well set.

[jiltedjock 10]

I would definitely disable hyperthreading.

Is the 690 the only graphics card you have had installed? When I went from a 580 to a 680, I installed the 680 drivers from the Nvidia site assuming that we had moved on from the days of needing to do it in safe mode and delete the previous drivers. I think Nvidia would say we have moved on but I experienced all kinds of weirdness until I did that, and also used one of the driver sweepers to remove all trace of the 580 drivers.

[das attorney 857]

Pagefile is disabled because of my ram amount, Hyperthreading is enabled, and I was testing in both MP, editor and scenarios by the way

Try setting a pagefile on a hard drive that doesn't have your OS or Arma on it. Arma freaks out if you don't use a pagefile, even though you have a huge amount of RAM. (6GB PF should be enough IMO).

[jiltedjock 10]

Dataram ramdisk will allow you to create a 4GB page file in RAM. Free download, I've been using it a couple of years with no issues, recommended.

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk

[oldbear 390]

Ramdisk not useful here for he has a SSD. It was useful years ago but no more now with Windows 7 64bits and a SSD.

Do not disable Pagefile even if you have 32 Go for Ram ... it's in Windows genes since Bill thought nobody will need more than 640 Kb of Ram.

Edited October 5, 2013 by Old Bear

[MavericK96 0]

I've been running without a page file with 12 GB of RAM for years now and no issues running ArmA 2 or ArmA 3, nor any other programs.

[phil0sophy 10]

Ok so basically, first of all here is my Nvidia control panel settings...

Then Secondly my Arma 3 Launch settings in steam...

Thirdly here are the autodetected settings that Arma recommends for my PC...(note I have changed these and tried to improve framerates but sometimes lowering certain settings actually makes my framerate worse for some reason?)

http://i43.tinypic.com/55jk3o.png (1843 kB) http://i44.tinypic.com/2iuyzxl.png (1854 kB) http://i40.tinypic.com/otnayc.png (1821 kB)

And lastly I tested my min, max and Average framerate on the showcase "Helicopters" Literally all I did was run around the base, did not get into any choppers or anything, just ran in one direction towards the hills and this is my results over 300 seconds....

Min, Max, Avg

9 42 28

To answer some of the questions in the thread, I did enable pagefile again, it made no difference unfortunately, also everything from RAM to GPU to CPU are all working perfectly, every other game I am playing including battlefield 4 and other demanding games are working excellent, hell even Arma 2 is working great and maintaining a pretty high framerate.

So what do you guys think the problem could be? Is it just the fact that maybe the game is not optimised for my particular hardware?

[jiltedjock 10]

Ramdisk not useful here for he has a SSD. It was useful years ago but no more now with Windows 7 64bits and a SSD.

Do not disable Pagefile even if you have 32 Go for Ram ... it's in Windows genes since Bill thought nobody will need more than 640 Kb of Ram.

I'm recommending he puts his Page File on the Ramdisk. Thus page swapping will be much much faster than if it is on an SSD. If you have the spare RAM it is a good idea, because 32 Bit apps will page even running under 64 Bit OS.

[phil0sophy 10]

So what do you guys think after showing you my settings etc?

[spanishsurfer 58]

So what do you guys think after showing you my settings etc?

I'm going to just paste everything I've done on my PC to get Arma 3 running smooth:

Parameters: -nosplash -world=empty -cpuCount=8 -exThreads=7 -maxvram= 1536 -maxmem= 8192 -nologs -nobenchmark -high

For your nvidia control settings I recommend you set maximum pre-rendered frames to the max, try your FPS at different pre-rendered frames. Every other setting in that control panel, read the description on each one. They usually tell you what to set it to for best performance, I set all of them to "best performance." When you go ingame, set view distance between 3k-4k (what I run Arma 3 with a much older rig then yours). Your settings should be a mix of high/ultra, try setting terrain to high/medium and set your AA to 2x.

Report back if any of that helps.

***EDIT: Why is your cpu count 12?

[jiltedjock 10]

Parameters: -nosplash -world=empty -cpuCount=8 -exThreads=7 -maxvram= 1536 -maxmem= 8192 -nologs -nobenchmark -high

Cpucount - any more than 4 won't do anything. This startup parameter has generally not been needed since Arma 2 1.60 as the auto detect works fine.

Maxmem - there is a hardcoded limit of 2047. Any higher and it will fall back to this. Again, haven't needed this since way back. And as it is a 32 Bit app anyway...

***EDIT: Why is your cpu count 12?

Because he's got a hyperthreaded 6 core.

[Leon86 13]

Lower object viewdistance to something like 2k, viewdistance 5k, turn off PiP (picture in picture).

in the arma3.cfg (documents/Arma 3) file make sure it says

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

[antoineflemming 14]

Lower object viewdistance to something like 2k, viewdistance 5k, turn off PiP (picture in picture).

in the arma3.cfg (documents/Arma 3) file make sure it says

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;

Turn AA and PP effects off as well. PiP doesn't hurt that much. View distance to 2k, object distance to half of that, if not lower. If the GPU_MaxFramesAhead and GPU_DetectedFramesAhead set to 1 doesn't work, then try 10000. One extreme or the other should work. I know after playing with it set to 1 for all of Alpha and Beta, I recently set it to 10000 and it improved my performance (that's with the mentioned changes).

[maquez 141]

people have to learn Arma 3 is not an out of the box game, it's not done by hitting the auto detection button only.

Arma 3 needs a lot of tweaking and then testing, what also counts each system is different.

what me helped a lot:

http://day0.com.au/forum/arma/638-arma-3-performance-tweaks-and-settings-guide

try these advices and settings there.

and also important leave the Nvidia settings for Arma 3 at it's defaults.

online don't go over 2000 view distance, 3000 when flying.

Edited October 11, 2013 by maquez
bad english

[pr0ph3tswe 1]

tried disabling sli? installed chipset drivers etc?

and you say bad fps or lose visual quality, what kind of fps do you get if you lower settings a bit? as in turn FSAA down to 4x, leave everything else on ultra and tweak view distance a bit

[kingbuzzo15 11]

Have you tried using Razer Game Booster? Seems to give me extra FPS, I get worse performance when playing online, but with game booster it gives me extra FPS to at least make it playable.