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Extremely bad performance on 1.12

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I upgraded my system this year as well to a duo core 2 with 2 gigs of ram and a 512 7600GT running windowsXp with the latest patches and for the life of me it get s 25 frames most of the time and less in dense area. I have to run it so low in options that it is unplayable because I cant see anything beyond 100 yards. tress all of a sudden pop up and textures are horrible. I have concluded that ArmA just isnt worth the headache. I uninstalled it. lot more games out there that run a hell of alot better and alot more people playing. Hell my OFP runs better

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I find it odd that I have ran Arma on 4 of my pc's and all ran pretty well, just like any other game.

It has to be something that some of you are running in the background, the way you are setting up your pc or just something causing such mixed results.

I have ran Arma on:

PIV 3.0 gig,1 gig ddr,7600gs 512 agp, winxp home

AMD X2 4200+, 1 gig ddr,x800pro agp, winxp home

Laptop: XP4000+, 1 gig ddr,x600 video, xp home

X2 6400+,4 gig ddr2,hd3870 512m video,xp64

All ran Arma without problems, only the laptop required "very low" settings

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Maruk,

Appreciate BIS's response, and I'm sorry that I've not provided very clear technical information other than my specs. I'm also sorry to hear that NVIDIA seems to be blowing this issue off or not providing the correct level of support to this community - I will give them a piece of my mind.

Is there a particular program that you would prefer I use to benchmark my FPS as i try to collect some of this information for you?

What I will do is go ahead and test the performance in 1.08 through 1.12 and let you know what I get.

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Some things to consider for reporting framerates / performance hit's in game.

When testing the same conditions (Troops, items, weather etc. placed on map) with the various versions (1.08, 1.11, 1.12.) something I'm sure which could be very helpful to BIS for troubleshooting would be if people could include some basics like,

Condition= Single or Multi-player

FPS= #'s Max, Min and Average

Direction faced= "Whatever the Compass says, K? biggrin_o.gif "

Approximate Map position via. GPS (Not sure what would be needed in the init. to access GPS outside of a chopper or other vechicle? Anyone?)

Action= Running / Walking (Direction), Still, Prone, Reloading, Healing, Scoped / Zoomed or not etc.

Useful System Spec's Including but not limited to:

Motherboard/ Make , Model , Series - revision#

Processor/ type & speed

Soundcard model, drivers

Memory/ Manufacturer, Amount, Speed and timing

Hard disk/ Manufacturer, Size, rpm, access time

GPU('s)/ Manufacturer, Memory amount & type, drivers and note if you use riva tuner or some similar app. to "tweak" their settings

DirectX version (If ya dont know, START\"start search" or run\(type in) dxdiag ENTER)

I know getting some of this info might be a headache so I'll recomend PC Wizard. It's a handy system information tool which also has a good array of general hardware benchmarking features as well (Mabey your studder is due to a hard drive not spinning up as it should, faulty RAM or bad clusters on the hard drive etc, this will help show you if such is the case.

Remember, just cuz' you just pulled the 2 Gb stick out of the box and put it in the system doesnt mean it's a good stick, it just means that the manufacturer has tested about 5 to 10% of the strips in the same massive batch that yours came from. And no, I'm not suggesting in any way that all these issues are simply related to shoddy hardware or bad drivers, but some could very well be and by making sure your issues are not hardware related you will be helping BIS a great deal by eliminating one more issue from their big "to-do" list

And as far as running mods is concerned, if we really want to get these FPS and general performance hit's worked out properly then for the sake of problem solving, turn them off for a while when you're "Benchmarking". Just because a mod or addon was scripted to work seamlessly with one version is no guarantee that a later version might give rise to an unforseen hiccup in the flow of things.

PS. I use Fraps for getting the FPS, you could also record ingame action with it but it takes quite a toll on performance (At least on my system).

Another thing to consider is CPU, Mainboard, GPU, Hard Drive and case temperatures. One of the biggest increases I saw in gaming performance on this system (short of going from onboard video to a 7600GT) was after I had swapped the stock Northbridge chipset heatsink on my POS ECS mobo for the Zalman Northbridge Heatsink. Just the 8 C drop in Northbridge temps resulted in a gain of about 20-30 fps in Call of Duty and about 6-10 FPS in ArmA (Pre-1.08) So just because the manufacturer states a device can withstand a temperature of X# of degrees should not be considered == to the manufacturer suggesting that optimal performance will be acheived thruout the spectrum of that items thermal limits. The colder you can keep your hardware, the better the performance you will get.

