Will-my-pc-run-Arma3? What cpu/gpu to get? What settings? What system specifications?

[boombastic 17]

froggyluv , Arma3goodCPUlowFPS , St. Jimmy Thank you mates ! Your info was really helpful !

froggyluv - with 760 card you can play with maximum settings ? or the are still some settings lowered ? and witch screen resolution you use ?

Arma3goodCPUlowFPS - Dwarden - is this somebody that work in Bohemia Studio or he is mod maker ?

St. Jimmy - You sure about Physix that calculated over CPU for nvidia ? i remember that this is one of nvidia features that calculated over GPU....

Maybe there is an option for developers to chose were to perform calculation - over CPU or GPU - so you possibly right ....

[Greenfist 1863]

Dwarden is Bohemia's community manager and a developer.

And Physx is indeed calculated only on CPU.

[Valken 622]

Game is fully cpu dependent but having a very high IPC cpu such as an Intel Haswell may actually be worth upgrading if you play ARMA in general a lot.

I did get an SSD before Christmas and while it is an improvement on streaming the map and assets, RAMdisk is still king if you have enough ram and can load enough of the PBOs into it. The game plays so much smoother especially with a Haswell cpu OC'ed to the max.

[Sandy* 10]

St. Jimmy - You sure about Physix that calculated over CPU for nvidia ? i remember that this is one of nvidia features that calculated over GPU....

Maybe there is an option for developers to chose were to perform calculation - over CPU or GPU - so you possibly right ....

A lot of people have entirely misunderstood what GPU-based PhysX is. The core physics of games (that use PhysX) are always done by the CPU, no matter what hardware you have. It's not an "option for game developers to choose". The GPU features in PhysX (APEX) mostly revolve around eyecandy - particle effects, clothing simulation and so on - because such physics calculations can take advantage of the GPU architecture and are much slower on the CPU. For core game physics, it's pretty much the opposite.

As for Arma 3, it does not use APEX or anything else in PhysX that could be calculated by GPU.

[Sterlingarcherz101 15]

Speaking from my own experience. I went from a 7870 to a gtx 770 and noticed a big difference.

Your card is older. So you will see a notable difference going to a 760.

[dnk 13]

I doubt there's much you can do worth the expense. Your rig is fine. Or spend $250 for an extra 5FPS.

[brightcandle 114]

I took a profile picture in Palagia in Altis a while ago and captured the following from the game to explain the basic issues with the game on a 3930k running at 4.4Ghz:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3638175/Capture%20Palagia.png (2808 kB)

Each of the bars at the top represents a core (12 in my case since I have a 3930k) over the time of one frame. Ignoring the text at the bottom its pretty obvious that the game is mostly single threaded except at some points in the rendering where it can go very parallel, but performance tests show that its of minimal impact so despite the moments of parallelism the multithreading in this game has limited impact in practice. We can see that the game is dominated by simulation time (the time it takes to update the world on user updates and network received updates and run any scripts) and on rendering time on the CPU. That suggests two things to me about the game:

1) The simulation needs to be parallel or a lot more performant. Its taking over 9ms in this case to do all the various bits of updating the world and AI and such.

2) The game seems to be heavily dependent on draw calls to the graphics pipeline. Its spending nearly 12ms just doing this and that would suggest there is just too many draw calls and CPU overhead is dominating.

In addition sound and physx are all running in the same thread which a lot of games have them run separately which would save a couple of milliseconds as well. I also think that if this is performance at 4.4Ghz on a sandy bridge you aren't going to do much better regardless of your CPU. Worse that that the game seems to be hyperthreading insensitive. We can see it loads core 0 and 1 at the same time and yet they are the same underlying core, and then the rendering process threads seem to run cores next to each other as well while other real cores aren't being used at all. That is just really poor generally and its going to hurt performance.

So the game is very heavily dependent on a single CPU core and clockspeed, it also benefits from memory bandwidth but its also fair to say that the issue is mostly the game and the way its written. There is nothing any of us can do. I hope the others have answered your questions so I wont address that but wanted to show you what you are up against to try and get the game running well.

