Game performance is not satisfying

[-TwK-Danny 0]

Hello all, new player here

I´m a big OpFlash fan and absolutely love Armed Assault as a game, but i think that technically, its a disaster. Not just in terms of game-bugs (you have to admit, not being able to complete some missions are pretty big errors..) and performance in terms of frames per seconds are also awful.

What i´m here to post about is how some settings affect performance more than they 'should'. I have had as help my friends systems and my own (all pretty high-end ones) as help and they are as follows;

System1:

AMDX2 4400+

ASUS EAX1800XT TOP (TOP = 700/1600) 512mb

Corsair XMS 2gb T1

A8R-MVP

System2:

AMD FX62

eVga 8800GTX 768mb

2gb Corsair XMS

System3

AMDX2 4200+

7950GT 256mb

1gb RAM.

As you can tell this isn´t exactly what "everyone have" - this are above average performing systems, and these should be able to run a game as Armed Assault without any low fps.

On all three systems, we noticed severe performance loss when closing in to bushes/trees and i plan on demostrating the performance hit from various settings. Note that with the performance hit, also comes huge amounts of mouse lag that makes the game unplayable (in the way that the enemy AI can react/aim much faster than you = youre dead.)

The pictures i use to demostrate are all made in 1280X1024 resulotion (i have a LCD) and any lower makes things unsharp and my eyes hurt when playing at those resolutions.

My driver settings are all 'natural', not forcing anything (no af/aa/aaa/hqaf, catAI=standard).

To get started, i am first to show what settings me and my friends are playing with right now - that we found gives decent performance for our high end rigs;

Settings

Performance

Having 30fps is "ok", but not in any way optimal. Note that the 8800GTX was a little faster (2-3fps) but that aswell is not acceptable seeing the 8800GTX is the fastest GPU there is today. And dont forget that the game settings are not even close to max.

We have noticed that the three big settings that basicly kills performance (near foilage) are the following;

Shader Quality

Shadow Detail

"Anti Aliasing" (im going to question the method used)

The performance hit from each settings is huge, even by only going to "low" wich i am to demostrate now;

In following pics, settings in above screenshot is used, but with the two other settings disabled/lowest. Eg. for Shaderquality pics comparisons - shadow and anti aliasing are disabled.

Shader Quality:

Very low

low

high

Comments: The performance hit seems pretty fair, losing 10fps going from very low to high. This setting seems to control the amount of grass/bush shown, as well as activating normalmapping on textures futher away. But keep in mind that this is without any shadows nor any antialiasing - and we´ve already reached 30fps - lowest we can have for a playable experience.

Shadow Detail:

Disabled

Low and Medium (performance is the very same)

High and Very High (performance is the very same)

Comments: Shadows reduce fps quite alot. This quite common in most games. But with the High and Very High settings, performance is no where to be seen. We dive into extremly unplayable fps, even with high-end hardware like mine. So whats the diffrence between medium and high? I see the shadows on ground are now softshadows, instead of regular shadows on medium setting. But we have had softshadows in game (e.g. oblivion) without this kind of performance hit before. So its either very badly optimzed softshadows or the engine simply cant handle these. But i also noticed that bushes and grass - ever leaf and grass straw seems to be affected by shadows on high/very high. Could this be the cause of the low fps?

If that is the case, i would very much be happy if the devs would consider removing that for the "high" setting. Softshadows are so much nicer than the hard ones, and in games like Oblivion these are possible with 35fps+ with the rest of settings maxed, 1280X1024 HDR+4xAA/16xAF.

Possible solution for low fps: Remove grass/leaf shadows (per-pixel-lightning?) for the high setting but keep it only for VeryHigh. Or else two settings are basicly both unusable on todays hardware.

"Anti alisasing":

I am not really sure what sort of AA this is. Basicly im questioning if it really is proper AA. We all know 7X00-series of cards cannot do HDR+AA. Yet it works with ArmA. Disabling AA ingame and forcing AA from driver (both ATi and Nvidia) does nothing to the game.

Regular AA usually leaves grass/trees aliased (unless you are using AdaptiveAA). Meaning you usually dont have to deal with major mouse lag as soon as you close into loads of vegetation. This doesnt seem to be the case with ArmAs method of AA. I understand that this method is better in the way that it works for ALL graphics cards, but the performance hit is just too much. Therefore i request the abillity to use proper AA along with the HDR ingame - for X1x00/8x00 cards. We need the performance hit in areas with foilage.

