Mellonpopr

same problem with latest dev build and .6 or .7 version of the benchmark tool

very nice work, you've got talent for sure. Do you plan on bringing that into amra 3 at some point?

I did have my eye on the much cheaper 670 but I think the 780 will last me quite a bit longer and it comes with 3gb or DDR5 IIRC. 650.00 is a lot of money but it's nearly as fast as the 1000.00 titan and 690. Later I can add another 780 to the mix and scale up as needed.

I agree and it's strange. at lower resolutions x720 I get very good FPS without much detail turned on, somewhere in the 60-80's on average and GPU usage is 35%. But the game doesn't look very good. When I run a higher resolution such at x1080 it drops to 40-60fps on average with the same detail settings and the game looks much better. My GPU usage goes to about 60% on each. I don't understand why the FPS drops 20 in this scenario if the GPU usage hasn't gotten anywhere near 100%. I've logged everything and I'm staying well under my memory size and verified that the cooling is working properly, the core and memory clock rates do not drop. I even watched CPU usage, it's the same at both resolutions. The only thing I can think of is that maybe the memory size is okay but the speed is not?? I wish I had a newer card to pop in and test with. I really don't want to shell out 650.00 for the GTX 780 I'm looking at and find out that in THIS game it makes no difference.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2012/-20-Crysis-II,3175.html

allow the game to handle the 3d settings

I loaded up a multiplayer match and saw on average of about 50% GPU usage from both cards and about 650mb memory usage. Not sure why it's only half of what I was seeing for GPU usage in the single player campaign. Now I'm confused. I have a i7 950 running at 4ghz and a GTX 460 in SLI with 50% GPU usage with standard video settings at 1080p getting 60-80fps in the better parts of the map. I'm happy with that but with the GPU at only 50% each, does that mean i'm still hitting a CPU limiting factor?

ok, that confirms what I suspected about the memory limitation and likely explains why I can't turn on the higher quality and resolution without killing fps. At the lower resolutions the demand on the GPU/Memory is lessened and the CPU is doing most of the work. I think my next upgrade in light of the new information should be a video card but I'm still puzzled as to why the 4 cores on the CPU aren't working very hard. Maybe if I loaded it up with bots it would make a difference. ---------- Post added at 23:12 ---------- Previous post was at 23:00 ---------- Instead of staying at the splash screen I loaded up a scenario and the GPU usage skyrocketed to 90+% on both cores. The CPU usage remains the same. Now that the GPU usage was very high I began experimenting with GPU clock speed and memory speed. Memory speed had no effect on FPS but clock speed on the GPU going from 700 to 800 added another 10fps. I'm not sure it's stable there for gaming but it does show that a faster video card would benefit me.

I just tried that command again, it makes no difference. I've not seen any documentation that suggests certain tasks are assigned to difference cores, only people wishing it would do that so that their other cores were utilized more. ---------- Post added at 22:04 ---------- Previous post was at 21:57 ---------- I was playing at 720p to get better fps at the expense of looks when I was at 3ghz, and now that I'm at 4ghz (overclocked) I raised it to 1080p resolution to see if anything changed. The CPU usage remains the same 80/30/20/30 area, the GPU usage went from 35% on each to around 65%, the FPS dropped 20. Why did the fps drop 20 if neither GPU or CPU is being being overwhelmed. Would that be a GPU memory limitation? each card has 1gb of ram if I remember correctly but I'm not sure if SLI would add that together.

here's a pic of my cpu/gpu usage while playing. The only time I see higher cpu usage is when the game is loading, at that point all 4 cores go to 100% until the first game screen is loaded, then it drops to what you see in the picture below which is 80-90% on core one and the rest in the 30's and 20's. The average CPU usage between the 4 cores is only 39% http://i.imgur.com/3oI25yQ.png

it's a asus rampage III formula motherboard with 4gb of G.Skill DDR3 which is 1600 if I remember correctly. ---------- Post added at 21:27 ---------- Previous post was at 21:23 ---------- yes, with extreme overclocking which I'm not interested in doing just to run one game properly. I've only overclocked mine 1ghz more temporarily. ---------- Post added at 21:29 ---------- Previous post was at 21:27 ---------- I just disabled the 2nd SLI card, GPU usage for core 1 went from 35% to 66%, core 2 went from 35% to 0%. FPS in game was not affected either way. I normally use HT at 3ghz and was earlier at 3.7ghz, it had no affect on FPS since the virtual cores aren't being used at all in arma 3. To run 4ghz and keep the heat in check, I turned off HT for stability. No arma command lines being used, I tried countless combinations and came to the conclusion that they don't have any real fps effect for ARMA 3, I suspect it was an ARMA 2 thing.

at 4ghz fps is up about 10, cpu and gpu usage look about the same. again, lowering the GPU core/memory speeds in half made no different to FPS. I've been on the fence about whether to get a new cpu or new graphics card and it seems for this game the CPU is my bottleneck and unless I'm getting a new CPU that can do 5ghz (there's no such thing), it's pretty much pointless.

