ARMA3 Performance and Problem Guide

I'm hoping to keep this post updated with answers to the most commonly asked questions. Questions that are asked multiple times a day. I'm surprised we don't have some sort of official version of this thread.

Startup Parameters

These are commands that can change how the game perceives your computer or what resources it uses.

Adding parameters can be achieved by right clicking Arma3 in your steam games list and clicking properties, selecting the ‘GENERAL’ tab and clicking the ‘set launch options’ button: Here

All startup parameters can be found here : Link

Most commonly used parameters:

• -maxmem=x 256-2047 This can be used to set how much RAM arma3 uses. 2047 MB is the max you can set. The game automatically chooses between 512 and 1536 MB if the user doesn't designate a value
  
• -maxVRAM=x 128-2000(>2000 may result in issues) This can be used to set how much video RAM that's on your graphics card ArmA3 has access to (2GB cards seem to automatically select 1500)
  
• -skipintro Skips the intro logos/splash screens
  
• -exthreads=x Can be 0/1/3/5/7, sets the number of threads the game will use. Use 7 for quad-cores. This is almost entirely unnecessary as the game should pick the right one for your CPU Click Here for more details
  
• -cpucount=x 2/4 honestly not that important as the game will auto-detect the value for you
  
• -nobenchmark Prevents the game from automatically running a benchmark, can help computers with integrated graphics chipsets starting the game
  
• -winxp Forces the game to drop down to a DirectX9 only renderer, this may improve performance with low-end graphics cards
  
• -nologs Prevent ArmA3 from writing errors to the hard drive
  

CPU vs GPU

Certain effects are processed on your Graphics Processing Unit or your Central Processing Unit depending on what they are. Different settings can make an effect swap from one to the other.

Bottlenecks

A bottleneck occurs when one device is being made to wait for another device. E.g.: the GPU cannot process any faster until the CPU has finished performing a specific action.

For players a bottleneck is most likely to occur when their CPU cannot process fast enough, this in turn results in the GPU sitting idle, waiting. Not working at its maximum capacity.

Solution: Try and offload as much processing from the CPU to the GPU.

This includes: Setting Shadows to Standard instead of Low, Low forces shadows to the CPU, standard and above forces shadows to the GPU.

Common problems:

Low FPS in the editor/single player

It is necessary to work out what the bottleneck is. If it’s the CPU you can lower the following settings:

1. Objects
   
2. Terrain
   
3. Overall Visibility
   
4. Shadows – set to Standard(forces shadows to the GPU)
   

If it’s the GPU, you can lower the following settings:

1. FSAA
   
2. SSAO
   
3. Shadows – set to low(forces shadows to the CPU)
   
4. PPAA
   
5. Resolution / Sampling
   

Solution: New hardware

ArmA3 is massively CPU bound, a new CPU would help significantly, the current ideal CPUs are Quad Cores, these include Intel’s i5 range, 25xx(Sandy Bridge), 35xx(Ivy Bridge) and 46xx(Haswell) ranges. This is due to their ability to process more Instructions Per Clock(IPC) as well as perform more complex operations in fewer cycles.

AMDs 6/8-core processors are not an optimal choice for this particular game, ArmA3 cannot utilise a full 8 core CPU, resulting in many cores laying unused.

More RAM is also beneficial; 8GB or more is optimal to prevent file swapping with the hard drive. This is not to be confused with vRAM, RAM used by your GPU.

Video RAM will effect what size textures you can use. More vRAM means higher quality textures.

Solution: Change the power plan of your machine to 'Balanced' or 'High Performance'

(Windows 7: Control Panel > Power Options).

Solution: Close unused programs before you run the game. This includes your browser or email clients. Anything that may use up CPU cycles.

Solution: Excessive CPU or GPU heat can cause the device to throttle down in an attempt to prevent damage. Try monitoring the temperatures of your hardware and prevent it from overheating.

Solution: Unpark your CPUs cores. Core-Parking is when unused cores are placed in a low-power state, resulting in lower performance but also lower power usage. This can negatively affect ArmA3.

Core Unparking tool download Here

Solution: Do not disable your pagefile. This is a necessary component of Windows and disabling it will not improve performance.

Low FPS during multiplayer

As a player there is little you can do to mitigate this problem. The server may have problems dealing with the load required of it, the mission its running may be poorly coded or any other number of reasons.

Solution: Your options are limited to finding another, more powerful server or running a different, more efficiently scripted mission.

The game stutters

This can be caused by a number of issues:

Script errors writing to write to the error report file. Each time the game writes to the file it causes a tiny delay in the game, given enough errors being written to the report file this can cause game stutter.

Solution: Add –nologs to the startup parameters. Multiple startup parameters can be used; you are not limited to one.

Anti-virus or anti-malware software can also cause issues when it accesses files at the same time as ArmA3.

Solution: try disabling the software and running the game. If it is the cause see if it’s possible to add ArmA3 to the software’s exception list.

ArmA3 doesn't start

This can happen with on-board graphics, laptops often have this problem.

