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Update: Ticket added! http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=8233 Please go to the tracker and upvote this to help minimize CPU bottlenecking in Arma 3! Shadows settings on Low create stencil based shadows. These are shadows that are processed by your CPU, offloading work from your graphics card. It is highly advisable for anyone but those with the weakest of GPU's to raise the setting or completely disable it to avoid these stencil shadows, as Arma is universally always being CPU bottlenecked. Shadows on medium to Ultra create shadow maps calculated on the GPU, however there are still numerous models in the game that have shadows rendered with stencil instead of the GPU shadow maps. Is there a particular reason why this is so BI? Wouldn't it make sense at this point in time, when CPU bottlenecking is such a big issue, that we fully offload all shadow calculations to the GPU to alleviate some of the rendering stress off the CPU? Things I have confirmed to use Stencil shadows even on Medium - Ultra Shadows setting: -Infantry -Vehicles -Lamp posts -Rocks All of these things and possibly more, should be casting Shadow Maps instead so that the CPU can work on other things. In a game so poorly multithreaded, this unnecessary workload of rendering shadows is just wasting CPU cycles on things that the GPU should be handling. Of course I am no programmer so perhaps this old engine has some issues with doing full shadow maps, but I see no reason why at least static meshes cannot render shadow maps. Example screenshots how you can tell what's Stencil shadows vs Shadow Maps, Shadow setting is Ultra: All Shadow maps: http://imageshack.us/a/img829/3832/2013050500001.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img703/4215/2013050500004r.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img838/4058/2013050500005.jpg All Stencil shadows: http://imageshack.us/a/img703/6167/2013050500003.jpg http://imageshack.us/a/img689/3281/2013050500006.jpg Mixed both: http://imageshack.us/a/img841/8424/2013050500002.jpg You can tell the difference in that Stencil shadows have hard, often heavily aliased edges where as Shadow maps have soft blurred edges, which is much more realistic. Another problem with Stencil shadows aside from the fact that they are just another form of wasted CPU cycles, is that they do not function nearly as well as Shadow maps do. For instance, standing underneath a street lamp casting a Stencil shadow, does not have the shadow cast on my first person player model. Example: Standing under street lamp, shadow over my body and gun, no shadow visible in first person: http://imageshack.us/a/img543/7227/2013050500007.jpg Standing under tree, shadow map of branches and leaves appear on my gun: http://imageshack.us/a/img580/4005/2013050500008.jpg For these reason I ask that BI consider transitioning to full shadow maps on Medium to Ultra settings for the sake of not only offloading work to GPUs, which at the top end of gaming are starved of work because of CPU bottlenecking, but also to cure some visual artifacts that appear when mixing Stencil shadows with Shadow maps. Thank you for reading.

Realize that you're gaining something for nothing, and it becomes a nice free 15 or so free fps. Free performance is always welcome. Besides, they said this is an early implementation and they will continue working on it to increase performance beyond these beta drivers. AND it supports all DX11 cards, not just the latest and greatest like Mantle. Additionally this is a driver API wide boost, affecting games that have long since been released years ago. Mantle on the other hand requires a game be specifically coded for it. Something you'll never see for older games that have had their support killed off years ago. So thank you Nvidia. This driver was a nice surprise and I greatly appreciate the increased smoothness. Although, there is no truly fixing this disaster known as Real Virtuality. Engine is completely FUBAR.

You really think they're going to do anything about the performance of this game after showing that the game has received 0 true optimizations from Alpha? From Arma 2? FROM OP FLASHPOINT, A 2001 GAME!? These guys have no interest in truly increasing performance for their games because they know it would require a heavy re-write of their engine to implement multithreaded rendering. They'd rather save money and time and not bother with this effort, providing an unplayable game in exchange for your hard earned cash. I'm sorry but 30 fps dips on MODEST graphics settings (2km view distance, 1km object distance and LOW object and terrain quality) on a very high end gaming PC (rig specs in signature) is just completely unacceptable. This game could be something else, something truly amazing and open the doors for even better visuals and a more dynamic world. But it requires multithreaded rendering, something Bohemia has no interest in achieving. You guys better get used to that horrible frame-rate. It's working as intended.

Rig in signature, with measly 1.5km view distances and Low object quality, still seeing dips down to like 30-40 fps in any populated active server. The only time I'm able to hit a constant minimum of 60 fps with mostly ultra settings and realistic view distances, is when I'm alone in an empty Stratis editor spawn.

As much as I'd love to see the support for it, I highly doubt it. These guys can't even bring their shadow rendering engine into the 21st century yet, let alone add a whole new API to their game.

