New Beta Build 70951 is up!

[MavericK96 0]

@MavericK96

I did some tests for the problem I had, and things seem a lot better with the new beta.

My test scenario of BM_coastalFlight.Chernarus.pbo from ArmA2 FPS Analyzer that always CTD or produced graphical errors on the 1st loop, I have managed to pass 5 tests, with only once getting the "Receiving" message.

Can you retest too for problems?

Yep, I'll definitely test for stability. Thanks for the info.

---------- Post added at 12:53 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:48 PM ----------

Well, that was quick. I did one run of that BM_coastalFlight test and it didn't even make it through an entire test before CTD with "Out of Memory" error. :(

---------- Post added at 01:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:53 PM ----------

The BM_coastalFlight test is actually a really good repro for the "Out of Memory" error. I ran it twice with exThreads=0 and it crashed both times, in similar places (the first time it was just before the end of the first run, the second time it was just after the end of the first, at the beginning of the second).

Oddly enough, using exThreads=3, shortly after the first run I got a "Receiving..." screen, and then later in that same (second) run the game started to slow to a crawl (1 FPS and dropping continuously; slideshow). I alt-tabbed out to the Task Manager, and then went back in game, and the speed picked up for about 2 seconds before starting to slow to a crawl again. Weird issue, I've never seen it happen before and not crash the game.

[langgis08 10]

just finished playing @70951 (-exThreads=3) SP Harvest Red/Manhattan for 2 1/2 hours.

no problems, no crashing, having often saved and reloaded the mission.

then I let run ArmA 2 FPS Analyzer, result here: nearly equivalent graphs to previous beta build, so no significiant changes referring to FPS here. if there's a small difference for FPS then it's the mean variation, that could be a little higher with 70951 than with 70709, but average is same.

(btw BM of FPS analyser didn't make any troubles here)

all in all, ArmA2 has never been so stable as it is since the beta's of May 2010, including this one of course.

(no tests for MP so far, it's late and I will have a self made caipirinha now, cheers ;) )

Edited May 27, 2010 by langgis08
BM

[tonygrunt 10]

Arma settings that I am using for testing are VD 10k, Memory: Default,Terrain :Normal,PP:Off,everything else VH.

With vertical sync on I have completed close to 20 runs with half of them getting the "Receiving" message.

Tried once with vertical sync off but arma dropped me to desktop and had to close through task manager.

Used your own arma settings with vertical sync off and I got the "Out of Memory" error.

Tried again with vertical sync on and it completed with once displaying "Receiving".

Could you try vertical sync on?

Edited May 27, 2010 by TonyGrunt

[MavericK96 0]

Yeah, I'll give it a shot. I recall using Vsync drops performance a fair bit, but I will try it for stability purposes. Thanks for the data.

[Zipper5 74]

I just came across this bug when I was creating a custom radio action:

Seems something happened to the stringtable(s)?

[todayskiller 10]

Holy Smokes!!! Idk what BIS did, but boy have I gotten better performance from this new beta...I use to get 25 fps with 1.05...26 fps with the last beta patch...and now 29!!! with this beta, idk what they did to optimize it, but 3 fps IMO, is a great achievement for BIS, and for people like me (makes me very very happy).

I haven't tried out the MP, or actual In game stuff yet, will in a little bit...but now I'm just so happy with the FPS :)...good job :)!!!

[SaOk 112]

I also have that radio bug and compass "needle" looks bugged. Like the compass, also eyeglasses have some weird looking white-black artifacts with my HD4890 (Drivers 10.3).

@todayskiller, try warfare in mp. Its very smooth now. FPS could easily be two times better (for me ~20 -> ~40).

Edited May 27, 2010 by SaOk

[todayskiller 10]

Alright saok, I will in a little bit :)...and yes it could be.

EDIT: I did the same Benchmark 1, and got 32 FPS!!!...So scratch out my last post, I'm finally in the 30s now with -exThreads=3 Enabled! :) :) :)

With the Benchmark 2, however...I still get 10 FPS...BUT, if I get an increase in one of the benchmarks that is fine with me! especially if it is 7 more FPS :)

Edited May 27, 2010 by todayskiller

[MavericK96 0]

What settings/specs are you guys using? I literally saw zero performance increase with the new build...