Edited January 17, 2015 by BrightCandle

[Arma3goodCPUlowFPS 12]

I took a profile picture in Palagia in Altis a while ago and captured the following from the game to explain the basic issues with the game on a 3930k running at 4.4Ghz:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3638175/Capture%20Palagia.png (2808 kB)

Each of the bars at the top represents a core (12 in my case since I have a 3930k) over the time of one frame. Ignoring the text at the bottom its pretty obvious that the game is mostly single threaded except at some points in the rendering where it can go very parallel, but performance tests show that its of minimal impact so despite the moments of parallelism the multithreading in this game has limited impact in practice. We can see that the game is dominated by simulation time (the time it takes to update the world on user updates and network received updates and run any scripts) and on rendering time on the CPU. That suggests two things to me about the game:

1) The simulation needs to be parallel or a lot more performant. Its taking over 9ms in this case to do all the various bits of updating the world and AI and such.

2) The game seems to be heavily dependent on draw calls to the graphics pipeline. Its spending nearly 12ms just doing this and that would suggest there is just too many draw calls and CPU overhead is dominating.

In addition sound and physx are all running in the same thread which a lot of games have them run separately which would save a couple of milliseconds as well. I also think that if this is performance at 4.4Ghz on a sandy bridge you aren't going to do much better regardless of your CPU. Worse that that the game seems to be hyperthreading insensitive. We can see it loads core 0 and 1 at the same time and yet they are the same underlying core, and then the rendering process threads seem to run cores next to each other as well while other real cores aren't being used at all. That is just really poor generally and its going to hurt performance.

So the game is very heavily dependent on a single CPU core and clockspeed, it also benefits from memory bandwidth but its also fair to say that the issue is mostly the game and the way its written. There is nothing any of us can do. I hope the others have answered your questions so I wont address that but wanted to show you what you are up against to try and get the game running well.

thanks for your information. very helpful.

[boombastic 17]

Greenfist - Thank you! I really hope that Dwarden and other Bohemia guys will do something to improve game performance!

Totally i'm wounder about how Bohemia manage their people resources, i mean that the game have so much issues and bugs, and performance problems but with each update from them, they only improve minor things and bugs, and add things like helli flying model improvement, weapon sway changes and so on... but much more basic and important things have no attention at all ! :( They even don't care to make any new missions by them self and completely lay on community, that looks very strange for me ...

Valken - Thank you! maybe you know what is average overclocking potential of i7 4790K with good air cooler?

SandyBandy - God bless you :) Finally somebody explained to me how PhysX work ! So if i read about new game that will use PhysX i'll need to check if it will use APEX features or not, to understand if it will benefit from nvidia card ?

Sterlingarcherz101 - Thank you, i lean more to ATI R9 290

DNK - Thank you, i understand that spending solid amount of money will still give me only "few" additional FPS, but in my case i think if after all i will get additional 10-20 FPS in ARMA3 it will pretty helpful for me.

BrightCandle - Thank you very much ! It was really illustrative and helpful info!

I think we need to create some community petition to Bohemia with hope that they will pay much more attention to this problems !

At least, it would be nice to hear from them about their future road-map, if any serious performance optimizations will come !

[Valken 622]

I had upgraded from an i5-750 (4.2 GHZ) and run my 4790K at stock. The best I can do on water cooling Corsair H50 is 4.5 GHZ (all cores).

You can actually buy a guaranteed 5 GHZ 4790k! Read this review here.

Then get 32 GB of FAST ram, and load the game into a ramdrive. Runs fast and great with a good gpu.

Online is different as you are synced to that cpu. If the server is running off a ramdrive with a fast cpu, online play should be decent.

[vran. 13]

One of these would be nice to have:

Although A3 does not make very good use of 8 cores so it's probably lost money for that specific purpose. 12 or more core CPUs can already be bought too (Intel Xeon series, AMD Opteron series) but they're prohibitively expensive and useless for games. And there's also the '60 CPU cores on a card' things like the Intel Xeon Phi but that's even more useless for games. :)

[brightcandle 114]

...

I think we need to create some community petition to Bohemia with hope that they will pay much more attention to this problems !