If your PC tower is kept hidden beneath a desk or in a cabinet of the same, it will likely be 5-10 C hotter than it would if it were on the side of the desk, more exposed to the ambient temps in the room. But dont assume that leaving the case open for airflow is going to help any, some systems are well built and the fans & resulting internal airflow are taken into consideration during layout design. It wont hurt to open it up and see what the case may be for you, just dont be shocked if your Memory, GPU or Hard drives actually get hotter with the lid off. wink_o.gif

Mabey for repeatabilities sake BIS (Or the community) should come up with a series of "Benchmarking" missions?

No combat, just a squad placed in various areas with various conditions i.e.

#1 24:00 hrs, clear, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#2 06:00 hrs, clear, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#3 12:00 hrs, clear, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#4 18:00 hrs, clear, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#5 24:00 hrs, rain, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#6 06:00 hrs, rain, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#7 12:00 hrs, rain, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

#8 18:00 hrs, rain, heart of Corazol, 10 Civ's, 10 cars.

And similar "missions" for other areas of Sara.

If the worst areas framerate wise are known, mabey they could be set as waypoints with instructions on where and what to look at, then taking note on FPS and such & moving on to the next waypoint & so on.

(Or Mabey as areas are found to be problematic, those who can edit could add waypoints to those areas with a note in the breifing as to the nature of the problem and submit the mission & breifing to bis?)

As always, just sharing some thoughts on the subject.

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Well I had the most terrible FPS when updating to 1.12 but installing SP1 for my Vista 32 and the latest DirectX 9 update made things pretty smooth (on level with 1.11).

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Yep, the 1.12 patch in combination with Vista's SP1 really did make for some massive improvements in performance on my rig. Even the sounds seems to be getting handled better by my onboard audio, seems richer / fuller than before.

Heres my story,

Mainboard : ELITEGROUP COMPUTER SYSTEM CO.,LTD. 945G-M3

Chipset : Intel i945G/GZ

Processor : Intel Pentium D @ 3333 MHz

Physical Memory : 2048 MB (2 x 1024 DDR2-SDRAM )

Video Card : Nvidia Corp GeForce 7600 GT Driver version 7.15.11.6925

Hard Disk : Hitachi (320 GB) <---Storage / some apps

Hard Disk : ST3120022A (120 GB)  <--- OS / Utilitiy apps

Hard Disk : WDC (74 GB) (WD Raptor  thumbs-up.gif ) <--- Games

Hard Disk : Maxtor 1 Touch External drive (204 GB) <--- Storage

Operating System : Windows Vista Home Basic Home Edition 6.00.6001 Service Pack 1

DirectX : Version 10.00

With versions 1.08 and prior, I was getting acceptable framerates (25-38 unless spinning in circles or looking left-right rapidly) at a modest viewdistance of about 1200m and everything on normal aside from shadows on low and shading disabled. 1024x768, 32bit display. Finding the old "Turn AA up to Very high" bumped the top end of my framerates to upper 40's, low 50's and I found I could extend my viewdistance a "great deal" (2100) without any severe impact on performance.The  Proper Vegetation fix raised the bar even higher

1.11 came, bugs were fixed, I could climb ladders safely etc.

1.12 arrived, shortly after I found my display at 800x600 in hopes of preserving FPS, which eventually led to lowering the quality settings all to low as well. I even dropped my viewdistance to the 800-900m range for a frame or two more a second in hopes it would convince my brain that the max 23 FPS I was getting was in fact live action, not a flip-book animation.

I found myself seriously considering just going back to OFP (Which plays nice-nice with Vista b.t.w.) and waiting for ArmA2 but I wanted to blow up Yomies and they arent in OFP, theyre in ArmA...  Read the thread about Vista's SP1 helping performance a bit but suffered along as I have a nasty dialup line & was afraid it might just end up botching my PC altogether. But finally I gave in and upgraded to SP1.

