1.05 Causes performance Hits.

[EricM 0]

@MamiyaOtaru : Your tests are quite instructive. Thank you. There should be more documented posts like yours.

At least you can identify one posible and justifiable cause of fps drop between 1.04 and 1.05.

There is still an increase over 1.02 in most cases, right ?

[SlurrpyChillyFries 0]

i took a decent hit, used to be able to run the game at 1920x? now i have had to drop down to 1680X? and its on the edge of playability.

i have to lie to myself to get the placebo effect because i paid too much money for hardware that runs in 16:10 ratio and im not giving that up.

asus nvidia 8800 gts.

dual core amd 3800 (939)

2 gigs of ram, no page file

1.02 ran much better than this patch. ill try to get framerates tonight if the wife will let me on the pc.

btw, what are these light bulbs next to our names, mine turned on and i have no idea why? can i turn it off by saying some stupid stuff on one of these threads? is that how they work?

[vilas 477]

as someone wrote to me ironically "why does it always user fault ?"

so i repeat it here, what all is user fault ?

why we should use "normal" or "low" texture options ?

game in low options look bad

in high looks good - and that is the only option to enjoy game

if so many people have problems - don't deny it just try to fix it

ver. 1.02 PL was loosing textures, LODs after 30 minutes of few alt+tabs

now it has so much lag that i don't play ARMA

on 1.02 i could play easy for 30 minutes

now i simply don't play :/

i wish performance back to 1.02 as before patching

[Xsi9mmTW 0]

I have a crappy computer compared to todays standards i have about 512mb of ram A radeon 9800 pro and a pentium 4 with 30 gig of space. I was running ArmA 1.02 perfectly fine, But now that i have updated my game runs extremely slowly and the only satisfaction i get out of it is making missions but i cant even test me missions so its really pissing me off. I really would like an offical to take notice of this and fix the problem because its probably happening to alot of us old ofp fans that are trying to play arma. So please get on this i really enjoy playing ArmA and i would like to continue to play without buying a whole other machine yet. I also could play 30 minutes of ArmA game play perfectly fine before the 1.05 patch like Vilas

[weegee_101 0]

Maruk,

Since you need more information from us, here you go.

For Reference, my specs, even though I've already posted them:

Core 2 Duo E6300

XFX GeForce 7600GT

1 GB of DDR2-667 RAM

Windows Vista Business

I'm using the 505 UK/Euro release of ArmA.

My settings:

1152x864x32 @ 75 Hz and 16:10 ratio

Terrain Detail: Low

Objects: Normal

Texture: Normal

Shading: Low

PostProcessing: Low

AF: Low

Shadow: Low

AA: Low

Blood: Low

My Performance under 1.04:

25-50 FPS in the Intro/Menus

Usually 22-40 in game. Average: 25 Absolute Minimum: 18

Sound is very responsive

Scope/ACOG is 18-30 averaging around 22

NEVER drops below 18 FPS

My Performance under 1.05:

15-40 in the Intro/Menus

Usually 15-25 in game. Average: 18 Absolute Minimum: 5

Sound lags. It lags terribly!

Scope/ACOG is unusable. 7-18 FPS averaging at 10. Drops to a minimum of 6 when firing.

The FPS is not stable. As I play, it jumps up and down from single digits back up to the teens. Continuing to play, it gets worse over time.

Its not much of a loss for me, but its enough that the game is unplayable in 1.05. I also experienced some loading issues after playing the game for more than 15 minutes. As I would approach buildings, their distant LOD model would remain loaded, and would take a moment to load itself. As I would continue to play this would get worse over time, almost as if the game isn't dropping unnecessary resources out of graphics RAM. If you require it, I might be able to make a Fraps video of the phenomena if it doesn't kill my framerate too much .

[xmongx 0]

Yeah the "use a lower texture resolution" suggestion got my back up too.

It doesnt really matter what texture resolution you choose performance still degrades over time.

