-=seany=- 5 Posted June 25, 2009 (edited) I have taken some videos with my web cam to show an annoying problem relating to trees/bushes/flora in general. I can load the game jump in the editor and plonk myself down anywhere on Chenarus and will get great FPS. But after a short time, my FPS will drop by 50% when looking at certain plants or trees and then come back to 100% FPS then 50%...etc look at the vieos, you'll get the idea. I don't think its any particular bush or plant they all seem to do it at random. I don't know if anyone else did, but in Arma1 I also had similar random badly performing plants, trees and bushes, slashing FPS in half but again, inconsistently. I could for example, exit the game and reload on the very same bush or tree would not affect my fps for another 5 to 10 minutes. And I'm pretty sure that happened with or without sli iIrc. Makes me wonder if it is a problem with the engine rather than SLI. It cannot be because, "nVidia has not released a Driver with official Sli support for Arma2 yet". Arma1 had an official profile and it did similar things. When I turn off SLI I notice that zooming near some trees etc can cause a severe drop in performance. Turning shadows from High to Normal helps some what but it still seems way too severe a drop in my opinion. We also no longer have a "Shader Quality" option like in Arma1, that I am aware of, this greatly helped with the nasty bush lag. Finally for anyone who was wondering what kind of performance gains are made with SLI, you get a nice idea from my Vids. I would be interested if anyone else has the problems with SLI or Crossfire or even with a Single GPU. I am convinced these plants shaders are not as optimized as they could be or have some inherent bug in them. :/ This game looks so beautiful, it blows me away just walking around a forest, but this 50% performance drop is a real killer :/, especially when it teases me by showing what my hardware is capable of.. :( I really hope we can get this sorted, I believe this is the reason there are so many post about people with inconsistent performance or bad performance on good hardware. Its very hard to set up the game to run as you want it with these kind of difficult to notice performance problems going on in the background. Summary and Vids After a short while of playing, Foliage/flora cause performance to drop by 50% randomly, even when scene is not in motion as can be seen by the FPS counter. Usually its caused by zooming towards plants, but not always: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF5vBZ8UBRQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llNNohlDTAA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrizvglhU0I What the Heck is going on here? anyone one any ideas? Devs? ---------------------------------------------- Now for the details: PC Spec XFX 780i MotherBrd IntelC2Q9300 @stock 4gb PC8500 2*XFX9800gtx (186.18) Sli enabled using nHancer Crysis Profile. -winxp not needed. Xfi Extreme Music Vista Ultimate64 ------------------- GFX settings Visibility :Lowest (wanted to show Full GPU limitation) Texture Detail :Normal Video mem :Normal AF :V High AA : Disabled Terrain Detail :Normal Object Detail :Normal Shadow Detail :High Post Process :V High Screen :1680x1050 1:1 fill rate Edited June 25, 2009 by -=seany=- Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
-=seany=- 5 Posted June 26, 2009 I know the turn around on the forums is fast at the moment but jeez, page three already :) does anyone have any input on this problem? thanks :bounce3: Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mrcash2009 0 Posted June 26, 2009 Well, read the threads that already exist detailing plenty about this, plus all the stickies. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
flake 10 Posted June 26, 2009 i presume you tried upping the vid mem from normal ? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
-=seany=- 5 Posted June 26, 2009 Well, read the threads that already exist detailing plenty about this, plus all the stickies. well, I haven't seen any other people with this exact problem, which is why I'm asking. People may be experiencing it but not know exactly what the cause is. If we can narrow down whats causing performance problems we can get them fixed quicker. Flake, yeah tried that. the only GFX option which really seems to make any difference to it is Shadow quality. High quality shadows really show the fps dips when it happens. Switching to Normal shadows makes it more bearable, but drops will still occur and restarting the game or Alt tabing (sometimes) fixes it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
FraG_AU 10 Posted June 26, 2009 I think this is the problem I have expereinced and made a post about before. On a clean install using Vista x64 and the various work arounds for arma 2 to get SLi working I enjoyed a buttery gaming experience of 55-60fps (avg 58) in SP campaign of Razor Two and Manhattan. Now when I went to multiplayer my FPS dropped back to 25-30. Going back to the same mission I would only get 35-40 max again. Now I have replicated this 2 times on clean installs, mine was not as pronounced as yours seems, ie "turning on and off" but it killed the game.. I have had my game activations reinstated so I will try this again and see if I can do a fraps vid to document. But yeah, something is screwed.. I don't know if in your case the FPS is caused by AI tick-tock or what else it could be but I hope the devs fix it. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
armafreak 10 Posted June 26, 2009 Nice to hear FraG, been following your plight, good luck with the testing.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
maddogx 13 Posted June 26, 2009 Seany, have you tried disabling postprocessing? :) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
