Frequent freezing

[Chryseus8 0]

So I've been having this problem for about 8 months now, with no resolution, the game freezes randomly about every 5-30 minutes at which point everything stops with no sound, after around 10 seconds it resumes as normal, background programs appear to freeze as well.
This occurs in single player and multiplayer without any mods, I've verified the install multiple times and have even done a complete reinstall, since this problem started I've also fully reinstalled Windows 10 three times and tried a whole range of nvidia drivers, I have no anti-virus installed (with exception of Windows defender), I'm not getting problems with any other game, the event log is clear.

More advanced scenarios seem to produce the freeze more often, for example in an extremely basic scenario it might happen every 20 minutes whilst in a complex scenario this might reduce to 5 minutes.

Here is a rpt file, I marked the location where it freezes on line 722, https://ghostbin.com/paste/koyyh

CPU and GPU temperatures have been checked, manually increasing the fan speed makes no change.

I've tried a wide variety of launch parameters to no effect.

Drive has been defragmented and checked for errors, multiple different sizes of page file have been tried and memtest shows no errors.

I really need this fixed as it's making the game unplayable for me, I don't appear to be the only one suffering from this either.

 

System Specifications

CPU: Intel I7 4790 3.6GHz

Mobo: Gigabyte H97M-D3H

GPU: EVGA nvidia geforce GTX 970 4GB

RAM: 16GB Corsair DDR3 XMS3 1600MHz

Game drive: WD Caviar Blue 1TB

System drive: Samsung 840 120GB SSD

PSU: Seasonic S12II-620 620W

[Dedmen 2714]

You could try profiling build and https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/diag_captureSlowFrame

Just set it to capture a frame with threshold at a couple seconds. Then after a freeze it should tell you exactly what the game was doing while it froze.

[Gunter Severloh 4065]

18 hours ago, Chryseus8 said:

RAM: 16GB Corsair DDR3 XMS3 1600MHz

Welcome to Bis forums!

Your ram is weak, 16gb is good but you want DDR4, and at least 3000 speed.

See this tech review of cpu, and ram with arma3

https://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-cpu-reviewed/11

[I'mJimFuckingSterlingSon 10]

Does this happen even in SP? 

 

I must agree with Gunter that it might be the low ram speeds but i would not expect this to happen in SP. 

 

Please elaborate

[scheintot2 12]

24 minutes ago, Gunter Severloh said:

Welcome to Bis forums!

Your ram is weak, 16gb is good but you want DDR4, and at least 3000 speed.

See this tech review of cpu, and ram with arma3

https://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-cpu-reviewed/11

 

I have an I5 4690K and 16GB DDR3 and no problems at all.

So it has nothing to do with DDR3 or the "speed". Megahertz is not even importent at all. Read about it and you will see that the difference between different mhz is not even an fps (and in case we are speaking about 1 fps at all) worth.

 

18 hours ago, Chryseus8 said:

So I've been having this problem for about 8 months now, with no resolution, the game freezes randomly about every 5-30 minutes at which point everything stops with no sound, after around 10 seconds it resumes as normal, background programs appear to freeze as well.
This occurs in single player and multiplayer without any mods, I've verified the install multiple times and have even done a complete reinstall, since this problem started I've also fully reinstalled Windows 10 three times and tried a whole range of nvidia drivers, I have no anti-virus installed (with exception of Windows defender), I'm not getting problems with any other game, the event log is clear.

More advanced scenarios seem to produce the freeze more often, for example in an extremely basic scenario it might happen every 20 minutes whilst in a complex scenario this might reduce to 5 minutes.

Here is a rpt file, I marked the location where it freezes on line 722, https://ghostbin.com/paste/koyyh

CPU and GPU temperatures have been checked, manually increasing the fan speed makes no change.

I've tried a wide variety of launch parameters to no effect.

Drive has been defragmented and checked for errors, multiple different sizes of page file have been tried and memtest shows no errors.

I really need this fixed as it's making the game unplayable for me, I don't appear to be the only one suffering from this either.

 

System Specifications

CPU: Intel I7 4790 3.6GHz

Mobo: Gigabyte H97M-D3H

GPU: EVGA nvidia geforce GTX 970 4GB

RAM: 16GB Corsair DDR3 XMS3 1600MHz

Game drive: WD Caviar Blue 1TB

System drive: Samsung 840 120GB SSD

PSU: Seasonic S12II-620 620W

 

I've got a GTX970 aswell and it doesn't do freezing but funnily I've had the same kind of problem a few days ago.

When I was hosting a server to play with a friend together it was freezing because of a script I've written for the mission and I've also experienced the same symptoms. Worth to mention: I've never tested if it realy was the script but every other mission goes well without errors or freezes. When I closed the game via task-manager I got the "unable to init dxgi" message. Probably you will get the same one. I believe it has something to do with Arma 3 specifically. I suspect one of the newer updates to be at fault because I've never seen this kind of behavior before. 