My opinion is that textures arent being discarded properly and are being reloaded. Alt-Tabbing flushes the memory and youre good for another 5 mins.

It does eventually get to the point where alt-tabbing has no effect, is this is maybe due to the page file becoming full?

If you try to lower texture resolution after encountering missisng textures the engine goes crazy and loads NO textures. I ran around a totally grey masbete last night. Quite funny in a sad way...try it, you'll see what i mean, you have to do it at the point that alt-tabbing makes no difference

Its not likely to be a hardware/settings issue.

I did not have the problem on 1.04 but since 1.05 i have had frame rate problems which ive had to alleviate by lowering settings and am now getting missing textures (with lower texture resolution settings than 1.04)

I would have preffered the patch to have been delayed further and this problem sidestepped.

Im totally bemused at the fact that the game runs worse that it did before the patch, the performance has been the games downfall since release and i think it should be the focus of dev efforts. To be honest id rather be able to play the game for a reasonable amount of time than have a slightly lower chance of being hit by AI when im cowering in the grass

[snkman 351]

Well pretty good to hear something from the official side finally.

Next time something like this happend's BIS should just add a Thread with a few word's what's wrong and make it Sticky till the Problem is sloved.

So we can save most of the 1000 thread's in the Forum's General and troubleshooting.

[HeinBloed 0]

My specs:

AMD 3700+ 2200MHz @ 2860MHz.

8800gts 640MB (500MHz/800MHz @ 600MHz/900MHz)

2 GB RAM

All settings = normal. Except: postprozess = low, shadows = disabled. 1280x1024@75Hz.

I also did some tests with testmissions with fixed positions, fixed directions of my view and without any units.

I got a FPS increase and decrease. Depending on the situation:

1.02   1.05   change

58      52     -10%

56      50     -11%

42      44     +5%

28      35     +25%

22      28     +27%

There is a similarity to my grafic card upgrade from 7800gt to 8800gts.

On situations with highest FPS the new grafic card increased the FPS about 30%.

On situations with lowest FPS the new grafic card increased the FPS about 140%.

[bionic 10]

Quote[/b] ]as someone wrote to me ironically "why does it always user fault ?"

so i repeat it here, what all is user fault ?

why we should use "normal" or "low" texture options ?

game in low options look bad

in high looks good - and that is the only option to enjoy game

100% agree i got a 8800GTS so i don´t know why i should reduce my texture detail. I also ask me what are those Betatesters doing all the day what Systems are they using? This Problems must also be there for the testers didn´t they adressed this issue?

If so what was BIS saying to this Problem next time please choose some people with up to date hardware to test ArmA.

For me it is less a Problem to have have some stupid AI running around then not be able to play the game at all.

Oh and by the way using -maxmem=512 doesn´t work correct on Vista or am I wrong. When the texture problems start and i try alt-tabbing it brings nothing and when i have a look at the taskmanager ArmA is using up to 1GB of my Ram which ends in a CTD in the next few minutes. Also chaning AA ends sometimes in a CTD.

What happens when i try to reduce textur quality can be seen here in this thread i have added some images which shows the missery.

Link

I know there are alot of bugs which should be fixed but i think the major goal should be to make the game playable for all users. At the moment i don´t care much about how to steer the bikes or commander zoom.... in first place i want to play the game. 1.02 was much more stable than 1.05 not saying it didn´t crashed but it was better.

Greets

[r2101 0]

hmmm...to add a bit to the confusion...

