Arma3 stability on performance PC build.

[danielisaiah1 10]

UPDATE!!!!!---------------------

Looks a like a memtest86 run through netted out some pretty bad errors on one of my DIMM's

I replaced with exactly the same Memory and ran Memtest86....no errors!

Happy to report that I have been running Arma for about 2 hrs and have seen no issues!!! So...I'll consider this issue closed.

Thanks @Forteh for the feedback!!

---------------------------------------------

All - I have entered into the desperation zone with the Arma3 application.

Basically, Arma crashes every single time I play the game, 100% of the time. I am desperate and I am looking for help from all you awesome folks here!!!

My specs:

OS: Windows 7 64bit (All updated security patches and system updates)

MOBO: GigaByteZ97X-Gaming 7

CPU: Intel quad Core i7-4771 3.5ghz

GPU: MSI GeForce GTX980 4Gb DDR5 (nvidia Driver 347.09)

MEM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 (1600)

SYS DRIVE: 500gb Samsung Evo 840 SSD (Arma installed on this drive)

DATA DRIVE: 1 Tb Samsung Evo 840 SSD

PSU: Corsair TX750M 750 watt

CPU cooler: Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO

Case: Thermaltake Urban T31 w/ 3 120mm fans

Details:

I have built and rebuilt my PC 3 times now and with each new build, with NO OTHER GAMES installed or apps installed besides GeForce Experience, Chrome, Steam, Arma3, MSI afterburner (no tweaks) and CoreTemp. Arma randomly crashes either at the BI logo, the menu after the logos, in the editor and in game play. It's completely inconsistent....but what is consistent is that it WILL crash! Sometimes I can play for 3 min....sometimes I can play for 35 min. The crash is exactly the same every time 100% of the time. Here is what happens when the "crash" takes place:

While playing, there will be about a half second of audio lag/skip and then the game freezes completely. I must ctrl/alt/delete out to Windows and that's where I see the "Arma 3 has stopped working" window and I click to close the program.

Other details:

- I (re) built this machine last night and made sure all windows updates and drivers were up to date etc. I installed Arma3 about 2 hours ago.

- This is the only game I have installed.

- On THIS BUILD, I have made no attempt to optimize any game parameters. I just started the game as it was installed. I have literally tried every optimization trick that's out there on the web for game optimization on the previous builds (-malloc param, turn on/off threading, run as admin, run steam as admin first, delete cache, turn off windows firewall, etc etc etc....)

- On this new machine build, I have run the game only ONE time up until in crashed.

- I have no mods installed

- I don't have any Intel Graphics drivers installed nor are intel graphics turned on on the motherboard.

- No overclocking done to CPU or GPU. No memory modifications.

If anybody can help that would be incredible. As you can see, I don't have a chump system. The game is set to "Ultra" settings by default with my CPU/GPU setup...I have not moved one slider EXCEPT the view distance....which I have set to 10km. I am logging about 33fps on this configuration and my GPU and CPU temps are not getting out of control.

I cannot post the the RPT log file unless I break it into two separate reply posts - it is 67000 characters and there is a 50000 limit in each post. I don't know if posting that way proper forum etiquette. Is there a section of the report that is most important?

Thank you all for any replies in advance!

-Dan

Edited January 18, 2015 by danielisaiah1

[forteh 11]

Because it's a consistent crash even after rebuilding the machine I would put it down to hardware failure.

Run the ram through memtest for a few cycles and see if that highlights any issues. Is the processor stable whilst stress testing? Prime95 blend torture test for 8+ hours should guarantee it stable, keep a check on the cpu temps though as the haswell processors run hot; might not be much of an issue as you're not overclocking.

Have you tested a different gpu or older drivers? Make sure you clean out the old nvidia stuff before hand. I would ignore the geforce experience settings, made the game look and run much worse for me.

edit: I would pull your view distance down as well, try 2-3000; it's cpu limited and will be dragging your gpu down because your clock speed is pretty low.

Edited January 15, 2015 by forteh

[St. Jimmy 272]

Make a ticket: http://feedback.arma3.com/my_view_page.php

There you can upload rpt, dxdiag file and whatever is needed. Also you can upload the rpt in some website like dropbox, mega etc.

[danielisaiah1 10]

@Forteh - thnaks for the response!

I will run memtest but I can almost certainly say this is not a hardware failure (But I will remain open minded!) I believe this because:

1) I can run 3Dmark and Valley tests with no issues whatsoever and I consistently score in in the top 10% of scores recorded on those benchmarks. I can also run other programs such as Adobe Premiere CC (a very intensive memory and GPU application with GPU accel) and edit 4K files with heavy color correction and effects with no issues.

2) I experienced the same issues with another GPU (780ti) installed. I'm sad now that I turned that card back in because I thought was faulty. It wasn't.

3) I have thought about installing older drivers but now that I have the 980 card .... the oldest driver is 344.11 from last September. I have notes about that below in my observations.

Arma3 set the parameters to "Ultra" without me doing a thing. I don't use the Nvidia game optimization thingy. Also, I since this was a first time driver install on a new build, there were no older driver junk to clean out. On the view distance inquiry, I like flying helis and seeing a realistic and distant horizon... but I will dial that back. BUT - even with those large distances i am still getting around 35-40fps (when the game is running). I also had NO problems with those view distances when things were running great earlier last year (more on that below)

A few observations:

I cannot pinpoint the exact time frame, but sometime in the later part of last year, Arma became unstable for me. When I think about it, It was around the Helicopter DLC update. I cannot remember if I updated drivers before or after that update so its hard to say what it is. At that time I had the 780ti installed. From May to Aug-September time-frame of 2014, Arma was stable and I was able to run at ultra settings with a 8km+ view distances. I also had a few Map Addons (A3MP) as well as Dslyecxi's HUD and tactical addons, CBA, and CAF aggressors. All in all I had about 6 Addons. Please note that THIS build is a all stock Arma with no Addons except the DLC.

I notice when Arma is running, the pagefile starts to get filled up to 8Gb and is maxing out. Is this normal? MSI afterburner shows a graph where it slowly climbs and hits the max pagefile and stays there until the "crash". I have read conflicting (and older) posts around setting pagefiles to zero or increasing it to 2x installed memory size for performance improvements. I admit I know nothing about pagefiles or how to alter them or set them to higher or lower.

I also notice that the GPU memory follows same ramp up to "max"... I have 3GB DDR5 in my 980. I don't know if this means anything...Is Arma supposed to use maximum GPU memory? Is this a possible memory leak?

@ St. Jimmy - WILL DO!

[forteh 11]

You shouldn't be using any page file at all with that much ram, I have 8gb and rarely go above 5gb system ram used whilst playing arma.

Try running arma windowed and keep an eye on the task manager to see what is hogging the memory.

[danielisaiah1 10]

@ forteh -

Will try that. What amount of memory should Arma be using as a baseline?

[forteh 11]

I've just run a couple of the benchmarks through, total system ram usage was 4.1-4.4gb. This is with steam, playwith6, opentrack and afterburner running; the base ram usage of the system in this stat is about 1.5-1.6gb so arma3 was using about 2.5-2.8gb, I often see that ram usage go up to 5gb after an hour or so playing but not much more.

[danielisaiah1 10]

See Update in OG Post^^^^^^

[forteh 11]

Woop! :)