At least, it would be nice to hear from them about their future road-map, if any serious performance optimizations will come !

The community has been complaining about this as the number 1 issue since the first day alpha was released. Its been the number 1 issue with the game for nearly 2 years now. A petition isn't going to change a thing, they know we care they just don't themselves find fixing it economic.

One of the problems here is that the assets of the game are likely too complicated. There is too much stuff in the game world for DX11 to actually handle, there are more draw calls than a modern CPU can handle with DX11. BIS might be able to crush some draw calls together or reduce their CPU overhead but it looks like its just good old fashioned limits on the number of things you can actually render due to CPU overheads. So it needs DX12 or a downgrade of the number of assets that can be seen at any one time and since DX12 isn't available yet to fix this problem likely means a significant reduction in the games image quality, it needs half or less objects.

The simulation is single threaded due to the immense difficulty of multi threading it. BIS has spoken before about a way of panellising but its so far the project has brought us nothing tangible and I don't know if they are still even pursing it. It was meant to arrive with Arma 3 (because Arma 2 had the same problems) but obviously it didn't. This is hard, not everything can just be run concurrently, its not easy to convert serial code and many algorithms can't be run on all cores anyway because its mathematically impossible. This is not something any games company can do as a quick patch to a game. Its something they might try to do before the next one but its an immense job that no company does it to an existing product in its twilight years.

The problems are fundamental. Without a cutting back of the complexity and number of assets in the game at any one time (world, units, vehicles etc) and without a massive change in the simulation aspect of the game you aren't going to see a change in performance, and indeed its no surprise that the efforts we have seen BIS taking have provided no relief, as its not a series of little minor issues its 2 really big ones. They are trying to give us pounds by saving pennies and its not working. I would bet money on the fact this wont be fixed in Arma 3's lifetime at all.

Edited January 18, 2015 by BrightCandle

[dnk 13]

The game is multithreaded, but it's still restricted by the main thread, which is a combination of draw calls (which even AAA devs have a hard time multithreading) and a sole AI thread (which BIS probably could multithread, but it would take a major rewrite, so it's not to be expected for an inter-release update). If we're ever going to see the AI multithreaded (and in a way it already has been 1/2 multithreaded with HC), it'll probably come with the first major expansion.

Personally, I'm content with all the success they've had at reworking the engine for multicore support since A2. The fact it isn't perfect yet isn't getting me down. It's a lot better than it used to be (even the much-maligned MP -- 120 players wasn't possible in A2, 50-60 seemed the max, so we've nearly doubled performance there it seems). They do need to do something to either cut down on draw calls or multithread the AI going forward, especially since single-core processing power isn't likely to improve much in the future barring a gamechanging new tech. Either the AI won't improve for A4 much (which would be horrid) or graphical complexity won't, because either way we're hitting a performance ceiling right now.

I'm guessing the real breakthroughs are going to happen in the newer and well-funded DayZ team (which wants like 1000 AI to be feasible), and get sent back to the Arma team once they succeed. DayZ is the place where a lot of fundamental rewrites and code work is being done right now. Arma seems to be a mixture of adding in a few new minifeatures and content, bugfixing, etc, milking the franchise a bit.

[subunit 31]

The community has been complaining about this as the number 1 issue since the first day alpha was released. Its been the number 1 issue with the game for nearly 2 years now. A petition isn't going to change a thing, they know we care they just don't themselves find fixing it economic.

One of the problems here is that the assets of the game are likely too complicated. There is too much stuff in the game world for DX11 to actually handle, there are more draw calls than a modern CPU can handle with DX11. BIS might be able to crush some draw calls together or reduce their CPU overhead but it looks like its just good old fashioned limits on the number of things you can actually render due to CPU overheads. So it needs DX12 or a downgrade of the number of assets that can be seen at any one time and since DX12 isn't available yet to fix this problem likely means a significant reduction in the games image quality, it needs half or less objects.