1.05 works like a dream

specs:

pentium d 3 ghz

2 gb ram

ati 1900gt

onboard sound

so far 1.05 works best for me

... no sounderrors (better than opf infact... where i would "loose" my feet sometimes *lol*)!

the new lod "fading" works perfect... no texture errors, no sudden pop ups.. etc...

ingame settings:

terrain detail: very low

object detail: very high

shading: very high

postprocess: low

af: very high

aa: normal

shadow detail: very high

texture detail: low

game looks beautiful... don´t care about the grass (and well that is the only thing which really drags fps down on my system)... difference between low and normal or high textures isn´t that obvious (at least to me)... it´s good with normal textures aswell but even better with low textures...only visible difference is with very low... (which is a bit yuck indeed *lol*)

even postprocessing is playable... but i prefer some additional fps

oh ...resolution is 1024x768... i don´t use any maxmen switches

ati thingie is all set on "let the application handle it"...

very happy customer right now...

p.s. nope...i am not a fanboy. infact i shelved armed assault... after the first patch or so...

just got curious about the 1.05 update patch, and thought...well lets give it a try... and woooh!!! nice!!!

"felt" performance is on par with opf in reasonable sized scenarios...e.g. 3-5 squads for each side, couple of support units (armor, soft skinned vehicles, a chopper or two)...

must be a nightmare to patch with all those different results so far?!

[xmongx 0]

Yeah.

The fact you dont have grass is key i think, but why does the new grass layer cause the LOD/Missing textures.

If its not down to bad texture handling and is down purely to GFX memory (i dont think this is the case as 8800 640MBs are reporting the problem) does this new grass layer use so much memory?

[Possessed 0]

You have an ATI card and low texture settings. Makes sense. Have you tried to fill up your GFX memory? Go riding on sunny Sahrani for... half an hour

BTW I made more testing with "high" textures and postprocessing off. FPS is ok but graphics memory still fills up, now only slower than before. Then fps starts to decrease and textures start to show up with horrible lag.

[vilas 477]

somebody told that he don't see difference between low and high texture details - well i see

of course i can give more screens - but it is nonsense, just tae a look at flag on arm or tank

this image is compressed jpg so on "raw" image difference is bigger

when options are on "low" trees look bad

[lee_h._oswald 0]

Ok, ArmA runs ok here with 1.05.

I will try to tell you as much as possible about my settings.

---

Computer:

- MB: Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe (939)

- CPU AMD Athlon 64 3800+(2400) @2900MHz

- RAM: 2x Kingston 1024MB DDR(1) PC400

- VGA: NVidia GF8800GTS 640MB

- SND: Creative SB Audigy 2

- HDD: 2x Samsung 80GB SATA2 (RAID 0)

- OS: MS Windows XP Pro SP2 (all updates)

- SW: Latest drivers, bios, etc. for every piece of hardware.

         Latest DirectX 9.0c (february)

         Latest OpenAL driver

---

NVidia Driver Settings(97.92):

- AA: application controlled.

- AF: application controlled.

- Triple Buffer: enabled.

- Vsync: enabled.

- Max. fps rendered ahead: 1.

- Image settings: high quality.

---

Armed Assault settings(german DVD):

---

With those settings I get fps from ~15(big towns), ~25(northern forests) up to ~50+(southern desert).

ArmA plays very smooth, even with fps below 20. (which was unplayable with 1.02! )

---

Maybe this helps a bit.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me.

MfG Lee

[Xsi9mmTW 0]

Can someone please tell me what to do? other then buying a new computer... I have a pentium 4 512 ram 30 gig of hd and a radeon 9800 pro and my game played perfectly when i was on 1.02 now with 1.05 my game is hard to play, its fluidity is just not there. I need suggestions please!

[Possessed 0]

I was thinking what Maruk and xmongx said about textures and got an idea whats the problem with memory filling and alt-tabbing. It's all about memory speeds of GFX card, system memory and pagefile and how fast ArmA fills them.

If you have a high-end computer, good GFX card with fast video memory and you are using high or very high quality textures, video card memory speed can handle them until cards memory fills up and ArmA starts to use normal memory which is significantly slower. Normal memory can't cope with the speed the GPU is drawing the textures and fps decreases. When normal memory is filled, ArmA starts to use pagefile and the result is horrendous. Big textures also fill up graphics card memory fast so you notice the problem very soon. Actually I tried "-maxmem 128", everything was good at start and very soon textures went absolutely grazy=ArmA skipped system memory due maxmem setting and started to use pagefile after the video card memory was filled up.

