Sneakson

Yeah, this sort of tweak always needs some investigating to see who it applies to because it usually isn't everyone. Playing ARMA on cores that aren’t doing much else instead of the system cores makes some sort of sense however you’re going to have to be a bit more specific. Is changing affinities the exactly only thing you’re doing? Start game, low fps, enter task manager, set affinity, enter game, high fps? Also: resolution, background programs and do a serious stress benchmark through Showcase: Helicopters.

No, asking a game developer why he has been sitting on his ass not doing anything is obnoxious because that's obviously not the case and uploading pictures of everything they eat isn't really going to help anyone.

Your graphics card decent but indeed not strong. I’d investigate this with a 4770K, GTX 770 and GTX 560 Ti (6950 with 1GB VRAM) but I don’t think I’ll have my computer done until this weekend with some nice luck. If i7s could do some trick with their virtual cores that could mean a significant shift to recommending i7s over i5s instead of strongly doing the opposite as I would without having investigated this more and if it could apply to i5s or other CPUs too that would obviously be significant as well as players only interested in ARMA only having to stick with their old graphics cards or buying some cheap 660 would save them some money if correct. By the way 40 fps isn’t “smooth†really, but with maximum settings it’s quite great. Again though: in what resolution? I’ll remain sceptical and tweaks like this usually don’t work universally but if you claim you can play the game max in around 40 fps on a moderately strong CPU and just decent graphics card that sounds very interesting indeed.

You have my interest, but I'm quite skeptical. What it sounds like to me that you're doing is limiting the game to 4 cores? Does it matter which? By the way this may or may not be related: have you tried comparing your hyper-threading performance with non-hyper performance? In most games according to the tests I’ve seen disabling hyper-threading makes games run better. It sounds like to me that you’re doing basically the same thing here by limiting the game to 4 cores which is something I haven’t really ever heard of before however you’re putting it on the 4 virtual cores instead of the 4 physical cores. I’m really no CPU master and don’t know exactly what you’re doing and why you’re having better performance and if this could be usable to all i7 users. Sounds somewhat interesting though. Also, a lot of users have screwed up definitions of maxing and smooth. Are you running the game with all maximum settings including what draw distance and in what resolution and finally in what framerate according to Fraps measured through Showcase: Infantry (only in-game fps*)? *= Only measure in-game. Stop measurements before opening the menu or when you die and some sort of menu or loading screen appears and absolutely don’t measure when you tab out of the game and such. Use a Fraps hotkey to enable or disable measurements.

Stop being obnoxoius. You know nothing of BIS working conditions or personal lives.

Someone said AI retreat in Showcase: Infantry is dynamic but I think that sounds like bullshit pretty much. Because they always retreat.

More likely a Windows thing than an ARMA bug.

Which you say without having much evidence really. I want to see numbers before I advice people to buy a 760 instead of any stronger graphics card if all they're gonna do is play ARMA anyways. Naturally everyone should get a 4670K or something similar, but question is if they have an extra $139 lying around should they upgrade to a 770 or will a 760 4GB, extra RAM, a better or bigger SSD, cooler chassis or more efficient power supply be better value. Or should they absolutely not spend it at all?

I doubt it. In Alpha post-processing did a big number on the framerate but now it doesn't do anything. Sounds like improvement to me.

Yeah. Some people's been complaining about it though.

Aaah! Afterburner can't be started/paused with a hotkey? That's why Fraps is still leading I guess. The Haswell lottery mostly only affects overclocking what I hear by the way and 4670K=4770K in terms of power in gaming and ask anyone they will tell you a 4X70K won't bottleneck any combination of cards. I don't know the basis behind it and never seen anyone elaborate on it but on serious overlcocking sites it's not like one or two people will say it -- everyone will. Based on my own experiences using a 3 year older CPU than graphics card and the fact that you’re using one of the currently strongest CPUs available to consumers coupled with the weakest card of this generation which basically equals a year-old 660 Ti... Well so anyways I'm not sure about ARMA in specific... could be a monster game that really only runs on CPU. But a i7-3820 which is probaly 10% weaker than a 4670K/4770K can handle tri-SLI of Titans in games like Battlefield 3 and graphics-intensive games but in Skyrim for example it didn't do much... But that ARMA would be so CPU-intensive a 4670K couldn’t handle a 660 Ti... doubtful. Anyways I guess we could try coordinating some benchmarking when I get my 4770K/770 to see if there's a lick of difference soon. Maybe they’ll an an official benchmark soon.

No. The current ladder animation if it's still like in the video is shit and greatly immersion breaking not to mention confusing and unrealistic all at the same time... It's not unimportant.

Well I really don't know how well that CPU performs in gaming but a 560 Ti, 660 or 660 Ti should be more than enough... and that should bring it up to around standard-high settings in 40-60+ fps I guess. Upgrading both CPU and GPU at the same time would be the best and would probably need a motherboard change too but without having seen what RAM you have exactly I guess they're fine... maybe a power supply change too. I can't really tell what it is you have. Isn’t a laptop, no? Anyways a new CPU costs about $220 on Amazon, a 660 Ti $210, 560 Ti $140 and motherboard maybe around $100... power supply about $66 if that's needed. Memories don’t make much of a difference mostly.