The simulation is single threaded due to the immense difficulty of multi threading it. BIS has spoken before about a way of panellising but its so far the project has brought us nothing tangible and I don't know if they are still even pursing it. It was meant to arrive with Arma 3 (because Arma 2 had the same problems) but obviously it didn't. This is hard, not everything can just be run concurrently, its not easy to convert serial code and many algorithms can't be run on all cores anyway because its mathematically impossible. This is not something any games company can do as a quick patch to a game. Its something they might try to do before the next one but its an immense job that no company does it to an existing product in its twilight years.

The problems are fundamental. Without a cutting back of the complexity and number of assets in the game at any one time (world, units, vehicles etc) and without a massive change in the simulation aspect of the game you aren't going to see a change in performance, and indeed its no surprise that the efforts we have seen BIS taking have provided no relief, as its not a series of little minor issues its 2 really big ones. They are trying to give us pounds by saving pennies and its not working. I would bet money on the fact this wont be fixed in Arma 3's lifetime at all.

The thing I don't understand is the last year or so of radio silence on this issue. They're aware of it, they said they were working on it and would write a blog post at some point (supposed to be >1 yr ago IIRC) about optimisation issues, then nothing further, as far as I'm aware. I understand that they don't want to promise anything they can't deliver, but the approximate scale of the resources required to address the problem must be clear internally. If they don't think it's feasible to address the issue within the platform lifetime, it would be nice to get a heads up.

[tonschuh 3]

My (upgraded) Rig:

Computer Type: PC/Desktop

System Manufacturer/Model Number: Custom-Build

OS: Windows-8.1-RTM-Pro-WMC-Update-1-x64

CPU: Intel Core i7 3770k @4700MHz @1.435V

Motherboard: Asus P8Z77-V

Memory: G.Skill 16G(4*4G) DDR3-2400 Quad Channel [TDX] F3-2400C10Q-16GTX (10-11-11-28-2T) @1.690V

Graphics Card: 2x Gigabyte GTX780-Ti-GHz-Edition-3GB in 2-Way-SLI (skyn3t BIOS-MOD | Power-Target: 130% | Temp-Target: 95C | Core-Voltage: 1.313V | Boost disabled | GPU-Clock (max stable): 1431MHz | Memory-Clock (max stable): 7354MHz)

Sound Card: OnBoard Realtek® ALC892 8-Channel High Definition Audio

Monitor(s) Displays: Asus VE278Q 27" Wide Led Black Full HD 2ms | Dell S2409W 24" 5ms

Screen Resolution: 1920x1080

Keyboard: Roccat Isku | Logitech G13 | XBox 360 Controller wired | Logitech Dual Action GamePad

Mouse: Roccat Kone Pure Military Dessert Strike | Shogun Bros. Ballista MK-1 | Cyborg R.A.T. 7 Infection | Roccat Kone[+] | Zalman FPSGun Mouse | Logitech G9

Mouse-Pad: Roccat Taito Mid-Size (400 x 320mm) 5mm

PSU: Corsair AX1200i

Case: Thermaltake Level-10 GT LCS

Cooling: EK-H3O-HFX-240mm Liquid Cooling Kit | 2x EK-FC780 GTX WF3 Nickel Acetal | EK-FC Terminal DUAL Parallel 3-Slot Black Acetal | 2x EK-FC780 GTX WF3 Backplate - Black | PrimoChill PrimoFlex Advanced LRT Tubing 3/8"ID x 1/2" OD Brilliant UV Blue | 2x EK Ultimate Performance CoolStream 480 XTX Series Liquid Cooling Radiator | 12x BGears B-Blaster 120mm x 25mm 2000RPM High Speed Fan | EK Ekoolant EVO Concentrate - Clear | EK & Bitspower Compression-Fittings G1/4

Hard Drives: - Intel 520S 240GB/SATA3/R 550MBs,W 520MBs/25nm/3.5"Kit/5yr - Samsung 840 EVO SATA3 500GB - Seagate Barracuda SATA3 1TB 7200RPM 64mb Cache - Seagate Barracuda SATA3 1TB 7200RPM 64mb Cache - Seagate Constellation SATA3 3TB 7200RPM 64mb Cache -

Seagate FreeAgent USB 2.0 1TB - Seagate FreeAgent USB 2.0 2TB - Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex USB 3.0 2TB

