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CapBlackShot

What Pieces to Change to Increase FPS?

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Hello,

Currently, I think I don't have a bad PC. But something is wrong with that, or I really need to change it, because I have a lot of troubles with FPS, specifically with Arma 3. I've tried ALL the tutorials possible to increase my FPS, but those didn't help so much.

The most part of my problems are on multiplayer. Servers with more than 10~20 people I get 30 FPS or less, depending on where I'm etc. So I think it's time to change some pieces, isn't it?

OS: Windows 8.1 64-bit

CPU: i7 2600k 3.4 GHz

RAM: 8 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665 MHz

Motherboard: Gigabyte B75M-D3H

Video Card: ATI AMD Radeon HD 7970 (3 GB)

Maybe is it related to my motherboard? My RAM? My CPU?

(I can't spend too much, since I don't live in North America. Things in my country are too expensive!)

Thanks! :cool:

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I know your foreign pain my brother, My current PC's cost two years ago when I bought it compared to US was: US: 1300$ to TR: 2500$. Still paying the bank (Dead serious).

Best you can do without much to spend is getting an SSD, or maybe if your cooling is good OCing your CPU (Or getting good cooling to OC). Not that it whould improve performance that much as the first 2, but getting faster ram @1600 Mhz whould generally help your system and all games.

Also Give HRTZarma a try, basically it's every single non-hardware solution combined.

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1. client fps are affected by server fps, choose good server... (for example try filter jsoc 50/50 invade & annex host), got stable fps there all the time (1920x1200 ultra maxed)

2. amd gpus are worse than nv gpus for a3

3. forget all those magical "performance guides/switches"

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I know your foreign pain my brother, My current PC's cost two years ago when I bought it compared to US was: US: 1300$ to TR: 2500$. Still paying the bank (Dead serious).

Best you can do without much to spend is getting an SSD, or maybe if your cooling is good OCing your CPU (Or getting good cooling to OC). Not that it whould improve performance that much as the first 2, but getting faster ram @1600 Mhz whould generally help your system and all games.

Also Give HRTZarma a try, basically it's every single non-hardware solution combined.

Thank you! But do you think that my currently problem is caused by a non-SSD driver? I have a 1 TB HD from Seagate.

1. client fps are affected by server fps, choose good server... (for example try filter jsoc 50/50 invade & annex host), got stable fps there all the time (1920x1200 ultra maxed)

2. amd gpus are worse than nv gpus for a3

3. forget all those magical "performance guides/switches"

Thank you for the tips, but I have an Altis Life server, and I don't know if I can optimize it.

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overclock cpu and get a better ram..arma engine love those..ssd wont help with fps whilst it does help with stuttering..7970 is overkill for arma 3..the only tweaks that works for fps are from fred41(LPmanager and tbbmalloc)

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Okay first off, bohemia has explained, something very key to how arma 3 works.

http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?100519-exThreads/page4

exThreads, I am not going to delve too deep but, this simply creates additional threads for geometry loading, textures and file-ops, now the key point here is more threads DOES NOT equal better performance. If you have additional threads you play a trade-off. More threads for more computational over-head in the way of timing synchronisation etc.

My advice, this actually works by the way,

Play around with exThreads= 0 - 7

Key points for arma 3 / 2 performance:

1. fast CPU (lot of ops / cycle) usually 3.6/4 GHz or more

2. lot of L1/L2/L3 cache compared to cheap dualcores

3. Fast system in overall (fast FSB, fast memory transfers, low latency memory, fast GPU-CPU and CPU-GPU ops etc)

Relating to 3. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/understanding-ram-timings/26/3

It is an illusion to think overclocked RAM is better, because the CAS (CL latency) is the number of clock cycles it takes internally to complete a single memory transfer. Many high clocked ram has a higher latency. Latency is ABSOLUTELY paramount in games, as it is a "real time factor"

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr3-1333-speed-latency-shootout,1754-23.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-16gb-ddr31333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill/8

In general RAM means screw all

"8 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665 MHz" This just tells me you have pretty standard memory. 1330Mhz (DDR3) or 665Mhz Double Data Rate 3 Memory the 665Mhz refers to the "base clock" DDR is "double pumped"

Edited by Polymath820

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My advice, this actually works by the way,

Play around with exThreads= 0 - 7

Hmm I remember some post from Dwarden that there are still some experiments with -exThreads so the 7 for quad-core might not be the best option even.

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Bingo already discovered this, my Quad-core gets better FPS on 2 exthreads. It's because as I said, the threads add additional over-head intel very well explain this on their developer network.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/designing-artificial-intelligence-for-games-part-4

Threading DOES NOT solve performance problems END OF STORY. It's not a golden bullet and never will be.

