Th4d

Thanks for replying. Problem is, initially if you find my server on the browser, it will show as 2500, but if you start your steam with admin priviledges and do it again, it will then show my correct ping, without me doing anything here. That means the ping is being sent/received, but for some reason only people that run steam with admin priviledges on their client side can see the correct value. That hints to me that it´s something client related. I´ve tested this with a couple of friends over the internet and it works like that every time, if they run steam with adm priviledges, they see my servers ping fine. I´ll leave it running for a while (few hours) if you or anyone else cares to put what i said to the test, maybe to people overseas it behaves differently and will give me another clue. Server is found here along with it´s ip http://arma3serverlist.com/server/187.21.255.154-2302/ On the windows firewall i have tcp/udp and icmpv4 incoming all open, and an outbound rule aswell. And on my router i have all the known ports for arma and steam forwarded to the server. It works perfectly as long as the client for whoever is looking at the serverbrowser is running steam with admin priviledges.

I couldn´t figure it out, and noone has no idea apparently so no hosting servers for me.

Heres my issue, what i noticed and how i only partially fixed: I start the server with steam/client/server on the default, then i try to find the server on the client serverbrowser but it shows as ? ping and then 2500. Then i noticed that when i refresh the list several servers on my country, Brasil, appear that way. (I realzied it because of the server names and since despite being ? they are on top of the list before i rearrange it by ping) And here is the thing, if i start the ArmA 3 client with admin compatibility mode, it shows my server with the correct ping: sometimes 0, sometimes around 15, same as ingame. Had a friend enter it, he was about 15-30ms, perfectly fine ping once inside the server. But, the other Brazilian servers continue to show as ? or 2500. And if instead of the client i start steam on admin mode, i can not only see my server with the correct ping, but other servers in Brazil with the correct ping instead of ? or 2500 aswell. Btw, every other server from other nationalities i can see their ping fine, no issues there, also, sometimes there are a couple of Brazilian servers that i can also see without using the admin mode. Now, running it on admin mode fixes the serverbrowser and the hability to see my own server and a few others for me, but still, a couple of my friends said that they only see my server as having 2500 ping. The problema is that it disencourages anyone else to enter it. Is there a way for the server to show the correct ping for everyone else without them using admin mode? It remains the same with windows firewall off and no anti virus. Also, is there a difference between the server that comes with the client and the other one? the files and their behaviour once started seem exactly the same. And sometimes steam doesn´t let me start the client thinking i´m already running it, but it´s the server. Usually happens if i alt-f4 the client and try to run it again. What´s up with that?

Noone? I´ve tried port forwarding and turning off both windows and routers firewall, my servers ping over the internet(gamespy) can only be seen by ArmA 3 clients when the user runs steam on admin priviledges. So the ping is working, but for some reason ArmA 3 somehow because of steam can´t read it unless steam is run with admin priviledges. And this is not happening to just the server i´m trying to host, and at the same time it´s not all of them suffering from it. I´m out of ideas, anyone?