If you are using good or middle level computer with a decent video card, its slower graphics memory and GPU speed can't handle large textures. You switch your texture level to normal. Video card memory speed can handle those normal size textures and when the memory fills up, ArmA starts to use system memory which can handle normal textures also better. You don't notice significant difference in performance. You maybe finish the mission before the system memory fills up. Memory filling is also slower with the normal size textures than with the higher texture settings.

If you are using a low end... (I mean old ) computer, you had chosen low textures level since your antique video card speed can't handle any bigger textures. Also system RAM can handle low textures without any problems. Even changing to pagefile doesn't drop the texture drawing speed very much. Low quality textures are also smaller so the texture memory fills up significantly slower. You finish the mission before memory is choking. No problem with low end machine.

The way how the game uses graphics memory should be fixed. The game should use only graphics card memory and clear it from useless textures when it starts to use new ones, not to switch to fill system memory at all. Because if it is not fixed, we need a graphics card which can eat all the textures during a long mission. A graphics card with 10GB of internal video memory is not the way to go. Or 10GB of GDDR3 system memory with an operating system which can use it. Because at the moment those are the things what you need with satisfactory playing with high quality textures.

Just thinking: In the other games there are levels or game areas. They are loaded when one level is passed. The level before is erased from graphics memory. If we are thinking other huge gaming areas, Morrowind or Oblivion, there is loading when you change from one game area to other. But not on Sahrani. Can this memory problem actually ever be fixed? In that case the high texture settings are only for making nice looking screenshots for marketing purposes. In my case I use them to show to my Crysis-fanatic friend that we already have Crysis-level graphics . Just stop the show before the stutter starts

Question to BIS: Is it possible to make a command line option or graphics setting option that the game "loads" (do the same when alt-tabbing) when video card memory fills up. Of course it is a nuance when game loads at times but that's the way to constantly use high textures without alt-tabbing. This cannot be used in network games but in single player gaming it would be ok.

[r2101 0]

You have an ATI card and low texture settings. Makes sense. Have you tried to fill up your GFX memory? Go riding on sunny Sahrani for... half an hour

BTW I made more testing with "high" textures and postprocessing off. FPS is ok but graphics memory still fills up, now only slower than before. Then fps starts to decrease and textures start to show up with horrible lag.

ok, jogged thru the island with time acceleration... put textures to high... i get a performance hit when using high textures ( that was to be expected *lol*)... but even after quite some time there is no texture corruption / LOD / missing/wrong texture happening...

and well i know how those errors would look like...cause i had massive problems with 1.02 (guess it was that patch)... causing me to shelve the game... 1.05 exceeded my wildest expectations...

about the texture quality... of course there is a difference... but to me it is a good compromise between speedy fps and eyecandy... and (personally) i do not think that the low setting degrades the visual quality too much...but each to his own i guess...

i think shading details are what makes trees and bushes uhm... "bushes and trees"... *lol*...

dunno if it has any impact...i set non local vram to 0...

hope the problems for you guys gets sorted out...it´s a brilliant game when it works (and it works since only a couple of days...since patch 1.05 ... for me)...

greetings - r2101

[Possessed 0]

You have an ATI card and low texture settings. Makes sense. Have you tried to fill up your GFX memory? Go riding on sunny Sahrani for... half an hour

BTW I made more testing with "high" textures and postprocessing off. FPS is ok but graphics memory still fills up, now only slower than before. Then fps starts to decrease and textures start to show up with horrible lag.

ok, jogged thru the island with time acceleration... put textures to high... i get a performance hit when using high textures ( that was to be expected *lol*)... but even after quite some time there is no texture corruption / LOD / missing/wrong texture happening...

and well i know how those errors would look like...cause i had massive problems with 1.02 (guess it was that patch)... causing me to shelve the game... 1.05 exceeded my wildest expectations...

