NVIDIA PartnerShip and Driver Status and Complain

[GranolaBar 10]

Hello All,

6 months than the alpha was get out and no real news about drivers and improvment with the partnership of Bohemia Interactive with NVIDIA

I know many game who promote NVIDiA technology, but here, it's not the case.

What's the status of performance ? What's planned for NVIDIA players or ATI players in term of performance and improvments of the game ?

OK, i say, i must wait but the game was get out and it's the time to "get out" from shield to explain to players many things about tools, performance and more to help the community.

Actually, we see some great modders who leave the "adventure" in waiting some news from BI.

Finally, i think as almost player than the game was get out so quickly... and it's bad for the BI community and Arma series, that's all, it's a good game but seems to be a real beta again at this time...

Cordially

G.B

[dale0404 5]

I am sure we'll hear some news if and when anything needs to be announced. Complaining about it isn't going to make things faster.

[Tyl3r99 41]

i was going to create a thread to compare arma 3 with each GPU driver and what everyone thinks... would it be worth a shot? we can see if theres performance or not

[calin_banc 19]

You'll be CPU limited first anyway. The game is not THAT demanding on the graphics side.

[ramius86 13]

With one gpu ( 680 ) all works "fine". With sli no. PiP flickering, I got a big fps boost ( 40-45% more ) but gpu aren't used neither near 80% most the time. My hw isn't cpu limited ( 3930k@5ghz, 32@2400 arma whole in ramdisk ).

First of all it's time to resolve this flickering problem that's really annoying... Then maybe try to improve something in hw use if possible...

[jumpinghubert 49]

ramius, still with your monstre-cpu-ram-combi you will be cpu-limited with 100+ AI. Place 60vs60 soldiers in a fight and look how gpu-usage go´s down. With 50vs50 + 1 tank on each side my gpu-usage go´s down from 99% to 55%. (ivy 3570@4.9GHZ and GTX570(!)...........)

[ramius86 13]

Just recorded with 70 vs 70 and 140 vs 140. At the left bottom there's recorded gpu1 and gpu2 usage and also all core usage

[calin_banc 19]

With one gpu ( 680 ) all works "fine". With sli no. PiP flickering, I got a big fps boost ( 40-45% more ) but gpu aren't used neither near 80% most the time. My hw isn't cpu limited ( 3930k@5ghz, 32@2400 arma whole in ramdisk ).

First of all it's time to resolve this flickering problem that's really annoying... Then maybe try to improve something in hw use if possible...

The fact that you GPUs don' stay at 99% show just that - they are limited by the rest of the system. With the storage not being an issue, CPU is the only one left.

[ramius86 13]

The fact that you GPUs don' stay at 99% show just that - they are limited by the rest of the system. With the storage not being an issue, CPU is the only one left.

I see only one core at 60-70% with 280 AI, someone else is at 20-30- someone 14%...

[jumpinghubert 49]

The overall usage of cpu (thats the important parameter) turns into 55%, 10% more 10% less, independently of scenario, graphic settings, cpu frequency. Its like a constant.

edit: the video demonstrates what i´ve said: with lots of ai the gpu-usage go´s down (cpu have no "time" to "supply" your gpu) and with the gpu-usage go´s down your fps too.

Edited October 22, 2013 by JumpingHubert

[ramius86 13]

Whops, now it's rendered . Make sure to use 1080P in youtube settings to view the number more clearly. ( video recorded very low to not use too much hw... )

[calin_banc 19]

I see only one core at 60-70% with 280 AI, someone else is at 20-30- someone 14%...

As you can see your GPUs are limited (not using 99%). You can try the first helicopter showcase and monitor the GPU usage. Most definitely the CPU won't keep up as well.

PS: those frame rates in the test are by far not playable. Also, if you recorded using the CPU, that will put an extra load on it, ergo - false (higher than the game actually uses) load.

[ramius86 13]

As you can see your GPUs are limited (not using 99%). You can try the first helicopter showcase and monitor the GPU usage. Most definitely the CPU won't keep up as well.

PS: those frame rates in the test are by far not playable. Also, if you recorded using the CPU, that will put an extra load on it, ergo - false (higher than the game actually uses) load.

Don't understand... My cpu may can't keep up well if I see an avg usage of core above 80-90%.... Where do you noticed this massive cpu usage? Tell me at which second...

PS now I've to work, later when come back Ill make another video and I will use rivatunerstatistic to save all hw load on a log file

Edited October 22, 2013 by ramius86

[jumpinghubert 49]

it seems i have to repeat: please mesure the overall cpu-usage, not all single usages.

[ramius86 13]

it seems i have to repeat: please mesure the overall cpu-usage, not all single usages.

I haven't find an option to record onscreen the overall cpu usage... Maybe I will record the usage with procexp and will record this with my phone and I will try to shown ingame.. Let see...

[mamasan8 11]

HwInfo64 has an option called 'Total CPU-usage'. Can use it in conjunction with MSI afterburner via rivatunerstats.

To me, that is the only relevant thing to monitor in games besides temp and fanspeed.

I've heard (don't know if its true) that Arma 3 only uses 2 cores or threads. 1 for sound and 1 for the rest of the game. I have "8" cores (really only 4 full cores, AMD piledriver chip). CPU usage is around 20% when I play online. Which amounts to less than 2 cores being used 100%.