Yay. 4670K and 760 with 4GB RAM is just what we need to see benchmarked. However your methodology is strange. The settings don’t look like default settings, right? And anti-aliasing and ATOC are always on lol! I would like to see every default setting with view distance manually set to something like 1600/800 (std. default? 1600/1200?) which is Stratis ground-relevant and maybe double that or something more high-end. Even if default settings are pretty poorly optimized I think they’re a good place to start before you settle in somewhere in-between settings and start tweaking until you’ve got a balance you like. Also I would dispute anything you say about the graphics card being so strong that a stronger graphics card would not matter much until I’ve seen a 4X70K with a 770 and 4GB RAM which I’ll be getting in a week hopefully ;) Then we’ll see. Also you should have written the average readings from Afterburner, they’re right under the graphs. Averages are more important than minmax AFAIK. Oh and by the way: The CPU is working nicely at 93% and your graphics card at 100%... then you turn up your AA which I guess is calculated by the graphics card and the graphics card starts crying tears of blood pretty much but the CPU actually slows way down to 70% usage? What does that even mean? Did it shift gears?

Hard to tell. Okay CPU but 8 cores which may not work well since ARMA only uses a couple efficiently... and the graphics card is weak... I would say no. It will probably run with SOME settings but it won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be smooth. Too bad Alpha is over so you can’t have an invitation and try it out easily. Maybe there will be a demo when the game comes out.

It says infractions 1/3 (5) so it looks like he probably complains about it a lot. Anyways measuring CPU-intensity versus GPU-intensity is difficult. But I guess they do it by measuring CPU and GPU activity and changing between a strong CPU and weak GPU then weaker CPU and stronger GPU until they strike some sort of balance when both are working at about 100%... I hear bottleneckig is hardly even an issue nowadays anyways so I wouldn’t really support the notion of extra CPU-intensive games anyways.

Hmmm no :) No combination of graphic card bottlenecks a 4770K to my knowledge. Even quad-Titans supposedly won’t bottleneck a 4770K. New CPUs are much, much stronger than any graphics card out at the same time and should be since you will use it 5-10 years. Graphics cards almost always bottleneck CPUs other than in extreme cases is what I’ve been told anyways for example when the graphics card is several years newer than the CPU is. Also ARMA 3 does not SLI well. However I can’t say if the posts you’ve read are right or he is right. Many things matter such as singleplayer versus multiplayer, other specs, maybe tweaks, background programs, badly scripted scenarios and who knows what else. Can’t wait to get my own 4770K so I can verify how well it runs :p

If we can have 90% scaling that would be a great win for SLI-users obviously.

Doesn't say it's an exclusively alpha thread anywhere... all subforums here had their names changed from Alpha to Beta without changing any content as you probably know to all alpha threads are now beta threads. Also people still use it so it’s obvious it discusses the beta since noone is still playing the alpha, I'd assume.

Graphics card matters more in that case. And it’s a 780 which is pretty beastly.

SteelSeries Sensei isn’t ergonomic but is one of the advanced mice out there. Also check out Corsair, Logitech, Mad Catz, Microsoft, Mionix, Razer, Roccat, Zowie… DeathAdder, Mamba, RAT7, RATM and Naos 8200 are some I’ve considered. Mouse mats: SteelSeries QcK+... or Razer Goliathus if you wanna pay two-three times more ofcourse. Hard mats wear out and they wear out your mouse so I can’t recommend one. I'm no mouse expert though. Not sure which have the best sensors, super-small amounts of acceleration and wouldn't agree optical is the way to go like some other maniacs do.

Well clock rate is essential for anything. What makes ARMA3 different? Heavily CPU-bound makes it sound like you’re not going to need a strong graphics card to play the game well. But with all the heavy graphics settings I wouldn’t think that’s true really. And it’s not like any graphics card coupled with a strong CPU is not going to make an improvement anyways. I guess most relevant is someone using an old CPU with a brand new graphics card... you don’t really hear anyone doing that though. And I’m not sure if that would work out well in any game. All in all I’ve never really seen enough numbers to agree that there are more CPU-bound and more GPU-bound games to any big extent and testing it is difficult since it requires at least a couple of different CPUs and graphics cards from different generations in the same place at the same time for comparison. In a while I’ll be getting a high-end system and probably will have both a medium system and that at the same time for a while so then I might try out what happens when you use a 40% strength CPU or a 56% GPU in a system… But that probably wouldn't say much anyways.

Okay, first of all: do these parameter things actually make any difference what so ever? I would strongly discourage anyone from using tweaks that have no evidence of ever working. I tried changing to a Windows basic theme without Aero, mono-colour desktop background, all Windows control panel appearance settings to performance, all NVidia control panel settings to performance and running Razer Game Booster using all tweaks and manually shutting down extra processes that brought down my processes from 70 to like 50 and physical memory by 10% or something such and all of this resulted in no measureable difference in-game. This was not running an exact-same-every-time benchmark so there’s some margin of error but only around some fps and my system is only medium strength. Second: CPU being bottlenecked by GPU is absolutely more likely than the other way around. Third: massively CPU bound? Based on what I’ve heard from users with various systems ARMA isn’t as CPU-intense as one might think at all. Fourth and fifth I would like to see some measurements of core usage on various core systems and also see how much RAM the game uses in different resolutions because I can imagine 4GB (3.25GB) RAM being enough for 1920x1080. FPS during multiplayer is the biggest thing BIS have to work against right now unfortunately. Additionally CPUs typically should stay below 72 degrees but I think it’s 80 for most graphics cards however memories can run at close to 100 degrees constantly without any issues. Also: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?147391-Will-my-PC-run-this-What-CPU-GPU-to-get-What-settings-What-System-Specifications It's better people go there to ask about their settings which usually is what's wrong when they have slow fps. I’ve been thinking about doing an entire series of this type of thread in an easy-to-follow way around the retail release but I think all information in it should have hard evidence.

Well that's why people should buy Intel not AMD then :x

You guys should check out my settings. What do you mean? A 5-year non-overclocked CPU and 2-year low-end graphics card strength-wise can only run a game in 40-60+ fps on standard-ish settings in a brand new game and you’re surprised? Welcome to PC gaming, you must be new here. Newer systems have no issues running it.