about the texture quality... of course there is a difference... but to me it is a good compromise between speedy fps and eyecandy... and (personally) i do not think that the low setting degrades the visual quality too much...but each to his own i guess...

i think shading details are what makes trees and bushes uhm... "bushes and trees"... *lol*...

dunno if it has any impact...i set non local vram to 0...

hope the problems for you guys gets sorted out...it´s a brilliant game when it works (and it works since only a couple of days...since patch 1.05 ... for me)...

greetings - r2101

1900GT has 256MB am I right? If it fills up almost instantly with big size textures the difference between graphics card memory speed and system memory speed is impossible to notice. The texture drawing speed after that is a compromize between GPU speed and system memory speed.

With 768MB of video card memory and very high texture settings I can walk in a little forest area without problems, but after that, when I drive to a city, problems starts. Even 768MB seems to fill up very fast when using very high size textures.

[weegee_101 0]

You have an ATI card and low texture settings. Makes sense. Have you tried to fill up your GFX memory? Go riding on sunny Sahrani for... half an hour

BTW I made more testing with "high" textures and postprocessing off. FPS is ok but graphics memory still fills up, now only slower than before. Then fps starts to decrease and textures start to show up with horrible lag.

ok, jogged thru the island with time acceleration... put textures to high... i get a performance hit when using high textures ( that was to be expected *lol*)... but even after quite some time there is no texture corruption / LOD / missing/wrong texture happening...

and well i know how those errors would look like...cause i had massive problems with 1.02 (guess it was that patch)... causing me to shelve the game... 1.05 exceeded my wildest expectations...

about the texture quality... of course there is a difference... but to me it is a good compromise between speedy fps and eyecandy... and (personally) i do not think that the low setting degrades the visual quality too much...but each to his own i guess...

i think shading details are what makes trees and bushes uhm... "bushes and trees"... *lol*...

dunno if it has any impact...i set non local vram to 0...

hope the problems for you guys gets sorted out...it´s a brilliant game when it works (and it works since only a couple of days...since patch 1.05 ... for me)...

greetings - r2101

1900GT has 256MB am I right? If it fills up almost instantly with big size textures the difference between graphics card memory speed and system memory speed is impossible to notice. The texture drawing speed after that is a compromize between GPU speed and system memory speed.

With 768MB of video card memory and very high texture settings I can walk in a little forest area without problems, but after that, when I drive to a city, problems starts. Even 768MB seems to fill up very fast when using very high size textures.

It sounds to me like the new memory management algorithm that Maruk talked about isn't clearing the memory fast enough... perhaps the garbage collection isn't executing at the right time (or is executing too late! ). I personally don't have the money for an 8800 with 768MB, and I'd kind of like to be able to safely use High textures again (which work perfectly fine in 1.04).

Oh well, these bugs happen, I just hope that for the next version (1.06?) that they've fixed the memory management issues so the game performs as well as it did in 1.04.

[sirex 0]

1.05 is definatly faster for me, my cpu is a 64 bit (but on 32bit win xp)

[Airstar 0]

If you have a high-end computer, good GFX card with fast video memory and you are using high or very high quality textures, video card memory speed can handle them until cards memory fills up and ArmA starts to use normal memory which is significantly slower. Normal memory can't cope with the speed the GPU is drawing the textures and fps decreases. When normal memory is filled, ArmA starts to use pagefile and the result is horrendous. Big textures also fill up graphics card memory fast so you notice the problem very soon. Actually I tried "-maxmem 128", everything was good at start and very soon textures went absolutely grazy=ArmA skipped system memory due maxmem setting and started to use pagefile after the video card memory was filled up.

I believe you're on the correct track. However there has to be also memory leak bugs in arma 1.05. Thats because with my 1GB system, arma process always uses only about 500MB of memory but still freemem is zero and page file is fully used, game crawls and textures suck. This is after few minutes of playing. My GPU 7800gs has 256MB and AGP aperture is 256MB so not all of the system memory should never be filled right?