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I recently upgraded from a 7950 to a 970 GTX and didnt notice any FPS gain (i7 3770k)... the CPU bottleneck of ARMA is legendary!

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but I have an Altis Life server
delete altis life mission and your fps would go up ........xD

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delete altis life mission and your fps would go up ........xD

Lol :)

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I recently upgraded from a 7950 to a 970 GTX and didnt notice any FPS gain (i7 3770k)... the CPU bottleneck of ARMA is legendary!

Exactly and some people in the forums still recommend high end GPUs .

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I recently upgraded from a 7950 to a 970 GTX and didnt notice any FPS gain (i7 3770k)... the CPU bottleneck of ARMA is legendary!

You don't get better fps with the same settings. You can only increase GPU heavy settings so your GPU won't be the bottleneck in any situation.

For the OP. I'm now upgrading my RAM from 1600MHz to 2133MHz. Takes some weeks to parts come but according to these tests RAM would be the best option for you. You've currently 1333MHz RAM. Also overclock your CPU.

Likely in heavy mission or in a bad server your FPS increase is minimal compared to the fps but even upping the minimum fps with 5 is really a great improvement if that's possible.

/Oh SSD might also be a nice thing not only for Arma but you'll also love how quickly your PC starts when your OS is in SSD.

Edited by St. Jimmy

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Exactly and some people in the forums still recommend high end GPUs .

With better GPU you could play on higher settings, but not with more FPS in some cases(because of the CPU limitation). At least you could set everything to max(except the view distance, it require CPU). With sampling rate over 100% makes the game beautiful, but it is require good GPU.

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overclock cpu and get a better ram..arma engine love those..ssd wont help with fps whilst it does help with stuttering..7970 is overkill for arma 3..the only tweaks that works for fps are from fred41(LPmanager and tbbmalloc)

I agree. A very fast CPU is most important for Arma but lots of RAM is good too. Graphically, the game isn't that demanding as you can max it out with a GTX 460 and get decent fps (around 30), sans for view distance and terrain and object LOD which should be kept within reasonable settings.

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Hey I love how FPS threads turn in to a disaster just in a day, I'm just going to insist on the SSD again because of one reason: ArmA can't use much ram as explained here, so it reads terrain data from the drive every single time. Sure, back in OFP when computers RAM was low and maps didn't contain much detail, this was a good solution, but with ArmA 3's high quality terrain it really backfires. I also have a really good system, as shown below:

GTX 680 4GB

16 GB @1600Mhz

i7 3820k (OC to 4.5 GHz)

And a 2 year old 2TB HDD. It's a 7200RPM drive from WD , basically one of the fastest HDDs out there. It IS still the bottleneck.

Also the reason I suggested the launcher is because it has every single launch parameter, and it helps installing custom allocators and launches the game with them too. You should really try it. Hope you had a chance to read this in the giant pool of unnecessary posts.

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Forget all those tweaks, most of it are just placebos. The ones that can help you are the ones that help with game loading time, but will have no impact in game performance.

Even the tbbmalloc large block thing doesn't make sense, it could if A3 was loading a insane amount of data directly to RAM, which is not the case. Even so it would bring serious issues with flush and allocation timings.

Also forget the huge ammount of info available about gpu or cpu bottleneck, loads of inaccurate info.

The main bottleneck in A3 is with data write/read and that is with HDD.

Arma 3 due to its characteristics needs to load a insane ammount of data in to HDD and that is made in a continous way. What happens is most of the times the cpu and the gpu are waiting for HDD to read/write and load the data needed to play under a whatever scenario.

For A3, a single SSD does not have speed enough in matters of data write and read so that it can follow, without constraints, the processing speed of the CPU. What is the solution? Basically there are 3.

One can be to get a second SSD and set both with RAID0, this will increased the write/read speed, still be aware that will not be enough to avoid cpu bottleneck (assuming you have a decent cpu).

Another one, but expensive, can be to get a PCIe SSD, most of them have a write/read speed about of 1700 MB/s. With this (assuming you have a decent cpu and gpu) your game performance will be greatly increased.

The simple one (if you have RAM enough with proper configuration) is to get AMD RAMDisk or similar, this piece of software will provide the speed that A3 needs in matters of HDD write and read (assuming that you have a decent cpu and gpu).

Obviously a decent cpu and gpu are needed, anything like a quad core between 3.5/4.0 ghz and a mid range gpu like Nvidia 670 is enough (in matters of specs related with this type of hardware) to achieve a decent visual quality having 60 smooth and stable frames per second.

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Forget all those tweaks, most of it are just placebos. The ones that can help you are the ones that help with game loading time, but will have no impact in game performance.