---------- Post added at 03:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:44 PM ----------

Arma settings that I am using for testing are VD 10k, Memory: Default,Terrain :Normal,PP:Off,everything else VH.

With vertical sync on I have completed close to 20 runs with half of them getting the "Receiving" message.

Tried once with vertical sync off but arma dropped me to desktop and had to close through task manager.

Used your own arma settings with vertical sync off and I got the "Out of Memory" error.

Tried again with vertical sync on and it completed with once displaying "Receiving".

Could you try vertical sync on?

I gave this a shot. It got about halfway through the 2nd run and crashed with an "Out of Memory" error. :(

Also, Vsync on takes off about 5 FPS average of my framerate.

[todayskiller 10]

I'm using a nvidia 9800 gt

AMD PHENOM 9550 Quad-Core 2.20 GHZ

6GB RAM

...............................................................

Like on my old post I have seen 7 more FPS increase :)

I'm running on all Medium settings except Quality Preference or w/e that is on high Maverick, what type of Processor do you have? and is it Quad or Dual? I think this is really helping out Quad Core users a lot more than Dual (but I could be wrong, for me it isn't wrong though lol)..but I have a question

Is Antialising Really needed? because I get 3 more FPS increase if I have it disabled, would it make that big of a difference? Thanks.

[MavericK96 0]

I've got a fast quad core (see my sig), but I've seen no improvement in the latest betas. Actually, Builds 70100 and 70313 gave me the best performance out of all of them (very low stutter and highest avg framerate) but I still had issues with stability.

In terms of AA, it's not needed, but it makes the game look a lot nicer around the edges of objects, because what it does is smooth out the edges so they don't look "jagged", or pixelated. I can run Very High AA with little performance hit so I just leave it on.

On another note, I tried setting my Terrain Detail to High instead of Very High, and in the bm_coastalFlight benchmark I was able to run through it several times without an "Out of Memory" error. However, after a few runs I did get the "Receiving..." screen and drastic slowdown in performance (slideshow stuff like I mentioned before), so this helps but is obviously not a fix.

It seems apparent, based on the symptoms, that there is a memory leak somewhere in the game. It may be based on terrain rendering, or that could have just been a coincidence since I lowered a setting in general.

Also, running at High versus Very High, I saw no performance difference either up or down, so it's apparent my system can handle Very High, but it just causes the memory leak to build and crash the game faster.

[Alex72 1]

I run -cpucount=4 wich let me have HT on and no problems in A2.

Tested the latest patch and very nice to have the stuttery AI animations fixed. :) Performance wise its about the same - wich is good - but i guess the new beta adressed some other things than that. Hopefully grass will be looked at later as well. Some optimization in that area would be superb.

[todayskiller 10]

I run -cpucount=4 wich let me have HT on and no problems in A2.

Tested the latest patch and very nice to have the stuttery AI animations fixed. :) Performance wise its about the same - wich is good - but i guess the new beta adressed some other things than that. Hopefully grass will be looked at later as well. Some optimization in that area would be superb.

what does -cpucount=4 mean? it runs all the cores?...

Also, Maverick...I guess there is a memory leak in there somewhere, because your system blows mine out of the water, but I'm getting 7 FPS more than with 1.05...so I have no idea.

[slay0rwr4th 10]

this beta is intermittent for me. my first error is No entry '.profilePathDefault'. Once I click ok the game continues to load, almost as soon as it enters fullscreen mode it CTD's with an always unhelpful "ARMA 2 has stopped working, windows is looking for a solution to this problem".

So, I've tried compatitiblity mode (I'm running Vista Home 32 bit) with no difference, administrator mode with no difference.

The last beta worked great, I'm going to try and reinstall it now and see if the problem goes away.

** Nevermind, Apparently I had a dodgy shortcut on the desktop... I'm in :) **

Edited May 28, 2010 by slay0rwr4th
fixed

[oktane 0]

Hey did you guys notice that Horns are network synced again, hurray! Now if only the reload animation was synced again. (both of these issues started with A2's release I think, they worked fine in OFP/ArmA1)

At least I can honk for people to get the hell out of the way or tell the to get in with the horn, etc. Simple things like this make me happy. :D

---------- Post added at 12:46 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:39 AM ----------

what does -cpucount=4 mean? it runs all the cores?...