And here is to show the hit of using these 3 settings together;

Shaderquality+Shadowquality+antialiasing

Normal+Normal+Disabled (combo i use for playable performance): http://img120.imageshack.us/img120/224/arma2007030120285796ek9.jpg

Normal+Normal+Normal: http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/5291/arma2007030120293034gl6.jpg

VeryHigh+VeryHigh+Low: http://img329.imageshack.us/img329/407/arma2007030120301225nf3.jpg

Possible solution: Let the cards able to do it force AA from within the drivers and possibly get better performing AA.

All in all, it comes to the fact that ArmA seems to be the most demanding game out there - but doesnt live up to that when it comes to visuals. ArmA looks nice- no doubt about that - but it should NOT perform 50% of what Oblivin does, and that with oblivion played with higher settings (4xAA/16xHQAF against none at all in ArmA). The game has such a huge potenial and i would hate it if the performance never was improved.. i dont think its sensible to require two 8800GTXs to run these three settings together at "medium".

I´d love a comment from any dev about performance and if it is to be improved with patches (judging the fact that there isnt a single sole that doesnt complain about perfrmance - its a must).

Thanks for reading,

Danny

[OIK 0]

good work my friend good work.

I hope they listen and do everything they can to optimize.

[Tracer 0]

Hi quick reply;

Quote[/b] ]"Anti alisasing":

I am not really sure what sort of AA this is. Basicly im questioning if it really is proper AA. We all know 7X00-series of cards cannot do HDR+AA. Yet it works with ArmA. Disabling AA ingame and forcing AA from driver (both ATi and Nvidia) does nothing to the game.

It uses 8bit to allow me (7800GT owner) to use HDR and AA

Go into 'your docs/ArmA and open the ArmA.config file and you will see

language="English";

adapter=-1;

3D_Performance=8721.000000;

Resolution_W=1280;

Resolution_H=1024;

Resolution_Bpp=32;

refresh=75;

FSAA=3;

HDRPrecision=8; Change the 8 to 16 switches off AA in the game options and you get a truer Oblivion HDR experience (if that's the word?

lastDeviceId="4318,146,0";

localVRAM=258793216;

nonlocalVRAM=394264575;

[Pedroshin 0]

Nicely done! I am also dissatisfied of the performance of this game, and I've always been a huge OFP fan.

I have:

2 7800GT 256 MB in SLI;

AMD X2 4400+;

2GB of RAM;

Hitachi HDT722525DLA380 250GB (30GB Partition for OS and OS-related Programs and the 2nd 220GB Partition for everything else);

SAMSUNG SP1213C 120GB for storage;

GA-K8NXP-SLI Nforce 4. Supports SATA II.

Running the game between Normal to Very High + 1280x1024x32 @ 75Hz (View distance 1200, Shadows Low, AA and AF disabled) causes FPS to dip as low as 25 FPS in most of places, 20 FPS near cities, 15 FPS inside cities and 10 FPS in vegetation areas. It only barely touches 40-35 FPS when I'm looking at the sky in an open field...

It's funny that I still can only get an average of 26-42 FPS with 640x480x32 @ 75Hz+ ALL Very Low or Disabled + Distance view 500. This means graphics MUCH worse than OFP.

Might I just as well add that I ran OFP with an average of 40-80 FPS with 1024x768x32 + All Very High or Enabled + Distance view 3000 with my old ATI 9800 XT 256MB and Intel P4 3.2GHz.

Tried everything for my Nvidia cards and Dual core processor.

I'm using 92.91 drivers. They are the best all-round drivers for me in most games. 93.71 gave me some problems with a couple of games.

I still have some hope that Nvidia and/or Bohemia Interactive will address ArmA's issues, including SLI issues, in the next official driver release, which is taking some bloody long time to be released (latest driver was released about 4 months ago). They seem to be only focusing on 8800 and Vista drivers lately...

[-TwK-Danny 0]

I tried setting HDR to 16 and only notced reduced performance, with a much thicker fog close to me (=reduced draw distance). I could still enable AA though (might be that the game recognise my X1800).

Pedroshin:

I hear you, this game needs to have its performance imrpoved - and by alot. To get the job done, you simply need to be able to aim faster than the AI - that is impossible with mouselag that mainly is due to low fps/performance.