Some short backstory: I have been playing Arma 3 for some time now (started in early 2017). I have had the same exact computer setup (all hardware identical) for the entire time I've played Arma 3.
Approximately 5-6 months ago, when I would play, I had no issues with FPS drops or freezing or anything like that, regardless of mods. I didn't play Arma for some time starting in approximately September 2017 and resumed in early January of this year. Suddenly I'm having all sorts of problems. The biggest issue is that regardless of game mode, mods, or anything else - I always start to see degradation of FPS and playability after some time in-game. It sometimes happens 20 minutes after I start, sometimes 45 minutes after I start. I don't know if mods exacerbate the issue, as I do not have time to devote to doing A-B testing multiple times at ~20-30 minutes per attempt to figure this out.
Essentially, the game will start to hitch at some point, with sharp FPS drops (from a stable 30-40-50 to 3-5 FPS, and then back up to 30). MSI Afterburner shows that CPU and GPU usage during these FPS drops falls off to 0%. These start to get worse and worse and overall performance even when it's not happening also tends to decrease, so instead of 45 FPS with drops to 5, I get 25 FPS with drops to 0, and every drop takes longer and longer to resolve itself. Eventually the game will simply freeze up. The HDD usage light will also start going nuts until it's fully on all the time. CPU and GPU temperatures never go above 55 degrees C, usage never peaks over 40% from what I've seen, so it's not an issue of overheating or anything. I eventually have to force-quit the process, when you do this it gives me an "UNABLE TO INIT DXGI" error message.
I will say again that this did not happen previously regardless of what mods I had installed/enabled, etc. Now it happens even on the vanilla version of the game, playing offline singleplayer.
Things that could have changed:
- Video card drivers
- Chipset drivers
- Windows update
- BIOS firmware updated
- Maybe I'm missing something else?
What I've tried:
- Completely deleting and re-installing Arma (2-3 times, no effect besides making me want to kill myself as I re-download 80 gigs worth of files).
- Tweaking startup parameters in all sorts of ways. Overall performance might have been improved but the FPS drops still happen like clockwork.
- Running the game in x86 mode as opposed to x64. Honestly it felt like it ran better that way, but I cannot say anything for sure.
- Rolling back to older GPU drivers. No real effect (though I did not try rolling back to 6 month old drivers).
- Complete driver uninstall and re-install via DDU. No real effect.
PC Specs:
- Win 8.1
- GTX 1060 6GB, stock clocks
- MSI Z170A-G43 motherboard
- Intel i7 6700K, stock clocks
- 16gb HyperX RAM
- Western Digital Caviar Black 7200rpm 1TB HDD (ARMA and all related things are installed on this drive).
Drive is OK per SMART and benchmarking, defragmented (regular + freespace defrag).
The worst thing is that none of my friends have this same issue when we play.
Video of my last play session with this issue happening:
