DirecxtX 12 for ArmA 3?

[calin_banc 19]

http://wccftech.com/amd-directx-12-async-shaders-multithreaded-command-buffer-dx12/

If look over the pictures from that article, you'll see that in some circumstances, the Direct X driver takes more processing time than the game AND the DX Runtime combined, so you go from 34FPS to 66FPS, although much is not changed in the game loading the threads - > basically you gain a huge boost just by better threading/spreading the dx x driver over all available cores. Worth mentioning that AMD is not that efficient in multithreading on DX11, so the difference might be somewhat smaller on nVIDIA side. Also, if the game is the one demoded at GDC (Ashes of Singularity), that one was HIGHLY optimized for DX11 from the start.

Edited April 25, 2015 by calin_banc

[.kju 3240]

My personal holy grail throughout the development of DayZ has, and will remain the server side performance. Much of what folks attribute to "lag" or "desync" can be traced back to poor server side performance. 85% of which comes from the performance heavy usage of SQF engine script for many gameplay systems. Mentioned in prior status reports, EnScript (the name for Enfusion's engine scripting language) is leaps and bounds ahead of the legacy SQF in terms of performance. This, the portion of the performance budget currently consumed by SQF usage is the largest roadblock between 50 player servers, and 100+ player servers. Moving the title completely away from legacy engine scripting tech, and onto the new engine scripting language for Enfusion is by no means a small task, and will be an ongoing goal for the team (and in my opinion 100% required for DayZ to reach 1.0)

http://dayz.com/blog/status-report-22-apr-15

While this certainly not the full picture for the client, and I am somewhat skeptical about that comment, its still interesting to hear from the devs itself.

[I give up 152]

What DX12?

First fix the dam memory and caching management in game because at this point is a perfect mess.

Then think about DX12.

[brightcandle 114]

In my experience with games from 8 to 80 people you see issues with literally just one player. The game may very well be server limited at 50+ players, but the problem starts at just a couple of players in a small mission, its completely client side.

[I give up 152]

Now I understand your pain and why you want DX12, you have a AMD GPU.

For the last 5 years I was a Nvidia user, never had big issues with Arma 3 in matters of RAM or system page file.

With Nvidia RAM usage is normal and does not load data (noticeable amount) to system page file, even the GPU memory is relatively low. With Nvidia everything works smooth.

Now I have decided to try AMD GPUs and I can say, the game does not work with AMD.

With AMD, RAM usage is insanely high (does not have limits), keeps caching RAM (apparently without limits also) and also it uses the system page file (windows page file) to load data in to hard drive occupying a few GB of free space in disk. Obviously with all this is impossible to work.

Why this happens only with AMD? I have no clue but Arma 3 does not work with AMD GPUs, simple as that.

Let's wait for DX12, or Arma 4.

[ProfTournesol 956]

Come on, i've always used Amd Gpu with whatever Arma game and never had any problem.

[Brisse 78]

Worked perfectly fine with my old 6950 I had up until recently, and works perfectly fine with my new 290X. With both of these cards I was mainly CPU bottlenecked, as you would expect in Arma. Yes, the Nvidia GPU's might work slightly better in Arma, but it's perfectly playable with a great experience on AMD GPU's too, even older ones.

[I give up 152]

Yup, try it with triple crossfire.

Beautiful.

[calin_banc 19]

On what resolution are you playing and under what settings? If you're not doing triple 4k, 2 cards should be more than enough. Actually even one may be more than enough @1080p.

BTW, see if the RAM usage drops while using 1 card, then add the 2nd and the 3rd - you should be able to disable/enable that from CCC, so no need to physically remove any of the cards. If RAM usage goes up, then it looks like the game needs to cache into RAM the data from the vRAM of the cards, hence your issues. Also, if you haven't used Tri SLI before, it doesn't mean it's just an AMD problem.

Edited April 27, 2015 by calin_banc

[Brisse 78]

Why use Crossfire/SLI for Arma3 anyway? This game is mostly CPU bound, and running multiple GPU's takes up some extra CPU time, so it has the potential to decrease your performance. Framerate will probably be all over the place. I have not tested myself though becouse I have not had multiple GPU's in a long time. Used to run two 4850's in Arma2 :)

[kklownboy 43]

I think DX-12 will be a nice boost do to the better occlusion culling.

A rip;

Conservative Rasterization and Rasterizer Ordered Views - they provide a very efficient way to implement occlusion culling, order-independent transparency and ambient shadows, which require a lot of effort on current hardware.

Hopefully BIS can build DX12 in ARMA 4 or wishfull thinking a ARMA 3.5+

I will own a DX12 card this year anyways, and Win10.

[I give up 152]

One thing i've learned these last days is the amount of data that can be loaded into system memory and how this is dependant of system specs.