Solution: Try adding –nobenchmark to your startup parameters.

Another posibility is your profile has somehow corrupted itself.

Solution: Navigate to Users/ACCOUNTNAME/My Documents/Arma 3/

and delete the files that end with .Arma3Profile as well as Arma3.cfg.

Solution: Try installing/reinstalling the latest version of DirectX, The download can be found Here

Textures suddenly ‘pop in’

ArmA3 streams textures from the install directory, improving the speed the data can be accessed will minimise the texture pop in

Solution: Increase the allocated VRAM by using the -maxVRAM parameter

Solution: Install the game on a solid state hard drive (SSD)

Solution: Given enough RAM, install the game onto a RAMDisk. This is not easy and requires a large volume of RAM (12GB+ ideally)

The game crashes:

Corrupted game cache

Solution: Right click the game in Steam > properties > LOCAL FILES tab > DELETE LOCAL GAME CONTENT

Overheating

Solution: Use Temperature monitoring tools (GPU-Z, HWMonitor, MSI Afterburner), over 70c for the CPU and 80c for the GPU is often a bad sign. Try using compressed air to clean out dust around the components in your computer case. If this fails you may have to reseat your CPU heatsink, you'll have to refer to online guides on doing this.

Out of memory

Solution: Close programs you don't need when running the game. Browser etc.

Solution: Try adding -maxmem=2047 to your startup parameters.

Solution: Try increasing the size of your page file. Instructions Here.

Solution: If its video RAM you're running out of, lower the Texture setting in the game.

Poor Power Supply Unit

This is a physical component that supplies power to other parts of your computer.

A cheap PSU can cause a computer to restart when too much power is requested, this can occur in demanding applications like video-games.

Solution: Buy a new PSU that is rated for your computer from a reputable manufacturer. Do NOT buy a cheap PSU from china, they will explode and can cause damage to other computer components.

Cant play multiplayer/cant connect to servers

Solution: Ensure steam is not in offline mode. Steam>Go Online.

The game has significant input delay/lag

Solution:Go into your game options and lower mouse smoothing to 0.

Solution:Find your arma3.cfg file located in users/ACCOUNTNAME/My Documents/Arma 3/

Look for the lines GPU_MaxFramesAhead and GPU_DetectedFramesAhead and change them to both equal 1.

Solution: If you have a nvidia graphics card open up nvidia control panel/3D settings/Manage 3D settings/

set 'Maximum pre-rendered frames' to between 1 and 3.

Legitimate game bug

Solution: If you can reproduce the crash by performing a set of exact actions, make an account here: http://feedback.arma3.com and create a bug report, Bohemia can use this to fix the problem for everyone.

A guide to posting a bug report can be found here

***********************************************************************

If none of the above helps you make a thread here, make sure to include as much detail regarding your problem as possible.

Details like:

• Your computer hardware:
  
• CPU (make, model, clock speed), GPU (make, model), RAM (amount, timings)
  
• Your operating system + if its 32 or 64bit
  
• Driver versions of your graphics card
  
• If you've overclocked your computer
  
• What you were doing when the problem occurred
  
• What you've tried doing to fix the problem
  

***********************************************************************

I’ll try to keep adding to the OP as necessary. If you think something is missing post your info and I'll get it added.

As a matter of fact for me one of the most surprisingly 'engine-features' is that low shadows gets me worse FPS than standard or high. With this way of thinking I was able to get a working setup for me over the last months.

Testing various settings while the development is going further, for me HDR set on low gives better FPS on singleplayer, set on standard better performance on multiplayer.

I'm using msi afterburner and HWinfo for measurement.

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.

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.

It's CPU bound clock-wise. The number of cores doesn't matter that much, but clock rate is essential.

Okay, first of all: do these parameter things actually make any difference what so ever?

In some edge cases sure, but for your average person probably not.

Thanks for your thoughts, I've added some text to the OP.

It's CPU bound clock-wise. The number of cores doesn't matter that much, but clock rate is essential.

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.

Added bits here and there. I've asked a mod to sticky this, we'll see if that happens or not.

thanks for the very useful thread. Yes, sticky would be nice.

Nice thread OP.

Vote for sticky!

Nice thread OP.

Vote for sticky!

Thanks for your support :)

"Textures suddenly ‘pop in’

Arma3 streams textures from the install directory, improving the speed the data can be accessed will minimise the texture pop in.

Solution: Install the game on a solid state hard drive (SSD).

Solution: Given enough RAM, install the game onto a RAMDisk. This is not easy and requires a large volume of RAM (12GB+ ideally)."

A friend of mine had no problem at all with Arma 3 pop in (game is installed on HDD) but after the latest update he suddenly has extreme close range texture pop-in. He noticed that his HDD is full and he cleared some space until he had 30 GB free of space. He says the pop-in is less now. So another solution than installing it on the SSD might be to simply clear space if your HDD is almost full.

Added a parameter to the list and a line or two about page files. edited formatting to be more consistent.