horible memory usage

[Deadfast 43]

I've got a feeling, that it got something to do with LODs.

The LODs itself are lagging and each LOD need its own texture.

*EDIT*

Good night .

[NeMeSiS 11]

Well, some other people reported the same thing (not everyone though, so its not an engine 'feature', probably a conflict between the hardware/driver and the game, only seen it on higher-end nvidia cards), its a bug and AFAIK there is no fix yet, putting your texture on medium (or lower) should help a bit but its probably no long-term solution.

Just hope that BIS patches this.

The problem is NOT your hardware like some here say, alot of people run the game fine on high with similiar specs. (it runs quite nice on my amd x2 4200+, 1,5gb ram, x1600XT 256mb (15-25FPS in cities on high settings, but i get overheating problems on those settings after a while because my stuff is overclocked quite a bit)

[slingblade20000 0]

I wonder if that why Dedicated servers arent working because there not setup to correctly stream info to each of the clients and that it lags out.

[wex-q 0]

p.s. my friend from Poland has 16 MB cache, fast 10000 rpm HD

Keep in mind that Raptor drives only transfers half the speed of what standard SATA-drives does...

[fubarno1 0]

The problem appears when the card runs out of memory.

I would have to disagree I don't think it is an issue with the cards running out of memory, I'm more inclined to think that it is a nvidia driver issue or something in the game not being managed right by the engine, I have a 7950 GTX2 (1 Gig of video memory) and I suffer with problems like this after about 45 min, sometimes it can be sooner.

Its just seems strange how some computers are not effected by this yet others are, all to varying degrees of severity.

Clean install of XP all drivers are current including BIOS

Settings

Terrain Detail: Normal

Objects: High

Texture Detail: Normal

Shading: low

Post Effect: High

Anisotropic Filter: Normal

Shadow Detail: Normal

Antialiasing: Normal

Blood: Low

1280 x 1024 x 32

[Deadfast 43]

Like I said - the LODs are somehow f*cked up.

Once I got a major lag - it took 5 minutes to load detailed LOD of factory building.

I've managed to get in ('cos the black spot were really doors ) and there was no interier.

I was walking inside and I couldn't see a single wall .

BTW: And I thought: "Gonna get myself GF 7800 and everything gonna be cool"

[Abbe 0]

...at least you guys can *play* for 40 min...

I get a CTD more often then that on a bad day

P4 3GHz

1.5Gig RAM

X1950Pro 512M

...and yes, I keep my computer tidy...

/Abbe

[whisper 0]

i have textures to high, but all now on low and problem is still (now i test my mission)

shadows on low, antialiasing, anisotrophy on low

but playing on low textures has no sense, than soldiers, trees look horible , worse than on OFP

Well, tried "Normal" textures? I have a 256M GC, and on normal it runs quite great, with a few times this "lag of texture" bug, but never to the extent seen in the video above.

"Remove unused textures"? Well, if this texture is reloaded 2 seconds after becuase you turn again facing this very texture, it's useless to unload it. It's called caching, and it saves your GC bandwidth, which would probably be overloaded without this textures kept in memory.

All this because you play with "high" textures.

You know, playing with normal textures is not a shame. Even you can do it. It could even permit you to up some other parameters.

BTW, everything else on low doesn't impact you GC RAM, or less than texture detail anyway. So it's not really a tradeoff

[BraTTy 0]

I played Arma for hours on my laptop (XP 4000+ cpu,1 gig ddr,x600 256meg video)

Nothing got worse and no reboots necessary

Something with your computer or latest patch (i think I am still 1.01)

[Väinämöinen 0]

Keep in mind that Raptor drives only transfers half the speed of what standard SATA-drives does...

What the he...  Raptor is the fastest SATA drive in market...

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/WD1500ADFD_3.html

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=230

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006....e8.html

Now single Raptor is almost as fast as two standard SATA150 drives in RAID-0 and faster than any single SATA300 drive.

I own 2 x Raptor WD1500ADFD SATA drives in RAID-0 and have x1950xtx with 512 megabytes of vram. Textures still dont load as fast as they should.

ArmaMark left me without textures in many scenes...only by dropping Texture Quality below Normal they loaded but not as fast as they should have.

Each scene was full of stuttering caused by loading textures...

[slingblade20000 0]

Question for Suma or somebody else that knows is Armed Assault using Microsoft's Advanced Streaming Format (ASF)?