-=seany=- 5 Posted June 26, 2009 I think this is the problem I have expereinced and made a post about before.On a clean install using Vista x64 and the various work arounds for arma 2 to get SLi working I enjoyed a buttery gaming experience of 55-60fps (avg 58) in SP campaign of Razor Two and Manhattan. Now when I went to multiplayer my FPS dropped back to 25-30. Going back to the same mission I would only get 35-40 max again. Now I have replicated this 2 times on clean installs, mine was not as pronounced as yours seems, ie "turning on and off" but it killed the game.. I have had my game activations reinstated so I will try this again and see if I can do a fraps vid to document. But yeah, something is screwed.. I don't know if in your case the FPS is caused by AI tick-tock or what else it could be but I hope the devs fix it. cheers for the info. I would be interested in seeing vids of similar issues. Have you tried the EVGA Sli enhancement yet? It runs better for me when it works but inevitably some bush or other decides its going to kill my fps after about 15 minutes. How come you have to keep reinstalling the game? After you play multiplayer do you never get back the same initial single player performance? I may be misunderstanding you. I have been using the radio tower hill "Vysota" north of Chernogorsk for testing, but I think anywhere will do. I use the editor to put myself and one AI there, then I just walk around enjoying the foliage until it happens. ---------- Post added at 03:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:49 PM ---------- Seany, have you tried disabling postprocessing? :) The only option that seems to affect it is shadows. When its happening I press escape and this "freezes" the scene, if you will. Then I can change gfx settings and see what effect each has on this frame dropping anomaly (when it's in this state the game is still rendering and doing the frame dropping thing like in the vids) The only option that seems to fix it is switching shadows from High to Normal. I am also pretty sure that even when shadows are on Normal they sometimes are not rendering at as high an FPS as they could. E.g. Shadows on High are giving frame drops, Ill switch to Normal shadows and the FPS will stabilize at 30. However, Ill exit the game and reload again, now the exact same scene and settings and I'm getting 50 fps with Normal shadows. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
nuggetz 0 Posted June 28, 2009 I think this is the issue I'm having. Sorry I didn't see this thread before posting mine. I'm running SLI, 8GB of memory, Quad Core processory Q6600 and I had texture problems in Win7 64 so I'm running XP 32 now in SLI with the EVGA sli patch. Works real nice for the first 5 minutes or so but then FPS drop by half. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Heatseeker 0 Posted June 28, 2009 http://forums.bistudio.com/showpost.php?p=1333933&postcount=262 Its the vegetation, it was supposed to be much better optimised than Arma 1's but its actually worse and i still think the trees in south sahrani looked great and performed great too. I know it wont look pretty but let me know how Arma II performs for you with the grass disabled and object detail to very low, im pretty sure that the vegetation is embarassing all the greatest HW out there.. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
-=seany=- 5 Posted June 28, 2009 ***Fixed*** Ahem, :o apologies to all. Shaders are fine, trees are fine (they're still fairly demanding, but not bugged :) ). I really should have seen this earlier given my experience with PCs, but any way, I downloaded Riva tuner to check my temps and clock speeds while this problem was happening. Low and behold, my second 9800GTX was at 105C!!!!:eek: For anyone who doesn't know 105c is the shut down temp of the card. That's why my FPS would drop after a while, then come back, then drop etc because the card kept getting to 105c then cutting out and coming back after it had cooled down a couple of degrees. I had this problem a while ago in Arma 1 also and could never figure it out, i figured if my gpu was overheating other games would show this too, but not so... Take a look at this, interesting reading for anyone who reckons Arma doesn't make good use of your hardware. These are the temps various SLI games where giving me before I cleaned both cards, If it hadn't of been for Arma2 I probably never would have realised: Degrees Celsius IDLE -------------- GPU0 63 GPU1 64 Live For Speed -------------- GPU0 71 GPU1 72 DCS:BLackShark -------------- GPU0 75 GPU1 76 GTA4 ----------------- GPU0 76 GPU1 79 Company Of Heroes ----------------- GPU0 77 GPU1 83 Crysis ------------ GPU0 80 GPU1 83 Arma 1 ------------ GPU0 97 GPU1 105 Arma 2 ------------ GPU0 97 GPU1 105 Both of the Arma's slaughter the the likes of Company of Heroes and Crysis in regards to how much they are putting your GPU to work. I find this surprising considering how well these two DX10 games are supposed to put your hardware to use. The Arma's sure are making good use of our hardware, its just a shame its so demanding. Anyway, for anyone having problems with sudden performance drops Check that GPU(s) with Riva tuner or something. When I opened my 9800GTX's I found a whole load of dust, a veritable carpet if you will :), across the cooling fins. I was a bit nervous about dissembling the cards but they are very easy to take apart and put back together. Here are my temps after cleaning: Idle ------------ GPU0 61 GPU1 63 Arma 2 ------------ GPU0 89 GPU1 89 If a moderator could put "Resolved" or something at the end of my thread title that would be cool. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
