aop

IMHO best solution would be not to buy their products in future. I lost all respect I ever had for BIS because of ArmA 3 and DayZ. Neither has improved the #1 problem with their games; piss poor performance. They gained large following with ArmA 2 and Dayz mod and choose to blatantly exploit it and sell subpar products with no intent to fix them. BTW. If someone says SSD improves the performance of the game don't fall for it. I have Intel 910 400GB PCI-E SSD which is significantly faster than any SATA SSD and there is ~0 difference in performance of ArmA 3 when compared to using plain regular HDD. Loading screens are like 10 times faster but that's it. No FPS increases since the game is so CPU limited. Now the same snake oil marketers are trying to push ramdisk as solution to shitty ArmA 3 performance...

http://koti.mbnet.fi/aop13/arma3notsim.png

Or the fanboy brigade could admit this game is considered a simulation and it is missing some pretty important features.

Are there any huge performance improvements expected in near future? The problem with this game is that no such hardware exists that could run it even at 30fps in almost all situations. No matter how much money you have, you just can't even buy your way to smooth fps. Considering how this game is completely bottlenecked by single-threaded performance it might be that there will not be hardware capable of getting smooth 60fps out of ArmA3 during this decade. The reason why people are asking you devs about multicore support is not because they would like their quad or octa core CPUs to be used 100% all the time but because they can see that the game is bottlenecked by one or two cores and it runs so bad there might never be hardware capable of running it smooth so going parallel seems to be the only option. Problem seems to as you devs have said many times that it's much easier said than done and perhaps even impossible for ArmA series. It makes the future of this game look very bleak IMHO, I'm pretty sure even less people are willing to put up with 15-30fps when next gen of consoles come out and set the standard to 60fps even for casual players.

If you don't think ArmA 3 is a military simulation, then maybe BIS should stop advertising it as one? http://koti.mbnet.fi/aop13/arma3notsim.png (357 kB)

It could use a thousand threads but it wouldn't matter if one of them was bottlenecking the entire engine and every other thread was waiting that one thread all the time.

Only if you use AA/ATOC. Those two features are GPU intensive but going to more powerful video card is not going to fix the low fps dips caused by CPU bottleneck.

This game is incredible CPU dependant. I just switched from GTX570 to GTX680 and on the same settings I get the same fps in this little test scenario: http://koti.mbnet.fi/aop13/bench1.zip I don't move during the test, just press benchmark key in FRAPS and it logs the fps for 1 minute. Here's the results: GTX570 Min: 28 Avg: 31.050 Max: 34 GTX680 Min: 28 Avg: 31.450 Max: 36 edit: Other components used: Core i5 2500K@4.3GHz 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 Kingston V200+ 120GB SSD

That is exactly what happens when the engine is bottlenecked by one CPU thread. Everything else stalls when the engine is waiting that thread to complete it's tasks.

Not true, 1600MHz and 2500MHz DDR3 have exactly the same performance in ArmA 3: Note the completely linear scaling with CPU clock. 26% CPU clock increase gives 26% framerate increase. This combined low CPU utilization points to the game having one extremely CPU intensive thread that is stalling the entire engine and GPU and other threads are waiting for that one thread to complete it's tasks before a frame can be rendered resulting in low framerate and low GPU/CPU utilization %.

Do you do voodoo magic too? Because on modern PC your advices do absolutely nothing. Maybe 1-2% percent performance gain max. We are not running 200MHz Pentiums anymore. For example on my rig background processes take 0-1% of available CPU resources when the CPU is in idle state (1.6GHz clocks). When I start gaming the CPU clock goes to 4.3GHz. Background processes have no impact on my rig. Some people really want to defend companies making games by shifting the blame on customers and their PCs.

30fps average is horrible. 30fps minimum is passable, but I really prefer 40fps+.

Lot's of text but no solution to the problems discussed in this thread. Try spawning some BLUFOR and OPFOR squads in Agia Marina or go play 40-60 player TDM and come back with your fantastic optimization results. ArmA 3 runs like crap. It's currently one of the worst running games bar some flight sims like X-Plane 10 or Prepar3D (atleast in them you can get good performance by lowering the graphics settings a bit). To get smooth 40-50 fps in ArmA 3 you need to have something like 5GHz+ Intel CPU. My i5 2500K@4.3GHz isn't enough.

Usage and allocation are two different things. Many games these days reserve almost all the available VRAM even if they are not going to use it all. Battlefield 3 does the same thing, if you have 1GB VRAM it shows almost 1GB VRAM usage in monitor software and if you have 2GB it shows almost 2GB usage.

Most likely mission specific change, since this setup provides exactly the same fps as in the last build: http://cloud-2.steampowered.com/ugc/882976114553809006/3CFBA4DB4C83B2CD576067036DF13442E7B69A3F/