ARMA demo and memory utilization

[NeMeSiS 11]

Quote[/b] ]It will not run at the same FPS as BF2, and that's fine. It does a thousand times more than BF2 does in any given second, with AI, practically unlimited terrain, scripting, and all the other things that make this engine unique.

Quite simply, no it doesn't.  I'm glad it runs well for you, I never said it didn't run well for me.  I said the game is bottlenecked by streaming from the hard drive rather than loading textures/files into system memory/vid mem sub system.  I have also said that the game is not well coded for the pc.  

HDs do not limit the perfomance, i dont want to see this discussion ever again.

Quote[/b] ]Graphically,there are no surprises.  The visual hit damage effect to vehicles is poor.  After a vehicle gets hit with a rocket, it catches on fire, smokes a bit, then after the smoke routine programming has run, the vehicle looks like it did before it got hit.  Undamaged.  I would expect that the vehicle should look like a wreck, not undamaged.

Mine look burned out..?

Quote[/b] ]Or, since that vehicle was "killed" I would expect it to disappear off the map after a bit like the dead bodies do in any first person shooter.

This is up to the mission editor (and is easily done by

deletevehicle vehiclename

)

Quote[/b] ]would buy the Xbox version because that is what this game was optimized for.  This game should look and play incredibly on that platform.

BIS never said anything about an xbox version, and after OFP:E i doubt that they will make another game for a console

Quote[/b] ]One thing that has bothered me about this forum, is that a few posters keep blaming the end user or end user hard ware for poor game performance.  It's laughable since the hardware is generally high end stuff.

Well it does run fine on other PCs with similiar (or excactly the same) specs, so its much easier to point at someones PC then at the game in such a case, however i think that there are some game/driver conflicts going on because there are quite a few people reporting the same bugs, while other people have no problems whatsoever.

EDIT: Ok you people just dont seem to get the point..

The engine is based on the OFPE (xbox) engine (which was based on the CWC engine), the xbox only has 64mb ram, so BIS had to optimize the game so much that it would use as few RAM as possible (CWC:res had 128mb ram as minimum specs IIRC), all these optimizations are still in ArmA, so the game only loads the stuff into the memery it really needs, so only the parts of the map around the player, etc etc. However, this does NOT mean that it loads everything constantly from the HD, hell, even when flying around the island any HD can easily load the needed parts of the island from the HD to the ram without any significant performance drop.

[Straw Dog 0]

Thank you XBOX for giving us pc gamers such joy playing ported crap. I wonder how long it takes before pc market is dead. Hmm...i smell a conspiracy; "Keep handing the plebians ported crap til they buy a console! Mwuahahaa!".

Other great titles with similar community discussions:

Splinter Cell: Double Agent

Rainbow Six: Vegas

...and much more...

Stop this porting madness now. Really.

[Bunks 0]

Opforum, know one really knows what is going on with the game which is part of the problem. Suma says its highly unlikely but then why my system perfomance jumped thru the roof after installing a new HD is a mystery of sorts (but a nice one)

Here are my facts: no opinions added

2.8 533fsb

2gigs pc3200 ram

x850xt

ultra ata HD defragged

original 5110 demo build

800 x 600 (all very low setting or disabled)

23 fps max

20 avg

5-7 in town

CPU OC to 3.1

24 fps max

21 avg

5-7 in town

CPU OC 3.1

GPU OC 15% core 5% mem

24 fps max

21 avg

5-7 town

Reformatted Ultra ATA HD 2.8 cpu, stock Vid card speeds

28 fps max

22 avg

5-7 town

Reformatted Ultra HD 3.1 CPU, stock Vid Card speeds

30 fps max

23 avg

10-15 town

New SATA Raptor HD ,stock vid card, new 5116 demo build

2.8 CPU stock vid card speed

Best performance now is at 1024 X 768 and I don't know why? (settings on low, AF Very High, AA high)

43fps max

26 avg

15-20 town

Now here's the amazing part, look at OCing now

Same as above except for OC

3.1 CPU, stock vid card

55 max

29 avg

20-25 town

This was tested on a standard demo map, done multiple times for the exact same amount of time and positions to the best of my ability with a frame counter. Maybe your right the HD is not the key, but logic tells me its related somehow to at least my perfomance problem. I also noticed that using a non-partitioned HD allowed OCing to impact performance as much as the new SATA HD. No conclusions from me, just the outcomes to what i did.