[vilas 477]

so if this won't work with NVidia than this is s***

[slingblade20000 0]

Nvidia Cards isnt the issue, i have one and its works fine

[lethal 0]

This game was written for the Xbox, where the game is streamed from the optical drive. Porting this method directly to a pc is simply not the most efficient way to do things. Streaming the game from the hard drive sub system guarantees non-optimal performance and low fps. Some might say that the game is "hard drive thrashing", or excessively reading/writing to the hard drive. But the game is written this way. The game is not optimized to utilize the increased bandwidth of the system memory subsystem or the pci graphics subsystem.

huh? since when is the speed of an optical drive superior to that of a harddrive??? and are you aware that optical drives are connected in the same way as hdds? (well except if you have a combination of sata/ide/scsi, but even then i think it all goes through one pipe at the very end i think) plus i *seriously* doubt that there's no caching and/or prefetching involved... guess where a lot of that memory usage comes from

Question for Suma or somebody else that knows is Armed Assault using Microsoft's Advanced Streaming Format (ASF)?

Did you mean this? ? Thats only for video/audio

[vilas 477]

so what is the problem

there are people who have quite fast compuers as me

people who have cosmic super computers as this man with 7950 GTX 1 GB VGA RAM

maybe it is problem of RAM that i wrote

as i wrote before - in Poland MIG25_Radek made test using special software, at the begining game was eating some RAM after long time it took whole RAM

can you remember comparision between German and Czech vesrions ?

Czech was working good, but German one was sloooow as snail

so the problem is engine, game was released to far, maybe it should be released on March not on December

game look beatifully for 20 minutes, after some time shadow appears under vehicles, after some time low quality textures on buildings, after some time no textures

such problem with OFP, COD2, DOOM doesn't exist

if it was card memory it would be working badly in FFUR

[slingblade20000 0]

lethal i think its was a typo, Hard Drive is what he meant not optical drive

It can also stream textures/sound for games to answer your question lethal i believe as well

[vilas 477]

ARMA texture problem is when :

turn on map, turn off map and back to game

turn on map , turn off,

switch back again to map, switch to game

wheels became square, no texture on buildings

so probably textures are loaded each time without cleaning from memory previous

and somebody asked if there are different textures to different LODs

probably no

as i saw making addons - one big texture for whole LODs

i haven't seen smaller textures for far LODs

[lethal 0]

so what is the problem

there are people who have quite fast compuers as me

people who have cosmic super computers as this man with 7950 GTX 1 GB VGA RAM

maybe it is problem of RAM that i wrote

as i wrote before - in Poland MIG25_Radek made test using special software, at the begining game was eating some RAM after long time it took whole RAM

can you remember comparision between German and Czech vesrions ?

Czech was working good, but German one was sloooow as snail

so the problem is engine, game was released to far, maybe it should be released on March not on December

game look beatifully for 20 minutes, after some time shadow appears under vehicles, after some time low quality textures on buildings, after some time no textures

such problem with OFP, COD2, DOOM doesn't exist

if it was card memory it would be working badly in FFUR

i have experienced this issue before, too, just not as severe as you describe it. first of all my specs:

x2 3.8

2048mb ram

x1900 (crossfire ed.) (only one card atm)

winxp pro sp2

audigy 2

just a short while ago i had a x1600xt which was simply not enough to run arma @1280x1024 so i upgraded. it *could* run the game with very high textures and acceptable framerates (if the shader detail was turned way down) but i would, after a while, experience severe lod and texture issues. that card only had 256mb of vram which i think was the problem and that confirmed my decision to upgrade.

the x1900 now has 512mb of vram and I rarely see a texture/lod error and if i do see one it usually clears up right away. that if while running the game @1280x1024 and highest texture detail of course (texture detail doesn't seem to make a difference anymore).

i also think that 'armamark' is flawed in the way those scenes are designed. it should allow the engine to cache every used asset before running the tests and not jump from one to the next resulting in the game having to catch up while it performs its tests.

armas engine isn't designed for those rapid cuts and scene changes. with every scene it has to load a whole new texture set whereas ingame you have a smooth transition from one set of textures to the next over a period of time allowing the game to 'stream' the content into memory.

this is also the reason why such a problem does not exist with the games you mentioned vilas. those games don't 'stream' their gameworld on-the-fly but load it all before putting the player in the world. or at least all the main assets...

but why some people experience barely or no such issues while others have huge problems like this i can't say. as with every troubleshooting question, there are inumerable(sp) possible culprits

[slingblade20000 0]

If you look at the link here you can see the huge difference in Mb bandwidth in there interface performance test and you can see the wide range there is that would effect textures loading from the hard drive.