Great post, thanks for taking the time. And i agree that Bohemia might not even have the technical hability to do so, i was reading Maruk´s interview for Operation Flashpoint in which he said that people even forgot how things were implemented in the engine for lack of documentation, and that was during its development. But as is, i simply can´t play the game like i would wan´t it, big vehicle battles with a lot of people online, because i cannot stand playing with 20fps or less and i find 20-30 player missions against AI very boring. So to me the game is broken and need a fix, since it does not deliver what it promises for me, and my gear is far superior to the minimum specs (FX8350, R9 280X, 16GB, 256SSD). But i can also accept that you can enjoy the game both with 20fps or with higher fps on smaller missions with fewer than whats officially suported players (60 VS 60). People´s expectations are very different indeed. Let´s just remember what the minimum specs are: Minimum: OS:Windows Vista SP2 or Windows 7 SP1 Processor:Intel Dual-Core 2.4 GHz or AMD Dual-Core Athlon 2.5 GHz Memory:2 GB RAM There is no way someone with that can play online with more than 15fps. I was watching Jack Frags video on DayZ SA (which supposedly received a massive rework on the ArmA´s engine), he has a 290X gpu and i saw his framerate dipping into lower 15´s while he played, and he even comented on it. "It´s alpha" might be the choice response for my comment, which is exactly what i heard for ArmA 3 before launch, not very promising but lets hope, if they finally optimize their engine somehow for that game i might buy it, but after ArmA 3, this time around i´ll simply wait and see. But again, i do agree with pretty much all you said. And, so far, the ones that announced Mantle support: Cloud Imperium (Star Citizen with cryengine), Eidos (Thief), Oxide (their engine), EA (several) and Square Enix. I´m guessing they know something people here don´t in order to jump in the bandwagon of Mantle, since AMD users are so irrelevant on the desktop market (and apparently isn´t supported on consoles), after all there is an added cost and development time for it, and Cloud Imperium is a small independent developer working with an already "done" engine. Edit.: "Delving deeper into AMD's Mantle API" (more information about the mantle presentation) http://techreport.com/review/25683/delving-deeper-into-amd-mantle-api Edit 2.: Slide presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/DICEStudio/mantle-for-developers

Ad hominem fallacies don´t do anything for me, just makes you sound stupid imho. Anyway, i agree for the most part, but here are my points: 1- Even if we ignore that the percentage of compatible cards will increase a lot because from now on all sold amd cards will be compatible, 3% of the steam userbase as potential buyers is nothing to ignore, steam is huge, would be enough for bohemia to increase their sales tenfold. And i also bet that 90% on that chart already cannot play ArmA online in it´s current state, because of how bad the performance is, there are daily complaints about performance in pretty much every arma discussion anywhere. 2- Star Citizen is being made by a small independent studio backed up with kickstarter money and they already announced they will use Mantle aswell, it´s a no brainer if you care about delivering the best product you can. It´s not just EA already announcing titles with it. Apparently for those inexperienced people that pretty much dominate the gaming industry it is worth it, and i bet EA more than anything only considers how much money they will gain from implementing it. 3- It´s a fact that ArmA performance is bad, no matter what hardware you use, simply blaming servers and user made missions doesn´t solve anything and isn´t a sucessfull way of shifting blame, just read this 200+ pages topic. It isn´t even worth it to mention the necessity of legacy compatibility to older hardware because it´s barely playable on them, noone can play multiplayer with the minimum recommended specs, noone. ArmA fans spent a fortune a trying to run this game with acceptable fps with overclocks and i´m sure they would welcome and even switch to AMD cards if that meant having a significant better performance. Hell i´ve upgraded my pc in the past solely because of ArmA. Some people buy nvidia cards for those apex physx they get for some games, would be the same. My reasoning is very simple "can i make the game i want with current hardware using dx and opengl and give out a great experience with great performance delivering what i promise?" No?, Then mantle it is, unless you can do it some other way but apparently they can´t. In the official webpage for this game they claim you can play a 60 VS 60 player warfare game, and they give out those ridiculous minimum hardware settings, do you believe EA could get away with that? They got pretty beat up with what they did with Sim city and now with BF4, the fallout from bad design choices/skimping on development costs is worse than simply doing it right in the first place. I understand the development cost isn´t small to adapt the engine, but if it´s essencial for them to deliver what they promise on the first place, then there you go, even DICE was humble enough to admit they screwed up and that made EA stock prices fall, losing a lot of money, but there is no going around it when something is wrong, excuses aren´t enough, money will have to be spent one way or another, otherwise the franchise suffers and risk dying out, which is a far bigger price. I also understand that they simply might not have the money or technical hability to do so, if so that´s fine, but don´t tell me that 3% of steam users is something to ignore when 90% of them can´t run the game as is anyway.

