Brisse

64-bit finally allows me to drive through or fly over big towns and cities. Previously the game would stutter to the point where I lost control of my vehicles and crash into objects, even with low default settings for view distance. Crazy eh? Never thought I would be able to do basic stuff like that, and after all these years, a fix finally comes along. I strongly disagree. :)

It's not an Arma issue. TrackIR need to update their software as it's not currently aware of the new executable. This is always the case with TrackIR when any supported game is updated to 64-bit.

They need to know for certain that 64-bit is stable first. They probably already thought of making 64-bit default further down the line, but it's too early at this point. I played some more with 64-bit executable earlier today. 99th-percentile frame times are objectively better and the subjective experience agree with that. It feels smother and that's very good news because it's not the average frame-rates that's been bothering me about Arma3, but the occasional stuttering and unstable frame-rates. Not seen any bugs or unexpected behaviour yet on my end.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the 64-bit executable is for raising the memory limits to make room for future content and memory heavy mods, so I don't expect any change in performance in the vanilla game as of now. Benchmarks are still interesting though, so here we go: Specs: Fx-8350 @ 4.4GHz R9 Fury 16GB DDR3 @ 1333MHz Win 10 Scenario: Helicopter ride at the beginning of showcase Combined Arms Application Name Date and Time Average FPS Average frame time (ms) 99th-percentile frame time (ms) arma3.exe 20161213-195016 55.3 18.1 32.5 arma3_x64.exe 20161213-195328 55.7 17.9 31.4

Yes, magnified optics is a different story.

Not necessarily. First time I mounted a red dot optic during basic training, we were told to mount them far forward. You quickly realize the benefits of this after getting used to it. The sight doesn't take up as much of your field of view which lets you use it with both eyes open so you have good depth perception while still being able to see your surroundings which really helps with situational awareness. That's how they are intended to be used and it doesn't work very well if the optic is too close to your eye because then the housing of the optic will obstruct your other eye too much. Also, having it mounted forward helps with night vision googles compatibility.

Request: Add option to set monitor refresh rate in video settings (and/or the game launcher) Currently, I believe this can only be achieved by modifying "Arma3.cfg", which some people might find inconvenient. Okay, you could argue that this will be useless for most users, but there are some of us who need to run non default refresh rate to get the best game experience.

Depends on how you define "lucky". The thing is that most Intel PC's seemed to be able to achieve playable framerates even before this update, while the AMD-rigs could not run Tanoa at all due to the insane stuttering. As soon as things started moving I dropped into the unplayable tens and twenties. This update just brought me up to the same level as other people, which means I can now usually achieve 40-60fps in the Tanoa wilderness. Not sure how that's "lucky".

Anything more than 800 and the game becomes unplayable on the FX-series CPU's, and that's not just Tanoa, but also Altis and Stratis. It's always been like that, and it still is. I'm sure they can override the object distance for certain object. I remember the lighthouse on Stratis is visible waaaay beyond 800.

Please do something to the bridges. I hate seeing them appear piece by piece right in front of my eyes.

LOD switching is a big step forward. Not only does it look much better, but I also had a huge performance increase that turned the game from unplayable to playable in Tanoa wilderness, but sadly, I still can't achieve playable framerate in towns (drops into the tens and twenties). FX-8350 @4.6GHz 16GB DDR3 @1333MHz CL9 R9 290X Game and OS running from 850 EVO 500GB SSD View distance: 2000 Object distance: 800 Shadow distance: 100 Objects quality: Low