Outstanding posts tinemem. I think it's all pretty clear right now. There are only 2 realistic reasons why Bohemia Interactive have not as of yet made this fix, which so many players seem to wish for: 1) Artistic decision. They might have some skewed view of what looks good and in their eyes believe that hard aliased sharp shadows make sense in some ways (I only agree for first person models, everything else should be shadow maps) 2) They are being lazy about it. It sounds like it's a good deal of work to go through and enable the hybrid shadowing system for every single model in the game and would require as you said, a sizeable download. This is, again as you stated, a foresight failure on BIS's part. Either way, I am disappointed. But am extremely grateful for your efforts to dig into this where BIS has decided to ignore us.

Precisely christianmo. As you said, for objects in the distance, shadow quality does not need to be perfect. Right now though BIS's implementation limits me to a rather pathetic 200m shadow draw distance. And this may not be critical to infantry, but get in the air and you can see the impact it has quite dramatically. This needs to change. The whole purpose to me pointing out GTA V's dynamic lighting model is to prove that using 100% Shadow Maps can produce a quality dynamic shadowing technique even when rendering shadows at great distances.

You are correct in that not all objects appear to be casting shadows. However take in account the following: 1) Game is made for 720p max resolution consoles 2) Said consoles are equivalent to mid-tier computer systems from 2005 Now correct these 2 things to adjust for top tier computer hardware in 2013, and you start to see why there's no excuse here. Bohemia CAN do what Rockstar did, they just choose not to.

Decided to take a personal screenshot myself showcasing the massive shadow render distance in GTA V. I apologize for the quality as I did it using my own smartphone as a photo of my monitor. Not the best quality but I think it delivers the idea of just how truly incredible long distance shadow rendering is to making a scene come alive: http://imageshack.com/a/img23/3421/3n1h.jpg

Back on the topic of shadows being drawn at distance, yes it is possible and has been done to great effect in Grand Theft Auto V on the 2005 hardware consoles of last gen. The lighting and shadowing in that game blows away Arma's lighting system. BIS already has the implementation of cascaded shadow maps built into the game, the issue is that their particular setup is very weak. Rockstar managed to get hard shadows out to what looks like 1km away and still maintain quality at close and mid range. If they had access to the hardware we do on current PC gaming setups, I'm sure an even more pleasing setup could be achieved with great performance. There's no excuse why shadows have a max distance of 200m in this game. Prior to GTA V's release, I could have said sure that's as far as shadow maps can go and still look good. But when GTA came out in September, my perception on the limitations of shadow maps has changed tremendously. Here's an example comparison I made of GTA 4 vs GTA V. Look at the DRASTICALLY improved shadow casting distance between the two games. Arma 3 only casts out to about 200m which is a little bit further than what GTA 4 renders out to. Now imagine if Arma 3 could render out to 1km+ ? It makes a massive improvement: http://imageshack.com/a/img405/7210/b3yl.png (2689 kB)

One thing the lighting needs severely tweaked is a properly optimized cascaded shadow map setup. The current one is quite bad. http://developer.download.nvidia.com/SDK/10.5/opengl/src/cascaded_shadow_maps/doc/cascaded_shadow_maps.pdf We should be seeing much higher quality shadowing and over a much greater distance than is currently being done. Come on BI, step it up. If Rockstar can get shadow maps out to hundreds of meters away, there's no reason we can't do the same wiht PC hardware in 2013. All you guys need to do is tune up the shadow map cascades and you can increase the distance shadows are rendered from instead of max 200 meters, to max 1000 meters.

If they're using the PhysX SDK... it almost is =/

Wow, they somehow ruined the glare from the headlights. Given how dark the surrounding environment is, those headlights should be blinding. The stable set of screenshots is much closer to how it should look.

I've read a few people's posts in the Alpha section speaking of their texture setting randomly dropping while they play even though the setting still shows what they set it to. Well I can confirm I was experiencing the same thing on my old Radeon 5870 2GB card, and my VRAM usage would max around 1.7GB. Now on my GTX 780 3GB card, with the SAME graphics settings, I'm finding my GPU memory hovering around 2-2.1GB. So what's going on? Is the game really trying to use more and more VRAM and it has to dynamically drop settings without showing us? This is frustrating because I feel like now even with my new card I can't be certain the game isn't dropping my graphics settings without me knowing.

Posts like this make me not even want to load up the game again. I have yet to launch the exe after the Beta ended. Feeling like money wasted.