Optical Drive: LG HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH12LS38

Internet Speed: ADSL2+ ~15MBit/s DL | ~1MBit/s UL

Browser: Google Chrome

Antivirus: Windows Defender

Other Info: - Logitech Extreme 3D Pro Joystick - Plantronics GameCom Commander 7.1 Headset - Logitech X-210 Speakers

Stratis @Ultra-Settings = 42fps

Altis @Ultra-Settings = 39fps

After water-cooling my GPU's as well and pushing the Core-Voltage up to 1.313V and pushing the Clocks from 1150MHz / 7000MHz to 1431MHz / 7354MHz and even pushing the Power-Target to 130% via Bios-Mod, I gained 3fps in the Stratis-Benchmark and 2fps in the Altis-Benchmark.

I'm really amazed !

:)

[Greenfist 1863]

TONSCHUH, what were your view distances?

If you ran it maximized, that fps is pretty impressive.

[brightcandle 114]

Reading through the siterep I come across something that kind of irks me in regards to performance. Not only has the profile build now disappeared and all we again have is development stable but we are soon going to get a boolean switch so they can tell if a game is modded or not. Its not which mods are running, nor is it tooling to tell us which mods are costing time per frame, no its a simple switch of vanilla or not. They seem to be setting up the blame game and pointing at mods rather than actually a) helping people improve the performance of the mods and b) actually addressing the problems of performance generally.

This massive delay and this feature as well as the type of testing they are doing tells us a lot about what they think the problem is, they think its all the modders fault. Yet I can open vanilla and go to altis and get the game into the 20's on a high end machine, I don't understand why they don't just do that test themselves. I would say keep up the pressure but they haven't done anything about it yet, and right now all the evidence is they are going in the opposite direction of "its all fine its you and your modded games" without actually helping fix the darn issues.

[SSgt Decker 4]

Hello everyone! I am looking to upgrade my PC and need some advice. I currently have an Intel i5 2500k CPU and a Nvidia GTX 660 ti GPU. My question is, which one of these should I upgrade to get better performance? I am currently looking at getting either the i5 4670k for a CPU upgrade or a GTX 970 GPU upgrade, but I can only choose one.

Thanks

[aop 1]

IMHO best solution would be not to buy their products in future. I lost all respect I ever had for BIS because of ArmA 3 and DayZ. Neither has improved the #1 problem with their games; piss poor performance. They gained large following with ArmA 2 and Dayz mod and choose to blatantly exploit it and sell subpar products with no intent to fix them.

BTW. If someone says SSD improves the performance of the game don't fall for it. I have Intel 910 400GB PCI-E SSD which is significantly faster than any SATA SSD and there is ~0 difference in performance of ArmA 3 when compared to using plain regular HDD. Loading screens are like 10 times faster but that's it. No FPS increases since the game is so CPU limited. Now the same snake oil marketers are trying to push ramdisk as solution to shitty ArmA 3 performance...

[forteh 11]

I wouldn't upgrade for the sake of trying to get more performance in arma because I think you will see minimal gains for a lot of expenditure.

Until the time the cpu bottleneck is removed from the engine the gpu isn't being pushed. You could add a second gpu in sli and push the resolution up but I doubt you will see and actual increase in real life performance.

My gtx660 pushes it along @ 30-80 fps single player on very high/ultra with 2.5k view distance, the same on mp until it gets chaotic in cities when it drops to around 25. That's with an i5 750 @ 4.2ghz.

Is your cpu overclocked? If not get that pushed as far as you can before considering a major upgrade for arma :)

edit: case in point...

My (upgraded) Rig:

Stratis @Ultra-Settings = 42fps

Altis @Ultra-Settings = 39fps

I get 32fps on ultra settings @ 1080p on altis with my machine, a first gen i5 running a good deal slower than a 3rd gen i7. In reality get the cpu clock speed up to 4.5+ghz and this is likely to be your result.

Just re-run the benchmark with my optimised settings (mixture of ultra+very high with 2500 view distance and 2000 objects) and got 46fps.