 

I will test my mission in the next days and try to detect the problem but like you have said, it is not a custom mission/script/addon/mod problem when you play vanilla version and SP - so my solution might me useless to you.

 

Suggestion: Have you ever tried to install Arma 3 on your SSD? Even for testing purposes only? I cannot realy believe it is the HDD when you say other games are doing just fine but I think it would be worth a try after all of your effort. Maybe Arma 3 is pushing your HDD harder than other games. Somehow.

[Dedmen 2714]

12 minutes ago, scheintot2 said:

Read about it and you will see that the difference between different mhz is not even an fps

That may be true for most games. But Arma is VERY memory speed dependent.

 

12 minutes ago, scheintot2 said:

it was freezing because of a script

That's also what I'm suspecting.

 

But speculating doesn't really help here if you can just actually test and find out what exactly is causing it.

 

12 minutes ago, scheintot2 said:

Maybe Arma 3 is pushing your HDD harder than other games. Somehow.

Yes Arma is also very disk speed dependent. Slow disk causes lag spikes. But not 10 second freezes every 5-30 minutes like was described here.

You can see disk-related lag spikes when you zoom in for example. Or look at something far away through binoculars.

[scheintot2 12]

6 minutes ago, Dedmen said:

That may be true for most games. But Arma is VERY memory speed dependent.

 

I've got 1600mhz DDR-3 and I cannot realy believe that. 

I'm also playing DCS World 2.5 and other simulations without problems regarding to my hardware.

 

 

6 minutes ago, Dedmen said:

 

But speculating doesn't really help here if you can just actually test and find out what exactly is causing it.

 

I did not just "speculate". I suspected several things to be at fault and I wrote a suggestion regarding HDD/SSD. After all I am trying to help this guy with his problem. Thats whats all about it here. Strange tone you have.

 

 

[scheintot2 12]

13 minutes ago, Dedmen said:

Yes Arma is also very disk speed dependent. Slow disk causes lag spikes. But not 10 second freezes every 5-30 minutes like was described here.

You can see disk-related lag spikes when you zoom in for example. Or look at something far away through binoculars.

I was referring to a damaged HDD.

[oldbear 390]

Hi, welcome

 

Well, from what I understand, those freeze events happen  when the rig is under a heavy load.

So as you have already tested many parts, I will suggest

- to look after all PSU to board connections  and to PSU to PCIe graphic card connectors.

- to try to use an other, more recent PSU, of course it's a Seasonic but even a Seasonic can fail *

 ... please use standard malloc and get rid of all those startup parameters.

Could you tell something about the Windows version you are using ?

 

* My own #2 "spare" gaming rig is running an i7 4790/GTX 670/16 GB DDR3 1866/MSI Z87-G43 combo, PSU is a new Seasonic, previous one having "exploded" ...

** Before working inside your rig disconnect the power cable from the back of the computer.

Edited June 6, 2018 by oldbear
being over cautious when tampering with electric devices

[Chryseus8 0]

9 hours ago, Dedmen said:

You could try profiling build and https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/diag_captureSlowFrame

Just set it to capture a frame with threshold at a couple seconds. Then after a freeze it should tell you exactly what the game was doing while it froze.

 

Thanks I'll give that a shot.

 

6 hours ago, scheintot2 said:

 

I have an I5 4690K and 16GB DDR3 and no problems at all.

So it has nothing to do with DDR3 or the "speed". Megahertz is not even importent at all. Read about it and you will see that the difference between different mhz is not even an fps (and in case we are speaking about 1 fps at all) worth.

 

 

I've got a GTX970 aswell and it doesn't do freezing but funnily I've had the same kind of problem a few days ago.

When I was hosting a server to play with a friend together it was freezing because of a script I've written for the mission and I've also experienced the same symptoms. Worth to mention: I've never tested if it realy was the script but every other mission goes well without errors or freezes. When I closed the game via task-manager I got the "unable to init dxgi" message. Probably you will get the same one. I believe it has something to do with Arma 3 specifically. I suspect one of the newer updates to be at fault because I've never seen this kind of behavior before. 

 

I will test my mission in the next days and try to detect the problem but like you have said, it is not a custom mission/script/addon/mod problem when you play vanilla version and SP - so my solution might me useless to you.

 

Suggestion: Have you ever tried to install Arma 3 on your SSD? Even for testing purposes only? I cannot realy believe it is the HDD when you say other games are doing just fine but I think it would be worth a try after all of your effort. Maybe Arma 3 is pushing your HDD harder than other games. Somehow.

 

Yeah I've tried it on SSD, it improves load times a decent bit but has no effect on the freezing.