Even the tbbmalloc large block thing doesn't make sense, it could if A3 was loading a insane amount of data directly to RAM, which is not the case. Even so it would bring serious issues with flush and allocation timings.

Also forget the huge ammount of info available about gpu or cpu bottleneck, loads of inaccurate info.

The main bottleneck in A3 is with data write/read and that is with HDD.

Arma 3 due to its characteristics needs to load a insane ammount of data in to HDD and that is made in a continous way. What happens is most of the times the cpu and the gpu are waiting for HDD to read/write and load the data needed to play under a whatever scenario.

For A3, a single SSD does not have speed enough in matters of data write and read so that it can follow, without constraints, the processing speed of the CPU. What is the solution? Basically there are 3.

One can be to get a second SSD and set both with RAID0, this will increased the write/read speed, still be aware that will not be enough to avoid cpu bottleneck (assuming you have a decent cpu).

Another one, but expensive, can be to get a PCIe SSD, most of them have a write/read speed about of 1700 MB/s. With this (assuming you have a decent cpu and gpu) your game performance will be greatly increased.

The simple one (if you have RAM enough with proper configuration) is to get AMD RAMDisk or similar, this piece of software will provide the speed that A3 needs in matters of HDD write and read (assuming that you have a decent cpu and gpu).

Obviously a decent cpu and gpu are needed, anything like a quad core between 3.5/4.0 ghz and a mid range gpu like Nvidia 670 is enough (in matters of specs related with this type of hardware) to achieve a decent visual quality having 60 smooth and stable frames per second.

Don't use RAID0 http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/08/raid-levels-tutorial/

Use RAID10 or also known as RAID 1 + 0

RAMDisks don't really improve all that much.

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Well, that's a little bit confusing. A lot of information, and, yeah, I read them all. Thank you guys for this!

I'm thinking on change my motherboard for some that can provide me overclock. Then I can think on a SSD or memory RAM. Any better suggestions?

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Change the motherboard to allow a decent overclock if it doesn't currently; cpu cycles is what arma wants, not loads of ram or a billion cores working simultaneously.

I achieved a 50% increase in fps simply from increasing my overclock from 4.2ghz to 4.5ghz, I have more headroom to play with so planning on pushing it further. Bear in mind I don't have recommended hardware and it plays smoothly enough with a moderate mixture of standard and high settings. With my stock 2.93ghz I get around 20fps stood in the middle of Pyrgos, @4.2ghz I get around 30fps and @4.5ghz I get around 45 fps.

I'm running: -

i3 530@4.5ghz

Gtx260 core 216 @ Gtx280/285 clock speeds

8Gb bog standard crucial 1600mhz DDR3

1Tb seagate hybrid drive

Once your cpu is 4ghz+ it will stop bottlenecking the gpu and will free up the fps, read up on good guides for overclocking (I used this one as it explains things well and gave me good results).

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Relating to 3. http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/understanding-ram-timings/26/3

It is an illusion to think overclocked RAM is better, because the CAS (CL latency) is the number of clock cycles it takes internally to complete a single memory transfer. Many high clocked ram has a higher latency. Latency is ABSOLUTELY paramount in games, as it is a "real time factor"

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ddr3-1333-speed-latency-shootout,1754-23.html

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/memory-performance-16gb-ddr31333-to-ddr32400-on-ivy-bridge-igp-with-gskill/8

In general RAM means screw all

"8 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665 MHz" This just tells me you have pretty standard memory. 1330Mhz (DDR3) or 665Mhz Double Data Rate 3 Memory the 665Mhz refers to the "base clock" DDR is "double pumped"

Your statement is inaccurate. The CAS latency increases in terms of the number of cycles, but each cycle becomes shorter in duration, so the total latency decreases.

Threading DOES NOT solve performance problems END OF STORY. It's not a golden bullet and never will be.

Of course threading is not a silver bullet, but we both know that it may be a useful tool to increase performance if the software is designed with threading in mind. I'm not a game developer so I don't really understand the limitations that apis like Directx impose in terms of threading, but I can't imagine that arma3's threading model is optimal.

Edited by hannsl

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Just want to post my experience.

I increased my FPS by overlocking the BOOST CLOCK of my 3570k to 4Ghz and in addition I overclocked my RAM from 1600 to 2133( without overvolting). This increased my Max fps by about 10 only, however my fps are over 30fps constantly.

Nontheless, the best way to increase you FPS and to enhance you gaming experience is to stay away from non optimised missions. I built some MP missions myself for my community, and we are getting some very good FPS there, even though we have a lot of firefights going on.

Kind Regards

R3vo

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You have to use an Ssd drive in arma otherwise it's very choppy.

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disable clouds and shadows and PIP and you will have huge fps improvement

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