There´s no gimmick on 120hz monitors, i have no idea what you are talking about, unless you are one of the ones that can´t see the difference between framerates higher than 30 and think the human eye is stuck at 24fps and all that crap. But yeah, tv´s do use fake rates with blurred interpolation to "improve" motion, but pc gaming monitors don´t. It appears you already made your judgement despite not even watching the practical usage on the presentation shown on the video, on a live test with benchmarks on a game engine even, but yes its performance will depend on how it is implemented in each game in which its used. There are those that had no issues with BF4, and crashes have stopped for me a couple of patches (weeks) ago, but yes they were very annoying, and it was a very bad launch. My main issue with that game now is with gameplay balance and how they deal with netcode meaning how other players lag (high ping) affects how/when you are shot. They chose to make the game playable for high ping players but that causes wierd behaviour/glitches on the outcome of firefights, that is something that will never be perfect but in BF4 is worse than BF3. I just think it´s funny that you first mentioned how bad bf4 was with mantle support, when in fact it has none, and now that you didn´t even play it. Seems that there is a lot of negative pre judgment lacking better information going on, good luck with that.

DX is more like a sick blind old man holding back on the gas pedal, it wasn´t made for the current hardware architecture. BF4 currently does not support mantle, and not that it needs, it´s pretty easy to get 60fps with that game, which does have a ton of bugs that affect gameplay. You should watch the already posted mantle video presentation.

Not really off topic, the reason mantle was mentioned is because one of the causes for the low cpu utilization is bad multithreading, and one of the causes for that is draw call overhead for the gpu which are singlethreaded because thats how apis currently deal with it, serialized batches, and also affects how the game bottlenecks on the first core piling up with bad optimizations, unnecessary simulation syncing, etc etc, stopping all other cores from doing anything while waiting for the first core, thus causing the low usage once you throw more things in a mission. Not the only reason, but one of them. But that´s a dream anyway, they might only think about implementing such a thing in DayZ SA since that´s the game they consider rewriting the engine worthy of. Maybe ArmA 4.

Not some, all 7XXX upwards and every card from now on, if you buy a new AMD card today it will support it, And AMD has a big market share, something like 40%, it´s a matter of time. Who develops a new technology and software and simply refuses to innovate thinking about future hardware and get stuck with horrible bottlenecks simply because old soon to be obsolete cards aren´t compatible? ArmA 3 runs bad (less than 20fps) on old hardware anyway (hell, runs with 20fps even on high end gear on some scenarios), your only leg to stand on in this argument is nvidia support which does hold a bigger part of the market. Also there is word that in fact any card from both ati and nvidia are Mantle compatible, but i haven´t seen the actual statement for it. http://www.dsogaming.com/news/amds-mantle-does-not-require-gpus-with-gcn-architecture/ We are not missing your point, you simple are trying to create an excuse for it not to be worth it, even worse, on a game that clearly would benefit tremendously from anything that gave out significant gains and lessened bottleneck issues, in short, could finally make the game perform acceptably. Anyway, EA and others already disagree with you, they think it will be worth it and already announced titles with it, the BF4 patch for Mantle is soon to be released already. I´ve said all i wanted, best of luck.

Afaik it has nothing to do with DX, it won´t use dx, it will use itself, Mantle, another whole API. It´s about the cards supporting or not GCN to a degree (every AMD card since 7XXX), and those cards are pretty much what you need for any newer game anyway (fullhd with medium settings or above). AMD has also said that nvidia or others could make it work for their cards if they want to, but i don´t know how that works. Mantle pretty much eliminates overhead and serial batch on the cpu´s first core, it can use true non serialized multithreaded batches to send data to the gpu and theoretically make use of all cores if needed, on the presentation they say even the latest avaiable GPU becomes the bottleneck, even when they underclock the FX8350 to half its clock. Not to mention that all draw calls took almost 1/3 of the time they did with dx.