ARMA 3 Performance problems

[jamyd0dger]

Hey!

 

So basically I am getting terrible fps in Arma 3 no matter what settings I choose. I get 17-25 fps on Ultra, 19-28fps on low and It doesnt matter what resolution I play at, 2560x1440 or 1920x1080 (windowed)

 

My Rig:

 

i5-3570k (not overclocked atm)

Gigabyte z77x UD3H

Gigabyte GTX 780

8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz RAM

Corsair CX600M power supply

60GB OCZ SSD

2TB WD Green

 

My flatmate, who is running a GTX 480 and similar components gets better fps, it doesnt drop below 24fps.

 

Any quick fixes ? Does Nvidia know about the poor performance with the 780 ?

 

Thanks

[Sneaky]

ArmA 3 doesn't run very well on any system, what render distance are you playing at? It would also help if I knew the exact video settings you are using for ArmA because there are quite a lot of options.

[boggle4321]

when i run arma i get decent fps (about 40fps) on ultra, but i get huge drops it will drop to about 5fps for a few seconds.

[sonarctica]

The game is still unfinished, they haven't been able to optimize it a lot but maybe in a few months we'll see better fps on that game...

[delet my acc pls]

Optimisation is terrible, but will hope fully be fixed

[Ryan Leech]

Game performance depends on your internet connection. Also Stratis is more optimized than Altis.

[Rekx]

Your performance depends on how good the server is, and you're internet connection. Dont really know why. But if you just want to play with friends, try to make you're own server 

[Cacao]

ARMA 3 FPS fix!

I used to run ArmA 3 at very crap framerates, but now I can play Wasteland with great fps and far rendering distances. This might not work for everyone but it's definitely worth a shot:

 

1. Go to C:/Users/''yourusername''/My Documents/Arma 3 Alpha and then open the Arma3Alpha.cfg file as a text document.

 

2. Find GPU_MaxFramesAhead and change it's values to 1; instead of 1000; or whatever it's at.

 

3. Now change the value of GPU_DetectedFramesAhead to 1; instead of 0;.

 

4. Launch ArmA 3 and drool at the framerates.

 

This little fix actually more than doubled my framerate and made the game actually playable for me.

[Ryan Leech]

ARMA 3 FPS fix!

I used to run ArmA 3 at very crap framerates, but now I can play Wasteland with great fps and far rendering distances. This might not work for everyone but it's definitely worth a shot:

 

1. Go to C:/Users/''yourusername''/My Documents/Arma 3 Alpha and then open the Arma3Alpha.cfg file as a text document.

 

2. Find GPU_MaxFramesAhead and change it's values to 1; instead of 1000; or whatever it's at.

 

3. Now change the value of GPU_DetectedFramesAhead to 1; instead of 0;.

 

4. Launch ArmA 3 and drool at the framerates.

 

This little fix actually more than doubled my framerate and made the game actually playable for me.

What's the catch?

[boggle4321]

The game is still unfinished, they haven't been able to optimize it a lot but maybe in a few months we'll see better fps on that game...

the game has been released for over a week now

[jbr]

The Real Virtuality engine is not something you simply throw hardware at and expect to get awesome performance and visuals.

 

You have to go into the settings and tweak things to get a balance between performance and visuals that you are happy with.

There is an FPS counter in the Video settings, tweak the settings and you'll see the results in real time in that counter.

 

An important thing to know is that lowering settings is not always what you're supposed to do.

 

Example:  Shadows are rendered by the CPU when you have them on MEDIUM or LOW and rendered by the GPU when set to HIGH or ULTRA..

HIGH and ULTRA will get you more FPS.

 

There are several settings that need to be HIGH or ULTRA to switch to the GPU, the more load you offload onto the GPU the better.

 

You can also lower the resolution and then crank a few things up and still get the great visuals and great FPS.

you do not need to run at your monitors maximum res to get the best visuals.

 

My monitor can do 1920x1200 but I run Arma 3 at 1680x1050 and have a lot of extra leeway to crank up the visuals and AA because of that

and it looks just the same as running at 1920x1200 on HIGH and ULTRA but without the performance hit.