I just did an interesting test...my system is a I7 950 3.0ghz overclocked to 3.7ghz currently. Dual GTX 460's in SLI. CPU usage on core 1 is about 80%, the usage on core 2, 3 and 4 are about 30%. My GPU usage is 35%. I lowered my GPU core clock speed and memory speed to half and my GPU usage went up to about 50%. The interesting thing is that the frame rate was exactly the same. That confirms that in my setup the limiting factor is the CPU at 3.7ghz and only core 1 being used mostly. I'm going to overclock further to 4ghz and see how that affects the FPS and GPU usage.

this is good information, thanks for sharing. my gpu usage is low, 35% area so with your explanation that would mean that my CPU is too slow. The problem isn't the CPU though, it's only at 60% on the first core, the rest are nearly dormant. The reason the CPU isn't running to it's full potential is the game engine, it's not utilizing the multi-core properly and that in turn may be why the GPU is waiting on it and is also under utilized as well. running a higher clock speed cpu helps because you're improving the performance of the 1st core of the cpu, the rest aren't doing much of anything for you. If the game used all 4 cores to their full extent, you wouldn't need more clock speed as a crutch.

yes but these game are really demanding for the wrong reason, not because they are incredible advancements in technology, but because they aren't utilizing the hardware properly and because the developers are trying to milk another game out of the same old tired engine instead of fixing the real problem. I wish you were right and the final version will have full SLI and Multi-core support but I don't think that's going to be the case. No developer has said it will be so why do you think it will?

if a 3.7ghz quad core cpu causes a bottlekneck that holds up the SLI video card, don't you think that's a major problem with a game? It's stock clock is 3.0, it's already pushed up 700mhz to help. Should I need a 4ghz cpu to run this game with decent frame rate?

I would prefer that the game be fixed rather than everyone be required to get a 4ghz+ processor and top of the line video card. I think you're forgetting the fact that the number one reported item on the bug tracker is very poor utilization of multi-core cpu/sli. There are countless people like me reporting 50-60% cpu usage on core 1 with 30% or no usage of the other cores and Sli cards showing 30% usage which is causing the dismal frame rate. Obviously if those were fully utilized then we would have good frame rates. Going majorly overkill on cpu/video card upgrades is like putting a band-aid over a punctured lung. It's not addressing the real problem.

multiple reasons: 1 - at one time the gtx 460 was a top of the line card, eventually games become more demanding and you simply add another 460 to the mix and get double the performance. Now it performs on par with a GTX 580 which is a little slower than a GTX 670 2 - two sli cards can be faster than a single top of the line card. for example SLI GTX 670 is faster than a single GTX 690 and the twin cards are cheaper. in a perfect world we'd all have top of the line cards but that does little good without a top of the line processor, memory and motherboard etc... I was pricing a new system out and it's looking like 1000-1500 to get what I want. It's tempting but then I say to myself, all of that just to play a single game doesn't make much sense when other current games run at higher resolution with better details and get better frame rate on existing hardware.

yep, my son and I ran into this too. yesterday I got stuck running diagonally

ok, can you answer the question about the SLI part of it and ignore the cpu part? "has there been any communication with the video card hardware vendors on the subject? if so, what's being done about it? any idea when a fix will be implemented?"

to anyone else that wants to dismiss the problem, read through this, it is the #1 problem being reported on the feedback tracker. I may not have the fastest rig out there but like I said before it plays all of my other games worlds better and I'm certain that's because they utilize a much higher percentage of my cpu/gpu http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=716

has there been any communication with the video card hardware vendors on the subject? if so, what's being done about it? any idea when a fix will be implemented? also, what's being done about the multi core CPU problems? by looking through the countless posts/threads on this subject and by monitoring my own pc it seems clear that arma 3 is under utilizing the video card and processor which is causing dismal performance in game compared to other games. Personally I'm seeing ~35% GPU usage from each of my Nvidia GTX 460 in SLI and 65% on the first of my 4 core I7 950 3ghz cpu with the other cores being used at a fraction of that. Knocking down video resolution from 1920 to 720 improved the fps about 20 and overclocking the CPU to 3.7ghz picked up another 15-20fps. I also turned off or set features to their lowest options to pick up a few more fps here and there. That is how I've been able to get decent frame rate but of course the video quality suffers greatly to do this. Average FPS in MP is about 50-60 but still dives into the 20's and hangs out there often which is pretty brutal at times.