Also, Maverick...I guess there is a memory leak in there somewhere, because your system blows mine out of the water, but I'm getting 7 FPS more than with 1.05...so I have no idea.

CPU count switch sets the number of CPU's the game will use. (maximum limit, not guaranteed) It's needed for people that have hyper threaded processors, because they want the game to use the real cores, not the virtual cores. (I don't know if the game detects real vs logical cores) For example, with an i7 920 which has 4 cores and 4 virtual cores (ht), taskman shows 8 cpus, the game would sometimes use a virtual core and that doesn't offer them any performance benefit. (people said their FPS was low) Personally I just disable HT in the bios because it makes my CPU run about 10c hotter. I use the 10c headroom to then overclock it further, which makes ArmA2 very happy. :P (faster cores are better than more cores, when you have at least 2 cores to begin with..)

Please use the forum search or Biki to find out obvious things like command line parameters do, here's a list: http://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma2:_Startup_Parameters There are many threads about CPUCount.

[sbsmac 0]

See this post for a graphic demonstration of the problems HT seems to cause for ArmA2 on a quad-core i920.

[Beagle 684]

This beta gives me the best performce out of all previous versions ever released so far. I gained +3 fps in Benchmark 1 and get demo fps that are counted as playable for the first time: 26fps.

No new quirks found so far!

[thr0tt 12]

SP game still suffers from........ a large pause and stutter during gameplay.

[rowdied 44]

This beta seems to be better performance wise for me with no thread option but when I connect to my home server to play evo, I can pick the mission and my slot but it just hangs there indefinetly. Same goes for friends trying to connect. Not sure why, but normal 1.05 works fine and also the previous

69645 worked no problems. Yes I know more beta's were released but I had a long standing mission that we just finished.

[jw custom 56]

Like with previous beta patch i keep getting CTD's while playing Domination.

[CarlGustaffa 4]

@rowdied. So why not use the thread options? I had to do that to get in.

I know I'm gonna love the AI shake fix :)

[NoRailgunner 0]

From the benchmark test the -exThreads=0 and -exThreads=3 results are very close to each other. A very slight difference is with -exThreads=1 where I lose one fps in "FPS-STAT" and gain one more in "FPSm".

AI issues and bugs are still there. :confused_o:

[Protegimus 0]

Build 70951 is running really well, much smoother than 70313 - 70709 and some much appreciated fixes to boot - nice work BIS.

Audio rendering appears to have improved wrt number of simultaneous sounds played since 70313. This is especially noticeable in benchmark 2 where there's plenty going on.

Played a good selection of missions over a six hour stint without a glitch.

Couple of key points to clarify the information regarding hyper-threading and core i7 CPU's:

the problem with ArmA 2 performance only applies to Win7 (Vista).

For Windows XP performance is actually better with all cores and yperthreading enabled, np with overheating limiting overclocking potential either.

Second, -cpuCount=4 is only a mechanism to limit the number of CPUs/cores available to ArmA, it has no influence on which core (physical or virtual) the thread is scheduled to run, i.e. it's not the application that dictates which CPU the software runs on, it's the scheduler in the O/S. The only way you are going to do that is through processor affinity, or disabling cores in the BIOS.

start /affinity, or for XP Sysinternal's psexec's -a flag can set processor affinity (and priority) so that's the way to get optimal performance with -cpuCount.

Protegimus

[Yoma 0]

On the i920 HT issue: it would be interesting if someone posted benches with sbsmac's tool for:

-HT on, no cpucount param used

-HT on, cpucount=4

-HT off

I've heard several people claim that cpucount=4 also aides a lot.

It might be better for BIS if we split this HT issue thing in a separate topic, so they can focus on their works and not on a general cpu issue.

[ricmaughn 0]

Having problem with ACE US ARMY soldier and last two Beta patches

soldiers missing body parts.

doesn't happen with patch 105

anyone no the cause

happens with Bink 2008 US soldiers also (same soldiers as in ace)

is this a problem with this addon or the patch