Tom Hardware hard drive test

[lethal 0]

yes - and also look at the other tests performed. especially random access time altough i highly doubt that hdd access time / speed is what people are having trouble with. i don't have a high-end drive by any means (seagate barracuda 7200.10 320gb sata) and i'm having almost no problem with this... additionally if file access was the problem it should be directly apparent when you're in the game and not only after 20 minutes, shouldn't it?

[vilas 477]

localVRAM=319815680;

nonlocalVRAM=319815680;

this i found in arma.cfg

but my MSI 7900 card has 256 MB ?

so the game see 60 MB VRAM extra ?

maybe it tries to use this 60 MB which not exist ?

changing paramterer gives nothing

just like changing HDRprecision to 0

after end of game, all parameters back to HDR=8

and vram =320 MB

[Deadfast 43]

It may be HDD access time, but even my old SATA 7200 rpm shouldn't be loading single stupid texture for 5 minutes !

There gotta be problem with engine, as I've never experienced it wit any other game.

[lethal 0]

localVRAM=319815680;

nonlocalVRAM=319815680;

this i found in arma.cfg

but my MSI 7900 card has 256 MB ?

so the game see 60 MB VRAM extra ?

maybe it tries to use this 60 MB which not exist ?

changing paramterer gives nothing

just like changing HDRprecision to 0

after end of game, all parameters back to HDR=8

and vram =320 MB

just a shot in the dark, but try putting the file on real-only.

but seriously - with your specs (which are better than mine before i upgraded) you shouldn't have such problems. the must be something wrong either in your system or in the game. i know it sucks but have you tried a clean installation of windows? with only essential programs and drivers installed? are you using any anti-virus? if so which one? (although that would increase overall access time and not long term degradation...)

try monitoring what runs in the background. Process Explorer if a neat utility for that. it shows things the standard Taskmanager misses... they have quite a lot of useful tools for system maintenance(sp?) on SysInternals btw

[vilas 477]

language="English"; (although game is in Polish)

adapter=-1;

3D_Performance=7389.000000;

FSAA=1;

HDRPrecision=8; (i am trying to turn it off but no efect)

lastDeviceId="4318,658,107091042";

localVRAM=319815680; (i have 256)

nonlocalVRAM=319815680; (what is it ?)

i use many freeware software, open office, avg, anitvira, legal norton internet security (off when i play)

clean install ?

format once again?

oh god this game sucks more every minute

i have a lot of work, documents, personalizations, etc. format is wasted day ! i don't have so much free time, work, family , shoping, cooking, etc.

system was new all was new

read my previous posts

i bought completly new computer

i set up new system XP SP2 , system FAT32

all was clean installation in december

[lethal 0]

language="English";

adapter=-1;

3D_Performance=7389.000000;

FSAA=1;

HDRPrecision=8;

lastDeviceId="4318,658,107091042";

localVRAM=319815680;

nonlocalVRAM=319815680;

i use many freeware software

clean install ?

format once again?

oh god this game sucks more every minute

i have a lot of work, documents, personalizations, etc. format is wasted two days ! i don't have so much free time, work, family , shoping, cooking, etc.

system was new all was new

read my previous posts

i bought completly new computer

i set up new system XP SP2

all was clean installation in december

well in that case i don't think a clean install will do much good. although i find the performance amazing everytime i witness a clean windows install

did you try setting the file on read-only? did it change anything? (i doubt it...)

i feel your pain but such things either take time (in case of bad software/install etc.) or money (in case of broken equipment)

your best bet st to wait a while for either a patch or a solution/workaround to be found imho.

which arma version are you using btw? polish? if that is the case are there any polish players out there with the game working flawlessly? maybe they got a similar issue as the german version had on launch?

here are the values for my 512mb x1900 card btw:

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">adapter=-1;

3D_Performance=7389.000000;

HDRPrecision=8;

localVRAM=379584512;

nonlocalVRAM=379584512;