[NeMeSiS 11]

Stop this porting madness now. Really.

...

Ill just act like i never read that

Quote[/b] ]This was tested on a standard demo map, done multiple times for the exact same amount of time and positions to the best of my ability with a frame counter. Maybe your right the HD is not the key, but logic tells me its related somehow to at least my perfomance problem. I also noticed that using a non-partitioned HD allowed OCing to impact performance as much as the new SATA HD. No conclusions from me, just the outcomes to what i did.

Dont know, you are the first to do some real testing into this. It still doesnt make sence to me, but ive got an old ATA HD lying around somewhere, ill see what happens when i install ArmA on that thing.

[Bunks 0]

Keep in mind the 2nd increase I noticed was when i reformatted the ATA HD by using Killdisk and removed the partition I had on it. This was the 1st time I saw a difference in game play especially around towns and forests.

[suma 8]

Opforum, know one really knows what is going on with the game which is part of the problem. Suma says its highly unlikely but then why my system perfomance jumped thru the roof after installing a new HD is a mystery of sorts (but a nice one)

Here are my facts: no opinions added

original 5110 demo build

23 fps max

20 avg

5-7 in town

...

New SATA Raptor HD ,stock vid card, new 5116 demo build

2.8 CPU stock vid card speed

43fps max

26 avg

15-20 town

The explanation of this "mystery" is easy (fortunately you wrote a very detailed "experiment diary" - really well done, makes analysis much easier) - the 5116 build is much better optimized than the 5110 one. If interested, you can find detailed explanation of what was wrong with 5110 in Server performance topic.

[sailindawg 0]

Suma, I'm not trying to give you a hard time. Quite honestly, I really like the coop mission on the demo. I really like that style of game play. I'm glad to see that my thread has not been shut down or locked. I have not been trying to be critical of ARMA/BIS or put ARMA/BIS in a bad light.

I have also seen an improvement in ARMA performance when I uninstalled it from the IDE RAID and put it onto my SATA drive. My performance improvement was similar to Banks's experience. Like Bank's, I lowered the resolution down to 1024x768. My fps are similar to what Bank's has explained for the coop mission.

I tried to use Armamark, but I only have the demo. Armamark could not be run by way of the demo because there is no mission folder or mission option in the demo folder tree. I would like to be of help to you and your team make this game play less buggy.

Can you suggest a more formalized manner to report results to you, so that you may get a better indication of end user game play performance?

Thank you for your consideration.

[Bunks 0]

Suma, thanks for the reply as any feedback is greatly appreciated. Hope you understand I wasn't trying to make a point one way or the other, just trying to get to the bottom of things.

One thing though, I do believe the new build was mainly responsible for the improved game play. Good job on that fix BTW. You made me one very happy camper But the modest boost I saw in performance after I reformatted my HD with the 5110 build still left some questions in my mind since it did show an improvement where nothing else did. Which is why I just kept doing tests after I got the new HD. I must admit I did get lazy not doing a 5110 install on the new Sata drive to rule out the demo changes, but I went on an assumption when Rg7621 (who has nearly the same specs as me) reported that he saw only a small increase after the new build, yet I saw dramatic differences. Because now I get nearly 10 FPS more than he does where as before we were about the same. But I guess I was just being lazy. Sorry bout that.

So after all that, I can safely say with absolute authority that I am still clueless But I am a much happier idiot with the new build. ANd the new HD will go right into my new Core 2 Build so no loss there either