With triple GPUs having Textures on very high/ultra, RAM and Pagefile combined will take 30/40GB of data loaded. The only graphics setting in game that defnes the amount of data loaded is Textures.

Now, the graphics setting in matters of rendering in game that has a major impact in performance is View Distance exactly because defines what is being rendered or not.

But, View Distance settings has no impact in the amount of data loaded in to system memory, regardless of View Distance (500 or 12000), the load is exactly the same, View Distance defines only the GPU load.

Means that even setting a View Distance of 1500, which has impact mainly on GPU performance, the system (hard drive, memory and cpu) still has to process and manage all the data loaded.

This means (since the game is heavily dependent of Hard Drive) that the CPU, RAM and GPU will have to wait for Hard Drive to write/read the data loaded before it can be processed.

We know that the Hard Drives have a relatively high response time (latency), even having a couple of SSDs in RAID0 it can easily reach 100ms.

Will DX12 decrease the data amount needed, or will increase it even more? How exactly DX12 will bring benefits for the game in these matters?

[brightcandle 114]

A reduction in the view distance setting is reduces the CPU processing per frame substantially. It doesn't appear from my testing that the constant culling time is an impact. I suspect the reason is the substantial CPU overhead per object rendered within the engine dominates over the culling algorithm. Despite the volume of entities culling is still cheaper than rendering them, purely on a CPU basis. Right now that culling process is not a substantial impact (although I doubt its negligible, its just constant) but increase the object count very well make it a bigger problem.

[I give up 152]

The object count is increased or decreased only by the Object settings in video options. Higher = more objects at a pre-established distance. Lower = less objects at pre-established distance. The object rendering distance (or count) is not linked with View Distance.

Only terrain (and probably some environment effects) is dependent of the View Distance settings, vegetation is not dependent from it, also.

[Horus 83]

It took 2 engineers, 6 weeks to port their game from DX11 to DX12

[Tyl3r99 41]

AMD is **** it doesnt work well with arma series at all trust me im now with nvidia and its much better with no lag at all on ultra settings :D

[enex 11]

AMD is **** it doesnt work well with arma series at all trust me im now with nvidia and its much better with no lag at all on ultra settings :D

You will have to be more specific, and generalizing and saying one brand is better is foolish.

[Horus 83]

DirectX 12: Multiadapter Unreal Engine 4

We implemented an experimental technique called heterogeneous multiadapter using Epic Games' DX12 Unreal Engine 4. This technique allows us to split the rendering workload across an integrated Intel GPU and a discrete NVIDIA GPU simultaneously maximizing performance.

We recognized that most mixed GPU systems in the world were not making the most out of the hardware they had. So in our quest to maximize performance, we set out to enable separable and contiguous workloads to be executed in parallel on separate GPUs. One such example of separable workloads is postprocessing.

Virtually every game out there makes use of postprocessing to make your favorite games visually impressive; but that postprocessing work doesn't come free. By offloading some of the postprocessing work to a second GPU, the first GPU is freed up to start on the next frame before it would have otherwise been able to improving your overall framerate

[KeyCat 131]

...even having a couple of SSDs in RAID0 it can easily reach 100ms.

100 ms? To my knowledge you are way of here or maybe just a typo. For a single SSD we are talking about a factor of 1000 less than ms i.e us. Then add RAID on top of that.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8104/intel-ssd-dc-p3700-review-the-pcie-ssd-transition-begins-with-nvme/3

/KC

[I give up 152]

Quick question for those who may know.

Is there any way to prevent Arma 3 from loading (caching) 30GB of data into system pagefile?

[.kju 3240]

@ Bratwurste

Could you please create your own thread(s) for your all your unrelated issues and questions. Thank you

[I give up 152]

;2931168']@ Bratwurste

Could you please create your own thread(s) for your all your unrelated issues and questions. Thank you

I am sorry, I will rephrase.

Quick question for those who may know.

With DirectX 12, is there any way to prevent Arma 3 from loading (caching) 30GB of data into system pagefile?

[doveman 7]

I am sorry, I will rephrase.

Quick question for those who may know.

With DirectX 12, is there any way to prevent Arma 3 from loading (caching) 30GB of data into system pagefile?

Yeah, disable the pagefile. I have 16GB RAM and A3 seems quite happy without one.

[I give up 152]

Yeah, disable the pagefile. I have 16GB RAM and A3 seems quite happy without one.

Is that with DX12?

Because with DX11 already tried that, all 24GB that I have available are wasted in matters of minutes.

[calin_banc 19]

Mantle allows developers to make their own memory management in contrast with DX which as far as I understood, it makes it for you - at least a hefty chunk of it. It was a discussion about this when a memory leak was in BF 4 while using Mantle. DX12 being as well a low level API, should in theory allow that. However, just because something can be done, it doesn't mean it will. After all, you can also do a lot more with DX11.x than it has been done so far.