I can't read the text in the youtube-video, too small. Does it say you have 12 cores?

[jumpinghubert 49]

yes, mamasan8, thats the tool I use too: Hwinfo plus afterburner. I have the highest cpu-usage in empty towns in editor WITHOUT AI (65% average). With lots of ai it go´s down a little bit to 45%-55%.

Ramius, alternatively you can use "perfmon", its a win7 system tool. You can log a graph but you have to quit the game to see the last minutes of usage.

[ramius86 13]

HwInfo64 has an option called 'Total CPU-usage'. Can use it in conjunction with MSI afterburner via rivatunerstats.

To me, that is the only relevant thing to monitor in games besides temp and fanspeed.

I've heard (don't know if its true) that Arma 3 only uses 2 cores or threads. 1 for sound and 1 for the rest of the game. I have "8" cores (really only 4 full cores, AMD piledriver chip). CPU usage is around 20% when I play online. Which amounts to less than 2 cores being used 100%.

I can't read the text in the youtube-video, too small. Does it say you have 12 cores?

Yes 12 core, you can see if you put HD 1080P in quality settings. I will try later with hwinfo saving data in a txt and also with perfmon

[NeuroFunker 11]

there wont be any magic driver optimization, maybe on some really old gpus, untill the engine gets more cpu optimizations.

[nikiforos 450]

Personally the only thing I hope for is CPU optimizations. You can run ultra all you want but when AI is engaged the FPS will drop like a dead bird from the sky .

[calin_banc 19]

Don't understand... My cpu may can't keep up well if I see an avg usage of core above 80-90%.... Where do you noticed this massive cpu usage? Tell me at which second...

PS now I've to work, later when come back Ill make another video and I will use rivatunerstatistic to save all hw load on a log file

You don't need to have a 80 or 100% usage on the CPU to be limited by it. As long as the GPUs aren't at 99%, they are not used efficiently and even lower settings won't give you a serious boost in FPS (am talking here about settings taxing on the graphics side, because render distance/objects is influenced by the CPU as well). For instance, a game that uses only 1 core (which will be, let's say, 100%), total CPU usage on a quad core will hover around 25-28%, depending on whats going on in the background - Stalker is such a game.

Your GPUs, as you can see in the movie, have a low to ridiculous low usage when lots of AI interact and the CPU resources are dedicated to that (and most likely as you go higher, even that is way to little) and have to little left in order to proper "feed" de cards the information needed - aka the weakest link in the chain. A lot of talk has been going on about concurrency, other engines and so on.

Anyway, bottom line, excepting the cases in which you go with full 8xAA or more, above 100% rendering resolution or multimonitor gaming, a regular GPU/video card is just fine. Low fps comes from the CPU or server side in MP games. Just try some of the showcases and have a look and the GPU usage. I wouldn't be to surprised if you saw a 60-70% on a single GPU, perhaps even lower than that, if you have both enabled.

Also - http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/arma-3-pc-performance-analysis/

As we can see from the CPU graph, ArmA 3 scales well on quad-cores. Still, we did not witness any performance hit when we disabled one of our CPU cores – in order to simulate a tri-core system. This means that ArmA 3 did not take advantage of our additional CPU core, something that is really ironic considering this is a PC exclusive title that relies heavily on the CPU. When we disabled two of our CPU cores, we witnessed a 10-18fps hit. ArmA 3 is clearly not suited for dual-core owners so we strongly suggest avoiding it, unless of course you enjoy gaming at sub-30fps with awful graphics. Yes, graphics are not everything but ArmA 3 looks bad (and when we say bad, we mean really bad) on low settings.

[GranolaBar 10]

At the origin of this topic, i speak only about NVIDIA parternship with BI Studio.

Actually, there is so many lack about physx and info from BI about what they want, what subjet than NVIDIA work, .... all the game since few years had changelog before they get out, in the case of Arma 3, we had 0 info about it.... and NVIDIA players or ATI had no info about optimisation we could have...

Always DEV's not promise a function or ... .... and more, the arma community would be died quickly with this exemple...

That's all, we had a very old engine on Arma, the work was good but stop with no info, it's just Arma, a huge landscape area with bugs, it's normal with the map size but it's always the same thing since the alpha, we can sleep easily on this game when we see so many guys who stop the game... and modders.

Always the same subject, Arma was a very poor game in compaison of VBS... and even with the basic scripts of VBS, we don't had it... we can dream... but since 10 years it's so long...

Maybe a new engine in 2020 ? after 20 years of the same engine...

[calin_banc 19]

I don't have any issue with it even on Eyefinity (although, the fish eye could have been avoided a little bit better). Besides the flicker on multi-gpu systems, the game I believe runs pretty well if we talk about GPUs. Like I've said, you can have a Titan or two, but without optimizations or serious hardware muscle to overcome the roughness of the code, it still for nothing. Not sure what nVIDIA or ATI can do here.

Regarding PhysiX, I wouldn't expect any effects that cannot be run on the CPU. It's just extra work for nothing.

[ramius86 13]

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=51F46C7AF00AD136!217&authkey=!ALNr_YgGsARcG70

using hwinfo64, first part i was in editor putting 300 ai ingame, then I start mission till blufor kill all opfor, then alt+f4 and stop logging

PS This was made whith standard bios profile, not OC one, now I will made some test with OC one

[mazza 1]

Is this SLI issue being address re PIP?