 

 

 

There's also an issue with WASTELAND which a majority of the complainers bought Arma 3 for.

 

Wasteland is a poorly coded mission that runs a ton of scripts and really suffers when players and Hackers are dumping tons of objects all over the map

it's also been ported over from Arma 2 and that is also causing problems,  a lot of mods and missions have problems when they are not ported over properly.

 

Another issue: Servers.

 

FPS in MP is reliant on the server.

If they server hardware is not up to snuff you will get very bad FPS.

 

Cheap server hosts also like to throw several games on a single box to save money

so Arma is being forced to share resources with them,....result.... low FPS.

 

Arma NEEDS a dedicated box that has the required power and bandwidth to run.

 

 

Go to the Bohemia forums, there are several years worth of information on how to maximize your performance and visuals.

 

http://forums.bistudio.com/forumdisplay.php?112-ARMA-3

 

 

 

Arma LOVES SSD'S..... get one.

[RuecanOnRails]

JBR summed it up very well, you are given full control over your experience with the game. You need to find the balance that you like. Unlike the current gen of console ports, there are no predefined settings for low, medium, high, ultra that work on any PC.

 

I'd like to add a few minor things.

Definitely overclock your CPU as high as it can possibly go. A lot of the lower than expected fps issues are due to the cpu being the bottleneck. The Arma series is very demanding of CPU's.

An SSD would be a big improvement, due to the size of the game assets, it's somewhat impractical to cache them. So instead Arma relies more on streaming data from the HDD as it's needed. An SSD may not add FPS, but it will run a lot smoother with quicker LOD switching.

Ramdisk is another option which can be used in conjunction with an SSD, although you may want to upgrade your ram or only use a small ramdisk.

Here's a recent thread about ramdisk also contains links to older ramdisk info from arma 2. http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?164641-RAMDisk-size-with-8GB-of-RAM

 

 

People have spent many hours tweaking settings in config files (beyond ingame settings) to find the perfect balance for their system. Be prepared to have a love hate relationship with the settings menu. Over time you will find that you switch between several settings based on the type of mission you're playing. Arma is great because it allows such freedom in it's settings.

[Aaanum1]

ArmA has way of processing that even the devs don't understand, just take an hour to mess with everything and you'll find the perfect combination.

[jamyd0dger]

Thanks for the replies everyone, Guess I will just have to tweak the settings and hope Bohemia optimize the game a bit more. 

[Lays]

when i run arma i get decent fps (about 40fps) on ultra, but i get huge drops it will drop to about 5fps for a few seconds.

 

Dw, on dayz I get like 40 fps at 1080p in ultra, the games optimization is terrific... Lol

[sonarctica]

the game has been released for over a week now

I know, it's completely unfinished still. It should have been in beta for few months still but they promised a release date and that's what they gave you, they released an unfinished game ):

[jimbob6661]

This old thread should definitely be updated there is some misinformation on here, mainly because it's outdated info. Especially the dedicated box thing when a3 servers up until recently only were able to utilize 2 cores and up to but never exceeding 2gb RAM... So there goes the dedicated box theory...As jb stated there are many years of data out there regarding the running of Arma servers and apparently jb didn't read too much of it. And as far as wasteland is concerned there are quite a few different versions of it. And the A3wasteland Code is a work of art so how this guy states it's poorly coded is truly incomprehensible unless he's speaking of someone's hacked together mission. Which can tend to be an issue within the Arma community as a whole no matter what game style you are playing including vanilla ArmA 3 campaign or co-op! The Real Virtuality Engine is probably the most outdated and un-optimized game engine on the market, it's very very inefficient, as I stated before until recently the engine wasn't able to truly utilize over 2 threads of cpu and 2 gb of RAM and now that they finally came of age and produced a 64bit version of the executable they are finally able to try and utilize more. Still many many bugs exist and as always BIS is slow to the take... I mean c'mon it took em over 3 years to add bi-pods for rifles... Just LOOOL!!! Anyhoo this rant is coming from someone whom runs many different game servers (and has for years) three of which are arma 3 and others are valve based games.