GTX660 any good?

[nicklomas 3]

Hi,

I have a GTX660, i7 3770, 4gb ram and A3 plods along and jutters. I also find there is lag looking down the scope. Settings are default and set to high but it makes the game unplayable. I looked in the other posts and tried some things but nothing has worked.

My question for you is that is my graphics card to poo?

[novemberist 2]

My question for you is that is my graphics card to poo?

Certainly not, on high-very high settings you should be able to play Arma 3 without stuttering (mind you, in multiplayer bad fps and lags are not uncommon even with current high end rigs). So if you experience these issues in SP, there surely must be some other cause. Arma3 is very heavy on the CPU rather than the GPU generally speaking, but since you have an i7, this shoudln't be a problem either...

I have a 750 Ti, which is not considerably better than your card and it makes Arma 3 run pretty well.

[sceneryexplosion 10]

object view distance is a major fps killer. Try setting this to 1000-1500 and see if things get any better

[stang725 10]

use Altis 0.6 benchmark (get from steam workshop) and set your draw distance to 1600/1200. What is your FPS with ultra preset (change draw settings) and with standard preset (change draw settings)?

Also play around with going from 4x -> 8x AA for Ultra+STD settings to see if you are being limited by AA processing. I don't see any difference, but my cards are a lot more powerful. Also consider turning off PPAA to see if you get an improvement.

I would slowly lower your settings down till you hit above 60fps for benchmark result... you will see lower FPS in multiplayer than this benchmark, so consider these settings valid for what your max FPS are going to be w/o the FPS hits you will see from MP servers.

Also consider downloading GPUShark... let it run in the background while running the benchmark... what is your vram usage and what is your gpu max utilization?

For reference on ALTIS benchmark, I get ~74fps on ULTRA settings with 8x AA and all settings maxed using 1600/1200 draw settings w/ i4770k OC to 4.3Ghz and I run 2x SLI 4GB GTX 770. I can get >95% usage on both cards, so your 660 isn't going to do that much for you in terms of running ultra settings and giving you playable frame rates. I would just slowly dial things down till you get better FPS. Shadows and clouds are easy to dial down w/o much a visual impact to the game.

Normally, FPS is limited by:

1. Weak servers hosting MP

2. CPU (due to poor implementation of AI, pretty sure its single threaded for AI and it should be multi-threaded)

3. GPU

4. Memory bandwidth (you will see gains going from 1600->2133Mhz+

[Greenfist 1863]

I have the 660 too and most of my settings are high/very high. The GPU utilization is almost never above 80% when my fps is in the usual range of 30-60. So I don't think the GPU is holding you back either.

Install some GPU usage monitor, MSI Afterburner for example, and keep your eye on it while playing. If the usage is generally below 80-90%, you're good. Near 100% and you should lower some settings.

[stang725 10]

Agree, you need to just play around with your draw settings to determine the sweet spot where you are getting good FPS and actually seeing >80% for GPU usage. From there, you can dial back some GPU-limited settings to get your FPS higher. But just keep in mind at some point you are simply going to by CPU limited like everyone else.

[nicklomas 3]

Cheers guys, it says I have 59/60 FPS most times but still jutters/lags at certain points. I'll play around with the draw distance and see if that changes things.