forteh

You should be getting that sort of fps on very high or ultra with some tweaking of some settings, specifically reduce view distances to alleviate the cpu bottleneck. The graphics requirements are pretty low so you should be able to max out most things as the cpu will eventually drag it down whilst the gpu waits. Mp performance in busy areas is purely down to server speed and how well the mission is written.edit: for reference I can run an 80+ Ai firefight free for all in a city using my 2500k@4.5ghz and the minimum fps is around 24, this is on very high settings with a gtx660.

The same as everyone else in the server as that will be limiting fps when push comes to shove, in open ground away from the cities you should be seeing around 50 to 70 I guess, but in a city firefight expect 20 to 30. As it's a non k processor your core speed will be the bottleneck.

Yes, when overclocked the clocks will all be at 4.5ghz, but at stock speeds the processor will only be running at 3.6ghz. In my opinion turbo is a marketing gimmick because windows will unload cycles to unused cores, as soon as the core is used it drops the turbo speed even if it is only 1% usage on the spare core.

Don't forget that turbo speeds are only attained when certain numbers of cores are utilised. On the 6600k when only one core is used it runs at 3.9ghz, two cores active it's 3.8ghz and all four cores active it's only 3.6ghz. As arma3 does utilise quad cores then your processor will only by running at 4 x 3.6ghz. When you overclock you should have turbo disabled so you get 4 x 4.5ghz naturally.

The i3 530 is only a dual core and whilst it overclocks like a beast ( mine ran at 4.7ghz quite happily) it just doesn't have the horsepower to drive arma3 unfortunately. Your best upgrade would be to pick up a sandybridge processor and motherboard, I paid £130 for my 2500k and Asus p67 sabretooth which when overclocked to 4.5ghz gives almost compatible performance in arma3 to any Intel processor released since. Your cheapest upgrade would be to find an i5 750 and overclock it to 4+ ghz. As a straight plug in on a p55 board you should see almost double the performance and with careful choice of settings arma3 is very playable. I followed the i3 530 - i5 750 path and only upgraded further to the 2500k because I got it at the right price. The 750 is simplest and cheapest upgrade, the 2500k is undoubtedly better though. I wouldn't bother with the i7 it will play arma3 no faster than the i5. edit: how much ram have you got and are you running on an SSD? If you only have 4gb ram you're going to be hitting the page file very, very quickly with arma3 - this will then thrash the hard disk and cause horriffic lag. Not such an issue on an SSD as they can read/write the page file far quicker. I would say that 8gb would be the minimum really for arma3, I regularly see 6gb total ram usage in singleplayer.

You should be much higher than 60 in the helo benchmark, you haven't got vsync turned on have you? Assuming you don't have vsync on the overclocked results aren't as high as expected, jumping from 3.5 to 4.5 gives almost 30% more for me compared to less than 10% for you.

I've upgraded my machine and performance has increased by over 100% since having arma3 so any perceived fps loss has not been apparent :)

I suspect it's the ram that is helping keep the speed up, switching from 1600mhz to 2133mhz was a big jump to the tune of around 20-30% increase on the helo benchmark; I never benched using YAAB with the slower ram but it is a well known peice of the puzzle of getting arma3 to run well. I clocked my cpu back to 3.5ghz (stock 6600k speed) and got 30.8fps on YAAB, clocked it up to 4.7Ghz and got 39.5fps, both on high preset and with 2133mhz ram; so yes skylake is faster to the tune of 30% at stock speeds on YAAB. However for the cost I'll stick to the 2500k as mp performance is still going to be on the floor :D For reference I get around 68-70fps on the helo benchmark on high settings.

I find opentrack works exceptionally well with arma3, using a 3point ir clip and ps3eye. Development work on it over the last year has been susbstantial and it is getting better all the time :)

Swap the ram it for 2133 or faster if you can, it helps the engine unlock a good chunk of cpu performance at that sort of clock speed. The rest looks good although if you're building it specifically to play arma3@1080p then a gtx660 pushes it along just fine, triple monitor would need more grunt though. Probably best to ask on the ocuk forums about the psu, as long as you don't scrimp on it you should be good :) edit: if you don't mind buying second hand then a 2500k @ 4.5 plays it fine, if anything just as well as any newer Intel cpu.

Just benchmarked my 2500k on YAAB and got 38.6fps on high default setting, gpu was thrashing 99% for a lot of it though. I also ran it through with my preferred settings and got 37fps, gpu usage is around 80%. 1920x1080 Sampling 100% Texture Very High Objects Very High Terrain Very High Shadow Very High Particles High Cloud Very High PiP Standard HDR Standard Dyynamic Lights Very High Overall Visibility 2250 Object Visibility 2250 Shadow Visibility 100 Bloom Off Raidal Blur Off Rotation Blur Off Depth of Field Off Sharpen Filter Off AO Disabled Caustics Enabled FSAA 4x ATOC All trees + grass PPAA SMAA ultra Anisotropic Filtering Ultra System is: - i5 2500k @4.5ghz 16gig - 2100mhz 11-11-11-31-2T gtx660 cruicial mx100 ssd

Have you recently defragged the hard disk arma is installed on and have you verified the game cache in steam? Possibly try creating a new profile and seeing if it still happens.

Apologies for the late response but I guess there is something up with either the config of your machine or arma3 if you're not using ram. On single player I regularly see over 5gb total ram usage in afterburner, cpu cores are all working (about 80/50/40/40 % split) and gpu around 75% load. I have high/very high settings and 2250/2250 view distances. My page file is set to 800mb and is barely used, when I had 8gb windows would occasionally flag up a low memory message when it went over 6gb usage, now I have 16gb it never happens.

Fair shout :) In my opinion yes it's worth the extra money, as much as people whinge and moan about arma3s multicore support, it does use 4 cores (although it doesn't load them all up 100%) and two cores will get overwhelmed because hyperthreading relies on there being spare cycles on the logical cores. Even if you consider a generous 50% IPC increase from 1st to 6th gen i3 processors that would give around 45-50 fps in the altis benchmark basing it on my hours of testing with the i3 530@4.7ghz. The 2500k at stock 3.2ghz outperformed the overclocked i3, the extra cores and increased cache is where it comes from. On a side note, I also use my machine for solidworks (notoriously single threaded because of how solid modellers are written) where single core speed if generally king, again the i5 trounces the old i3 by a good margin, it's only loading up one core but it is just lacking.

Or just buy a 2500k/3570k/4670k, save a bucket of cash and gloat over the fact you have a machine that plays arma just as well* as a 6700k :D *dropping down to 25 fps in kavala when the server can't keep up!