I can now set everything in the image quality settings to their max values, display set to 1024x768x32 once more at a 2500m viewdistance and run the game with similar performance to what I had with the low settings & 800x600 display.(23 fps in Corazol playing Quarantine where I was hitting as low as 8 fps before sp1)

FPS is actually slightly higher now as reported by Fraps (25-28) and the engine seems to be performing much better as well (AI making "big decisions" no longer give pause to the graphics, or is at least far less noticable than before)

I've more testing to do, settings to play with etc. but the main thing is that the Vista SP1 in combination with the 1.12 ArmA patch REALLY made some major improvements in the game performance. thumbs-up.gif

So if you run Vista, update your drivers and such, make a fresh restore point and hit Windows update for SP1.

*** I can finally race thru a major city on the m1030 without studders and video lag causing me to crash into things!!! YAY! yay.gif ***

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FritzDaKat,

Vista is your problem. I run 1280/1024 Max on a Pentium D 2.6Ghz with 1GB ram on XP with Arma 1.12 patch, 50-100FPS on local games.

X1950Pro 256MB.

Get rid of that nightmare called vista and see what your rig can do.

Also, run no other programs.

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You Hellop BIS needs to get with the times and make the game run better under Vista because soon Microsoft will stop updating XP and all we will have is Vista.

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Vista is not the issue, it could be a combination of things.

Somewhere between Vista SP1, ArmA patches 1.11 & 1.12, and numerous Nvidia drivers tested......my ArmA started falling apart (some BSOD's & ArmA stopped responding).

Reinstalling ArmA has it back running silky smooth again!

Extra's used= DurgsVegetationFix, and ECS mod.

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Hello all,

definately not just a vista issue, and don't think that everone will goto vista immediatly when Microsoft stop supporting it.

Anyhoo, back on topic, I've been looking through this thread and although there are alot of folk pro and against whomever they believe is at fault for all these issues, there's not alot of solutions comming forward (especially for XP) Perhaps a list of issues that the community has found and poss solutions would be helpful?

I know there's an error log/wiki out there somewhere but how about a skiky of probs and fixes here?

Rgds

LoK

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Vista is DEFINITELY the ISSUE!!!

I had over one third(1/3) more FPS in XP than with Vista AT THE SAME MACHINE. Its a fact!

And without the serious optimizations i did in/for Vista like all suggested updates, newest Nvidia drivers (always latest beta) direct-X updates and so on and so forth, it would be even way worse for me.

Ans its the same at my two brothers Rigs, we tested this really seriously and the lower-end your PC is, the more you will notice the FPS-sucking Vista does.

I seriously hope that Arma2 will be more optimized for Vista (if thats possible).

Regards, Christian

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Hello

Vista MAY well have issues, but so does XP.

All Im saying is dont forget us XP dinosaurs smile_o.gif

rgds

LoK

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roll back to 1.11, use -vm108 switch.  This will at least tell you if it's the new memory management system.

I must say i have to agree with olle . In the excact words he has stated my game has suffered everything was sweet until these patches. Love the game and most of all our community clanwars but there is no way i can play. There is an obvious problem with this patch in relating Nvidia cards most people with this problem has got one thats my opinion.

PS BIS please rectify this problem asap

                                                    Thankyou .

Dual core 6000 X 3.01 ghz

8800gts

2gig ram

windows xp pro

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I keep telling you to use the 174.74 beta driver for the Geforce cards! I run windows vista 32bit and didn’t have a problem with stutters or FPS!!

I don’t play the game myself because I have my own issues with it - but Armed Assault/vista compatibility isn’t one of them!!

Remember also to install service pack 1 for vista!!

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XP is good for at least another 3 to 5 years, vista is still an early adopter's problem child and probably won't be useful until SP2 (like XP was).

175 drivers are out now - bypass the 174's and try them instead.

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I keep telling you to use the 174.74 beta driver for the Geforce cards! I run windows vista 32bit and didn’t have a problem with stutters or FPS!!

I don’t play the game myself because I have my own issues with it - but Armed Assault/vista compatibility isn’t one of them!!

Remember also to install service pack 1 for vista!!

Have the latest drivers still no good.

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Conan @ May 14 2008,09:38)]
I keep telling you to use the 174.74 beta driver for the Geforce cards! I run windows vista 32bit and didn’t have a problem with stutters or FPS!!

I don’t play the game myself because I have my own issues with it - but Armed Assault/vista compatibility isn’t one of them!!

Remember also to install service pack 1 for vista!!

Have the latest drivers still no good.

Well how come I run vista and don’t have any problems?

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Conan @ May 14 2008,09:38)]
I keep telling you to use the 174.74 beta driver for the Geforce cards! I run windows vista 32bit and didn’t have a problem with stutters or FPS!!

I don’t play the game myself because I have my own issues with it - but Armed Assault/vista compatibility isn’t one of them!!

Remember also to install service pack 1 for vista!!

Have the latest drivers still no good.

Well how come I run vista and don’t have any problems?

Because Vista/SP1 is not necessarily the only factor that causes FPS stutter. As I stated before, some people with almost identical systems are getting wildly different performance results. There seems to be another factor.

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For those that say they have medium computers and use ECS... Well theres the problem. I got no stutters at all in arma on high/medium with my medium machine, but if i run ECS (with its AI enhance) my computer go to 9 FPS. ECS is really great, just not friendly to low/medium machines when the AI starts to "think". The value can be changed ofcourse, but i didnt notice any difference when i lowered the simultanious AI "moves" even to small numbers.

So try to change values or turn ECS off just to see if it makes it better.

1.12 rocks. Just give us the final though please smile_o.gif

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My old specs where

CPU : 3500@2.5

3gb ram

Nforce 3 mobo

AGP 7800GS 256mb

XP64bit

never used Maxmem commands

performance on this setup improved between patches. Although i did have to have most settings on low.

I have now upgraded.

Q2C Q9300 2.5ghz

4gb ram

Nforce 780i mobo

PCIE 9800GTX 512mb

XP64bit

haven't used maxmem commands yet (dunno what to set it too 512 or 4096?)

I seem to be able to whack up almost all settings to V.high/high and run @1600x1200. But I am getting performance issues over time.

For example:

I set up a test mission with an ACOG in the south and with very high settings I am getting 72 fps max (monitor Hz). Ill scan around a bit and the fps will fluctuate between 60 and 45. Then ill go prone and look over a bush towards a forest with my scope and the frame rate will drop to maybe 25 /30, fair enough. I get back up, run around, scope a few more bushes etc in the distance. then go back to that first bush, scope it and my frames could drop to as low as 19/11. If I look around a bit then look at it again FPS might go up. If I leave it scoped and switch to GFX options and change a setting like textures/shaders to LOW then back to Very High I resume the game and my frame rate goes back up to 25/30+.

also, one time my frame rate took a massive hit (from 60s to 30s) after scoping some things. I Looked around my position and some of the textures for fences, buildings, even my own uniform was like the textures were only half loaded and not at there full details. It wouldn't go away with out reloading the mission.

A similar problem that i feel is relates to the above is Random FPS drop when transitioning from no scope view, to scope view and from scoped view to no scope view. my frames will drop from 60s to 30s then back to 60's once has finished the transition. This also happens with simply zooming an area and unzooming, and with Iron site view transition.

seems like there are some issues with the texture LODing and players view. like when you scope/zoom view an area it loads lower res textures for the areas immediately around you (that are now out of your view) and when you go back to normal view it loads back the high res full LOD textures.

Anyway, sorry for the long winded post but I am kind of disappointed, since upgrading, with Arma's performance, especially when I know I can run almost every setting at max and get 60-70 fps in the north.

If anyone has any help they could give me that would be great. i know there are a lot of posts about 8800 series GFX cards and before i upgraded i just ignored then, so its possible some one already knows how to fix/improve my problem.

cheers

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Conan @ May 14 2008,09:38)]
I keep telling you to use the 174.74 beta driver for the Geforce cards! I run windows vista 32bit and didn’t have a problem with stutters or FPS!!

I don’t play the game myself because I have my own issues with it - but Armed Assault/vista compatibility isn’t one of them!!

Remember also to install service pack 1 for vista!!

Have the latest drivers still no good.

Well how come I run vista and don’t have any problems?

Because Vista/SP1 is not necessarily the only factor that causes FPS stutter. As I stated before, some people with almost identical systems are getting wildly different performance results. There seems to be another factor.

I agree

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72 @ May 15 2008,01:08)]For those that say they have medium computers and use ECS... Well theres the problem. I got no stutters at all in arma on high/medium with my medium machine, but if i run ECS (with its AI enhance) my computer go to 9 FPS. ECS is really great, just not friendly to low/medium machines when the AI starts to "think". The value can be changed ofcourse, but i didnt notice any difference when i lowered the simultanious AI "moves" even to small numbers.

So try to change values or turn ECS off just to see if it makes it better.

1.12 rocks. Just give us the final though please.

What is ESC?

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