 

5 hours ago, oldbear said:

Hi, welcome

 

Well, from what I understand, those freeze events happen  when the rig is under a heavy load.

So as you have already tested many parts, I will suggest

- to look after all PSU to board connections  and to PSU to PCIe graphic card connectors.

- to try to use an other, more recent PSU, of course it's a Seasonic but even a Seasonic can fail *

 ... please use standard malloc and get rid of all those startup parameters.

Could you tell something about the Windows version you are using ?

 

* My own #2 "spare" gaming rig is running an i7 4790/GTX 670/16 GB DDR3 1866/MSI Z87-G43 combo, PSU is a new Seasonic, previous one having "exploded" ...

** Before working inside your rig disconnect the power cable from the back of the computer.

 

I actually got the Seasonic PSU after my other one failed (a Corsair 600W), the freezing happened before and after so I doubt it's power related, I do have a spare Gigabyte Z97 motherboard which I might try if nothing else works.

I've tried it with no startup parameters nothing seems to have any effect on it.

I'm using Windows 10 pro 1709 build 16299.309 freshly installed about a month ago.

 

[socs 92]

7 hours ago, Gunter Severloh said:

Welcome to Bis forums!

Your ram is weak, 16gb is good but you want DDR4, and at least 3000 speed.

See this tech review of cpu, and ram with arma3

https://techreport.com/review/31179/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-cpu-reviewed/11

Actually, no offense im just pointing this out, I have an Nvidia geforce gtx 1050 8gb AND I run on a laptop and experience very little to no frame rate drops... I even run over 60 mods with no problems at all, so, to correct you, Id like to point out that his ram isn't weak lol... I also run 2.6ghz overclocked to 3.2, so it wouldnt be that either, carry on mate! :D

[oldbear 390]

Even if, you RAM seems OK, I hope you had already done a MemTest.

Then, switching to an other MoBo seems a more or less obvious next move if you can do it.

 

[Tankbuster 1746]

Wasn't there a thread ages ago with something very similar and it turned out to be an audio issue? Changing the sample size (or similar) fixed it eventually?

[Gunter Severloh 4065]

Like i said which no one seems to do is read the tech review i linked on cpu and ram, i could care less what anyone thinks whether 4gb or 8gb

of ram works for you or not.

I noticed a dramatic difference with my build for what i did and what i have, obviously the OP is dealing with something else that is

causing the freezing, you never know with arma3 and not everyone is running the same computer, so comparing a laptop or whatever else to what i have and getting

this or that result is futile, all i made is an observation.

[Chryseus8 0]

9 hours ago, oldbear said:

Even if, you RAM seems OK, I hope you had already done a MemTest.

Then, switching to an other MoBo seems a more or less obvious next move if you can do it.

 

 

Yep I've run memtest and it passed.

Might switch the mobo at the weekend if the profiling doesn't reveal anything.

 

8 hours ago, Tankbuster said:

Wasn't there a thread ages ago with something very similar and it turned out to be an audio issue? Changing the sample size (or similar) fixed it eventually?

 

Definitely worth a try, I have had games in the past that have had issues with audio settings.

It seems to be linked to object rendering or loading, standing still in an empty scenario I've not been able to get it to happen, while driving in to a large minefield for example it occurs quite often.

I'll try the profiling build today and see if I can get more information.

[oldbear 390]

Yes, I remember about the audio issue, but so far I have been unable to find it.

I will also suggest, even if it sounds a bit like a magic trick ... try to play with a new profile

[Chryseus8 0]

On 07/06/2018 at 7:00 PM, oldbear said:

Yes, I remember about the audio issue, but so far I have been unable to find it.

I will also suggest, even if it sounds a bit like a magic trick ... try to play with a new profile

 

I've tried disable the audio so that doesn't seem to be the issue.

A new profile is a good idea, my old one is quite old.

 

diag_captureSlowFrame is not working, as far as the game is concerned the freezing isn't happening which makes a hardware issue much more likely that the game itself being at fault.

Trouble is finding what it is, no other games exhibit this problem, I'm pretty much certain memory, PSU and hard drive are not at fault but I guess I'll check everything again.

 

Update

Making a new profile seems to have stopped the freezing entirely, played for about an hour without a single freeze, going to test some more but this may very well be the fix.

Another Update

It seemed to work at first but now it's back to freezing again.

[NigerJones 0]

Since this is only about a month ago I thought I would post here the solution that worked for me:

please try this and see if it works.. tldr: devs made a way to steal user data for reports or diagnosis, but they didnt even make it correctly.

[stanhope 411]

12 hours ago, NigerJones said:

tldr: devs made a way to steal user data for reports or diagnosis, but they didnt even make it correctly.

No they didn't.