Edited January 21, 2015 by forteh

[dnk 13]

IMHO best solution would be not to buy their products in future. I lost all respect I ever had for BIS because of ArmA 3 and DayZ. Neither has improved the #1 problem with their games; piss poor performance. They gained large following with ArmA 2 and Dayz mod and choose to blatantly exploit it and sell subpar products with no intent to fix them.

BTW. If someone says SSD improves the performance of the game don't fall for it. I have Intel 910 400GB PCI-E SSD which is significantly faster than any SATA SSD and there is ~0 difference in performance of ArmA 3 when compared to using plain regular HDD. Loading screens are like 10 times faster but that's it. No FPS increases since the game is so CPU limited. Now the same snake oil marketers are trying to push ramdisk as solution to shitty ArmA 3 performance...

I have an SSD. I saw a significant improvement after testing it. Of course, not all improvements are readily seen in FPS numbers, though they do come up in frametimes.

Guess I'm a liar.

I also have seen significant performance boosts since A2/OA, as have many others. Just run AinA, it's obvious, the engine has been improved. MP has been seriously improved too. 120 player games now, yes. In 2009? lolno, be lucky with 60.

[St. Jimmy 272]

I have an SSD. I saw a significant improvement after testing it. Of course, not all improvements are readily seen in FPS numbers, though they do come up in frametimes.

Guess I'm a liar.

I also have seen significant performance boosts since A2/OA, as have many others. Just run AinA, it's obvious, the engine has been improved. MP has been seriously improved too. 120 player games now, yes. In 2009? lolno, be lucky with 60.

This.

[windies 11]

I have an SSD. I saw a significant improvement after testing it. Of course, not all improvements are readily seen in FPS numbers, though they do come up in frametimes.

Guess I'm a liar.

I also have seen significant performance boosts since A2/OA, as have many others. Just run AinA, it's obvious, the engine has been improved. MP has been seriously improved too. 120 player games now, yes. In 2009? lolno, be lucky with 60.

I've tried two different SSD's neither improve load times or FPS very much, FPS pretty much not at all and load times a little bit but far from any staggering improvement. Not calling you a liar, simply saying I have as much anecdotal evidence as you do.

Yeah A2 maps run better in A3, does that really mean that the engine has been improved if it can't readily handle it's own newer content? If ArmA 4 suffers from the same issue's, are you gonna say "But hey look we can run Takistan/Chernarus better than A2!". I mean your point is valid, older content does run better in A3. It's just not really much of a useful point to be made in the argument against the engine though. Maybe they could use it as a selling point " ArmA 4, runs older content better than it's predecessors but can't manage anything newer!". What an improvement!. Sarcasm aside that's basically what you are calling an improvement to the engine.

I was in 100+ player games back in ArmA on Sahrani, it lagged like hell then and it lags like hell now TBH. I actually wouldn't try to tout the Multiplayer in A3 as a beacon of improvement with all the focus on issue's it has.

[tonschuh 3]

TONSCHUH, what were your view distances?

If you ran it maximized, that fps is pretty impressive.

It's unfortunately not impressive, but I didn't try it maxed-out this time.

Just tried the normal "Ultra"-Profile:

http://imageshack.com/a/img538/1039/qfueU5.jpg (130 kB)

May try it completely maxed-out on the weekend if I have some spare-time.

@forteh:

I luckily didn't upgrade for ARMA-3 alone.

;)

[forteh 11]

Glad you didn't invest in the hardware for arma :D

Unfortunately I had to upgrade to get arma running well (going from an i3 530@ 4.62 + gtx260 216 to an i5 750 @ 4.2 + gtx660 made a world of difference and doubled fps) but it was less than £100 to do the upgrade and it also helps massively with running solidworks at home :)

Maxed out kills my machine, I tried it ages ago and I think I get something like 18fps on altis!

However you make a perfect example for Jake34 above who is talking about upgrading his rig for arma, assuming he has overclocked his cpu to decent limits (4ghz+) then he generally won't see much increase in performance in arma for either of the major upgrades he was considering. He could try some super fast ddr3 and make sure it is running at full speed, that has shown to increse performance quite dramatically when coupled with a fast cpu.

I like the arma3 engine, it's a great leveller for those with new super fast computers and drags them down to the performance level of my entry level rig from 5+ years ago :D