Oh for f*** sake. And here I thought you might be more reasonable than all the other hardcore Arma fans that will defend the games performance issues to their death. For every argument you give, and can think of one or more counter arguments, such as: "Phenom II x4 980 there have been no real improvements" Just plain wrong. True, gaming performance hasn't changed much in titles with few threads, but multi threaded games has seen large improvements. Also, I don't just play games on my rig. One example is video encoding. I can encode 1080p video at more than 100fps with my FX-8350, which is competitive with mid to high end Skylake processors.Try that with a Phenom II X4 (which I did own many years ago by the way). I bet it doesn't even achieve half of that speed. "The cause being choices being made by AMD in processors architecture" Poor choices for gaming perhaps, but they have actually been really competitive in productivity tasks, especially if you consider the performance per $, with the AMD processors beating out Intel CPU's costing twice, sometimes tripple the money. "Here is a display of average benchmarks results of 8 games : Crysis 3, Arma3, X-Plane 10, F1 2013, Watch Dogs, Total War : Rome 2, Company of Heroes, Anno 2070 :" Think about this for a second: All of those games are perfectly playable and enjoyable on my rig, unlike Arma 3. That pretty much invalidates the point you were trying to make. "You are not the only player lured to AMD based "Gamer" rigs by marketing sirens' song" I am perfectly happy with my current PC, thank you very much. Also, it isn't just built for gaming. It's supposed to be able to do anything I need it to do, which includes several productivity tasks. I don't build my PC's based on what the marketing campaigns tell me. I build them based on real world performance per dollar, efficiency, sound and heat output, features, quality, stability etc... Also: I will not ever let Arma 3 influence my choices when it comes to picking PC parts, because it isn't representative of any other software besides itself. One should only do that if Arma 3 is the only thing you do with your PC. That will never be the case for me, so Arma 3 is completely irrelevant when I pick parts. "Some game must be played at a high level of FPS, it's not Arma* case." The criteria I posted were specifically meant for Arma 3. If I had been talking about CSGO I would have said "stable 144fps minimum, no stuttering". "Arma* is a "slow" game, infantry based with a tactical orientation mostly fought in short range firing exchange or CQB fight." That is definitely not an excuse for poor performance. Quite the opposite actually. I can't even begin to think about how many times I've spotted an enemy in my peripheral view, and try to move my cross-hair over him, and instead of being met with reliable, consistent, and predictable response from the game, I'm met with huge stuttering. When the stuttering stops, I'm already dead. Arma 3 is no different than any other shooter in this regard. It's just that some players have gotten used to putting up excuses for issues that shouldn't exists. The stuttering definitely hurts game-play in Arma 3. Not just infantry game-play, but also things such as driving a vehicle. Stuttering has actually made me crash vehicles, leading to the destruction of the vehicle, and injured or killed passengers. Stuff like that is among the most frustrating things you can stumble upon in gaming. "Over 30 FPS, the game is quite playable." It could have been, but the thing is, Arma 3 doesn't just plague us with low frame-rates. It combines low frame-rate with very irregular rendering times for each individual frame, making everything so much worse. It's what I mean when I say stuttering.

It's a good thing someone decided to make a thread like this. In my opinion, the current minimum and recommended specs for the Windows build are fraud. Yes, you can start the game on a PC like that but it will not run well enough to be enjoyable, or even playable. I've been playing the game since alpha and put more than 1300h (no idea how I put up with the games issues during all those hours, but it's been frustrating) into it. This is what I have to say so far about the experience on my PC which is an FX-8350, R9 290X, 16GB DDR3 and SSD storage for both the game and OS: Altis and Stratis is playable as long as you stay away from Kavala, complex scenarios, and multiplayer. Are those acceptable conditions for a PC which surpasses the recommended specs by a large margin? NO! Tanoa release candidate is not playable in any way currently. I use modest settings, and I am especially restrictive with the view distance and object distance which I usually set to 2000m and 800m which makes the game playable but unpleasant to look at, with objects (including soldiers and vehicles) popping in well within engagement distance which hurts game-play badly. Are those acceptable terms for a PC which surpasses the recommended specs by a large margin? NO! I define enjoyable as 60+ fps without stuttering. Playable is 50+ fps with only occasional stuttering. When I say unplayable above, the game constantly drops below 30 and stutters badly with not only low, but also very irregular frame-rate. Is that acceptable for a PC which surpasses the recommended specs by a large margin? NO! The FX-8350 is one of the fastest AMD chips currently offered to consumers, yet I cannot enjoy the game properly with it. Is that a CPU issue? NO! It's a game optimization issue. Look. Beats out the i7-4790K in multi threaded performance! The FX-8350 is no slouch! It plays any game perfectly fine except Arma3. The recommended system specs for CPU should be something like: Intel: i7-2600 or better AMD: NOT COMPATIBLE