There gotta be another way doing this than loading the whole game in memory lol!

[sickboy 13]

My Little Story:

I was running Vista64 with 8800GTX, specs are in my signature... and I simply gave up on it after 1.05...

The problems I had:

- Low Performance

- If ArmA Crashed, about  2 out of 3 times, it took the whole system down with bluescreen: Process has Locked Pages

- Missing Textures

This was with ANY driver version on Vista.

My Simple Conclussions:

- Nvidia Drivers for Vista suck, at the very least the 8800drivers

- ArmA is written and tested on XP, and has no Vista Certification, this means that most issues are to be expected on Vista and that the support will not be that high (I suspect BIS taking Vista as very low priority due to the ratio/ammounts of XP players and the amount of Vista Players)

- 1.05 Code changes seem to lead to more problems on Vista

I'm back on XP32 now.. and it's a dream come true, none of the above problems hit me anymore.

Another thing I found out:

The missing textures DO seem to have to do with CPU and not Videocard, at least in some cases...

My test case: Play a cpu-heavy mission (loads of scripts running etc)... It gave me low fps but especially many missing textures, if I tried it in the ingame server on my own.

If I Upload the mission to a server and run it then... the texture problem was not there...

ergo... it seems that if the CPU is heavily loaded, the GPU texture problems come or become more apparant/worse...

[Possessed 0]

Some thoughts: I don't really believe that this memory problem will ever be fixed. It is a feature. In the other games the whole game area or level textures are loaded to the video memory before the level starts. In ArmA the textures must be gradually moved to the video memory since there are no "level" changes. But because there is no loading, there is also no memory cleaning from useless textures.

I think the way the memory is used is hardcoded in game engine and cannot be changed. The only way is to use "a manual level load" = alt+tab x 2 if you want to use high size textures.

From now on I set the texture level to normal and wait for a miracle from the patch 1.06. It's time to watch the aimpoint dot in the middle of the screen more than the FRAPS values in the top left of the screen...

[weegee_101 0]

Some thoughts: I don't really believe that this memory problem will ever be fixed. It is a feature. In the other games the whole game area or level textures are loaded to the video memory before the level starts. In ArmA the textures must be gradually moved to the video memory since there are no "level" changes. But because there is no loading, there is also no memory cleaning from useless textures.

I think the way the memory is used is hardcoded in game engine and cannot be changed. The only way is to use "a manual level load" = alt+tab x 2 if you want to use high size textures.

From now on I set the texture level to normal and wait for a miracle from the patch 1.06. It's time to watch the aimpoint dot in the middle of the screen more than the FRAPS values in the top left of the screen...

There should still be a thread in the background running garbage collection on textures that are no longer necessary. Plenty of large scale games have done it in the past (Oblivion does it... observe your memory as you play... textures that are no longer needed are removed from memory), and the memory management that ArmA had in 1.04 and earlier seemed to be working just fine for most everyone.

For those of us using cards lower than a 7900GT, such as my 7600GT, the memory management sucks even when I drop it down to Normal textures. When I drop it lower than that I feel like I really should just go back to Operation Flashpoint since it looks better and runs better on my machine with FFUR 2007.

[Tunguska 0]

Game was running just perfect on my Core 2 Duo 6800 and Nvidia 8800 GTS in version 1.04. After installing 1.05 I have significant FPS and texture problems. I lowered post process and texture and object details, but the game still lags. "Foggy" appearence of landscape has increased. Harrier sound is now completely unrealistic. What kind of Patch was that supposed to be, a sabotage patch?

I read the other replies and I take the liberty to declare that lowering settings is not an option to me.

Will now switch back to version 1.04. and stay away from official BIS support. Personally I do not think that BIS can cope with the performance problem.

System:

Core 2 Duo 6800

Nvidia 8800

3 Gig Ram

Win XP