I feel this picture speaks more than a thousand words: http://imageshack.com/a/img401/9143/2ojo.png (644 kB)

They do negate the need for shadow LODs. If you haven't noticed with the stencil shadows, the player models cast shadows that are nowhere near appropriate for the actual 3D model, obviously this is due to extremely low LOD assets in place to cast stencil shadows. This is because Stencil shadows are EXPENSIVE and they need to optimize it as much as possible. Where-as Shadowmaps generated on the deprived GPU, can cast full quality LOD shadows quite nicely and easily. Sad that they haven't touched on this subject at all since it's been opened up months ago :( Actually it's easy for you to find out that nope they aren't. Here's what you do: - Go to a forest area - Turn Shadows on Ultra - GPU usage should spike quite nicely - Now turn Shadows on Low - GPU usage plummets and in fact your minimum fps should drop a lot due to CPU bottlenecking gg

Altis performance limitation will be on your CPU way before your GTX 570 is the culprit. You'd have to be running an insanely high resolution with good amounts of AA before your GPU bottlenecks. Object Quality, Terrain Quality, View Distances. These are the 3 main settings you need to tweak in order to get great gains in frame-rate. I used to be able to run 5000/2500 view distances with High Terrain and Standard Object and get a solid 60 fps everywhere in Stratis. Now in Altis, this gives me somewhere in the ballpark of 40-50 just about anywhere I go. Only the truly barren areas of the map give me that 60 fps. Forget about cranking everything to Ultra. That's like a disaster waiting to happen to your poor CPU. It makes me wonder: A) What system the devs are playing on if the one in my signature isn't good enough and B) What frame-rates are they actually playtesting at that they think it's acceptable I realize there's a drastic discrepancy between the way one person perceives frame-rate compared to another, but come on, no one can say 20 fps on pure Ultra settings is acceptable for top end gaming PC's.

Ya know, after 3 hours of running a chkdsk /r, I have determined my hard drive is in perfect working condition with no errors or bad sectors. Arma 3 crashed while loading into a black screen, and after ending the process which was doing nothing, I ran the verify integrity of cache in Steam and instantly got hit with 331 invalid files. Unfortunately I could not reacquire the files to fix it, and ended up deleting it. But before deleting it and performing the full chkdsk, I was getting strange glitches with my drive that had Arma 3 installed. Now everything's back to normal and I reinstalled Arma 3 Beta to the same location I had it before, but I am hesitant to try playing it again after what happened before. I did get in once before the weird startup crash and I noticed flying around Altis was causing some SERIOUS hard drive thrashing and frame dips while moving around fast say in an MH-9. Debating not playing at all until the game goes Gold so I can just transfer it to my SSD and not have to worry about the delta patching nuking my daily storage usage :/

Man some of these example shots are just incredible. Great work to the modders trying to improve what BI won't. Which in and of itself kinda bugs me :| have they even officially said anything on this major issue? These default mid-range textures are just... appalling. I mean for a 2013 game come on guys, you can do a lot better as is proven by these modders.

Shhhhh..... they know. Most of the people have been begging to get rain back even if it isn't up to par with the rest of the game in terms of quality. They had disabled it months ago and never really worked on it. Why, I guess to prevent a ton of people complaining about it just like you, but we all realized we'd rather have SOMETHING than nothing. So please, be quiet lol

Man, I've been pushing for pure shadow maps to replace the random stencil shadowed objects, for like 3 months now :( It just isn't worth the glitches and oddness that the ancient tech of Stencil shadows generate. At least give us the option to force full shadow maps instead so we can remove some overhead from the CPU load...

It's nice that we can fully customize the controls to our individual liking, but there really should be a default setup that just uses everything properly.

Wow, really? I'm trying to have legitimate discussion on a major visual change to the game in the dev branch, and it gets buried by discussing silly lines in changelogs? Really? Pettka any response on the changed clouds? They were never mentioned in the dev branch changelog neither when implemented nor removed.

Yes. 19:15 hours on the default date (July 6th 2035 I believe.) The discrepancy in lighting is due to the fact that with the new cloud shading, what you see is 30% overcast coverage. Where-as with the old technique photo I had to up the cloud coverage to 45% to match the cloud consistency. By upping the cloud overcast this has an impact on sun and moon diffuse lighting. It makes the world appear darker. But they are otherwise equal. My point is, to anyone who has paid attention to the development of the clouds since this game hit Alpha, it's obvious that there were two stages of Cloud changes, the original that lasted for months, and the new technique which had an extremely short lifetime and was reverted 2 days ago. This is undeniable and really disappointing. I believe I've made my proof quite clear and am now directing my attention towards the other side of this discussion: What happened? Why the revert? I seriously hope it was only a temporary revert while work is done to fix the sunrise bug with the new technique. I have never seen such beautiful cloud shading in a videogame with 24 hour day-night cycles as I have these new clouds. I can't see why all that work for such a massive improvement would just be dumped in the garbage without even so much as a dev branch changelog mention... quite depressing.