Most weapons should be capable of that though. Most car engines have been made of aluminium blocks for decades now. It's a very soft material compared to what bullet cores are made of. Most small arms should cut through them like a hot knife through butter.

Also, top speed is way to slow (currently 60km/h). Should be about twice as fast. Both the PWC and the RHIB currently have horribly awkward, buggy and unauthentic handling.

Vanilla content was criticized for being too futuristic. With Apex, I think that critique is even more relevant than with vanilla content. Of course, that doesn't apply to all the content (AK's etc...), but it does apply to a large chunk of it. Also, while you are doing AK's, why no AKS-74? All the normal size AK's are 7.62 and only the 74U is 5.45 :( I would like to see some normal size AK's chambered for 5.45mm.

Framerates on Tanoa are just as unplayable as on Altis, even though I'm not even testing real gameplay. Just placed down a quadbike and drove around on an empty Tanoa, and I can't even manage to drive safely because the framerate is so bad. I'm using modest settings on a fairly powerful machine. If this is what BI consider their Apex, then it's probably time for me to abandon Arma for good. Nice content (Tanoa seems like a lovely place), but still unplayable thanks to the ancient technology it's built upon. Can't even imagine how badly it will run during proper gameplay if it doesn't even manage 25fps during a ride on a quadbike in an empty playspace. FX-8350 @ 4,6 GHz / R9 290X / 16GB DDR3 / SSD storage <--- Not exactly a potato. Manages any game I can throw at it except Arma3. Theoretically, it exceeds Arma 3 minimum and recommended specs with a huge margin. These are the recommended specs listed on Steams Arma 3 page: Processor:Intel Core i5-2300 or AMD Phenom II X4 940 or better Memory:4 GB RAM Graphics:NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 or AMD Radeon HD 7750 with 1 GB VRAM or better Can't even imagine playing the game on a machine like that. Sure, it might launch and display an image or two, but will be it enjoyable? Hell no...

That is exactly what I expected, and no surprise at all. Do I mind? No, not really... DX12 hasn't impressed me in any other game, so why would it work in Arma, which is so limited by other stuff besides the rendering pipeline.

Actually, I'm working on that right now. I just made a 60s benchmark during showcase fire from vehicles on dev version, and I'm going to do the same on RC as soon as download is done. I like to use some of the showcases as benchmarks as some of them start off with a helicopter ride where you don't have to make any player input. I plan to put both benchmarks in the same frametime graph and I hope it will clearly show the stuttering on devbranch. Edit: Damn. I didn't get the stuttering in this scenario, except one big stutter just before frame 200, but that doesn't prove anything. Devbranch even ran slightly better than RC in this case. I wish I could find a scenario that properly displays the issue, but honestly, I'm tired of changing branches and downloading 2gb of data every time, so I will probably throw in the towel here. Edit 2: On the other hand, this benchmark does show how bad the game runs, even in a vanilla scenario. It starts off at around 25ms which is barely playable, and then rises towards 50ms which is completely unplayable. PC is above recommended specs, and lowering the graphics options doesn't help me. See previous posts for full PC specs and graphics options. This next graph is an unfair comparison, but I wanted to put it here anyway to show what an ideal case looks like. Note the very different scale of the Y-axis and that I'm capping the framerate to 60fps.

The one I made earlier in the thread was made with Fraps and LibreOffice. https://forums.bistudio.com/topic/143930-general-discussion-dev-branch/?p=3006753 In Fraps, go to the FPS tab and check "Frametimes" under "Benchmark settings". It will write everything to a spreadsheet when you run the benchmark ingame. Then I open the spreadsheet in LibreOffice5. There are two columns, "Frame" and "Time (ms)". You need to add a third, which is "deltaT (ms)". It needs to contain the following formula: "=B3-B2". Then just extend that column all the way down so every frame is included. That's all the preparations you need. Now you can simply make a graph and you are done.

It looks unlikely that we will ever see dx12 in Arma 3 at all, much less Asynchronous Shaders.

We all love BI and we love the game, and that's exactly why we are on devbranch, testing and reporting the issues we come across. Don't tell me to be "patient", or "this is devbranch, expect issues". Yes, this is devbranch, and that's exactly why we make an effort to test and report any issues that we come across. If you are one of those handful of people trying to sabotage that effort, just stop. I'd like to clarify one thing related to the performance issue I'm having. Some people here seem to be testing static scenes (like main menu, or just standing still staring at something). That's wrong, you won't see any issues there. When my camera or avatar is not moving, everything is fine as usual. It's when things start moving that I get much more stuttering than usual, and as I said, it seems to be related to objects being loaded/unloaded, because it gets worse in areas with a lot of objects. It can be something as simple as turning my ingame head 90 degrees to the side, and I get mega-stuttering while doing it. It is so bad it often makes the game unplayable. If an enemy soldier happens to be standing there and I need to engage him, I turn towards him, get a mega-stutter, and at the time my monitor starts receiving new frames again, I'm already dead. That makes it a critical issue in my opinion. It's the sort of thing that causes rage-quits, as it doesn't feel like the game is being fair towards you. ***Got a warning for this post and had it removed by a mod the first time. Since I only had good intentions, and believe I'm not breaking any rules, I'm now posting it again, slightly edited. Thanks so much for removing my feedback and my expression for how much I love the game. Great work mods***

No. The game is not running as it should, and here's the evidence. The hardware is FX-8350 @4,6GHz, R9 290X and latest AMD driver. Obviously I'm running a frame-rate limiter at 60fps. AND NO, OF COURSE I'M NOT RUNNING ANY MODS. YOU THINK I'M AN IDIOT? Yes, I probably am (Want proof? Look at how I used caps in the last sentence), but I'm not running any mods and I never do while providing devbranch feedback, because that would be so stupid there are no words to describe it. Edit: My settings were the usual, which are as follows: fullScreenWidth=2560; fullScreenHeight=1440; refresh=120; renderWidth=2560; renderHeight=1440; multiSampleCount=4; multiSampleQuality=0; particlesQuality=2; GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1000; GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1; HDRPrecision=16; vsync=0; AToC=15; cloudsQuality=4; pipQuality=3; dynamicLightsQuality=4; PPAA=8; ppSSAO=8; ppCaustics=1; tripleBuffering=0; waterSSReflectionsQuality=1; ppBloom=1; ppRotBlur=0; ppRadialBlur=0; ppDOF=0; ppSharpen=1; View distance: 4000 Object distance: 800 Shadow distance: 200

Why are so many people coming here and trying to undermine constructive feedback regarding framerate? It adds nothing to the discussion and only serves to drown the reports that are actually worth something. When something is obviously wrong with the game, we come here and report it. Being undermined by other users who have nothing to say otherwise, is not appreciated at all. Sorry for the rant. I tried to report a lot of posts for being off topic, but that didn't seem to help, so there you go...

I have also been bothered by increased stuttering after the visual update. Instantaneous framerate is not worse than before, and water reflections didn't seem to have a negative impact, but the thing is that framerate drops during gameplay are much more frequent and much more jarring now than they were before. In between those drops, framerate is as high as it used to be, so I'm not sure what's going on. It seems that the stuttering is at it's worst when you are moving and lots of distant objects are popping in when they come inside visual range.