Arma III Stuttering Issue

[Paul Rudd]

Anybody know a fix for the micro-stuttering? All my other games play flawlessly. It's a common issue because when I Google it, tons of discussions show up.

[Raudi_]

Just now, A Random Dude said:

Anybody know a fix for the micro-stuttering? All my other games play flawlessly.

How long has this been going on? Also Arma III needs some serious CPU power. 

[mattdmg]

The reason it's a common issue is because Arma 3 is terribly optimized

 

I've never personally had any issues with micro-stuttering so you might need to play around with settings. Something to try as well is updating your drivers if you haven't done that in a while. 

 

DayZ Standalone benefits heavily from SSD usage versus an HDD because it eliminated a lot of stuttering in-game. Since the games are somewhat similar I'd say giving an SSD a try too if you don't already have one.

 

Something to also consider is that your PC might be lacking. Everyone will also tell you Arma 3 likes a fast single-core CPU. A newer i7 would suit the job the best

[Paul Rudd]

1 hour ago, KingCry said:

How long has this been going on?

I haven't loaded up the game in a good year, give or take. When I loaded it up today, this is the first I've ever seen it stutter at all. A year or so ago, the game ran flawlessly, not one stutter.

1 hour ago, KingCry said:

Also Arma III needs some serious CPU power.

My CPU usage is normal and it can handle it just fine. It's in the 40's-60's. GPU usage in the 60's-80's. Temps are all normal.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

The reason it's a common issue is because Arma 3 is terribly optimized

Seemed to be optimized almost flawlessly a year ago.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

I've never personally had any issues with micro-stuttering

Me either, not for a very long time. Back when I first got into PC gaming and had only 8GB of RAM was the last micro-stuttering I experienced, and that was in GTA 5.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

you might need to play around with settings.

I just played around with them and they don't seem to do anything but give me more fps when I lower them. This doesn't fix the stuttering though.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

Something to try as well is updating your drivers if you haven't done that in a while.

Oh I've been sticking with my current drivers for around 6 months because every single other game works flawlessly with them.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

DayZ Standalone benefits heavily from SSD usage versus an HDD because it eliminated a lot of stuttering in-game. Since the games are somewhat similar I'd say giving an SSD a try too if you don't already have one.

This is what I'm leaning towards for two reasons. One, when I walk about 50 feet forward, turn around and walk about 100 feet in the opposite direction and keep doing this, the stuttering minimizes and almost disappears. And two, whenever I just walk around and enter new areas, you can hear my hard drive loading up the game unlike other games where you don't exactly notice any of this hard drive loading while doing the same walking around. All other games don't do this much at all.

 

These two things and the fact that I've barely played Arma III to figure anything out about it yet lead me to believe Arma III really needs to be installed on an SSD to not experience this stuttering. However, I also think the recent Windows updates(particularly the Creators updates) could be to blame for this stuttering in Arma III. And what I think is that someone(most likely people that still play the game all the time) knows a fix for this issue. Which is why I created this topic. Those people just need to somehow run into this topic.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

Something to also consider is that your PC might be lacking.

Nah, my PC is fine. It handles every game I throw at it, very minimal issues. And is well above both the minimum and recommended system requirements for Arma III.

1 hour ago, mattdmg said:

Everyone will also tell you Arma 3 likes a fast single-core CPU.  A newer i7 would suit the job the best

Maybe, I'd like to hear this from people that play it flawlessly using an i5. I was one of these people around a year ago. There's gotta be a reason it didn't stutter then and it does stutter now.

[mattdmg]

5 minutes ago, A Random Dude said:

 

 

Could be a degrading hard drive of some sort.  An SSD is a million times better in everything

 

Arma 3 to this day only uses 30-40% of my GPU and CPU at all times and I get 20-30 FPS in King of the Hill. And factoring in your stuttering issue I hope that isn't what you consider flawless game optimization 

[Paul Rudd]

14 minutes ago, mattdmg said:

Could be a degrading hard drive of some sort.

That could be very possible. It's about a year and a half old now and filled to the brim with games. 3TB's worth. Same with my 1TB HDD with Windows installed on it. But if this was the culprit, wouldn't this stuttering happen in other games? And I play dozens of games daily and don't experience any stuttering at all in them.

14 minutes ago, mattdmg said:

An SSD is a million times better in everything

Not life span. However, I don't think I'll ever use an SSD because I don't mind 10-50 more second loading times using an HDD. But, this new stuttering issue I do mind if it is in fact due to my HDD. It will also be the very first reason to actually need an SSD. Maybe I'll get one when I get my new PSU in the very near future. I'll most likely earn a mail-in rebate to put towards it.

14 minutes ago, mattdmg said:

Arma 3 to this day only uses 30-40% of my GPU and CPU at all times and I get 20-30 FPS in King of the Hill.

Wow, that's pretty low fps and usage. Is that because of the King of the Hill? I'm not familiar with that game mode yet. And was it doing that a year ago in Arma III?

14 minutes ago, mattdmg said:

And factoring in your stuttering issue I hope that isn't what you consider flawless game optimization

It was so very flawless around a year ago. Something is to blame for that. If I can find the fix for this stuttering, I have no other issues with the game. Of course I haven't put in enough hours in other game modes to find other issues with it.

[Paul Rudd]

I just found some things said about the game from a YouTube video(above) where someone was experiencing the same issue I am(exact same micro-stuttering in video above):

 

"It has problem with mechanic disks. Crappy developers cant make functional game. This is first game i ever see which cant run over an HDD."

 

"I dont know for sure why this happens but apparently looks like disk streaming problem. The real problem is from the game code itself, it using less than 1GB of memory for the game process in single player, what means than this game dont cache enough data at RAM and while playing keep accessing disk for urgent data instead of already caching it on RAM."

 

Different guy, same video:

 

"I initially had A3 on a partitioned disk with my C:\ disk which is my 7200rpm main HDD, so I thought as a last resort let me try moving A3 to one of my other add-on HDD's which are all 5400rpm and voila no more constant micro-freeze/stutter, There is still a fps drop randomly but that's to be expected with Arma. so either it didn't like the partition or my main drive is dying although all other games and windows on that drive are perfect."

 

Hmm...

[trufret]

SSDs are almost required for some games at this point, especially games with large worlds and high res textures.

DCS World and Squad have load times of 5-10 minutes when running of HDDs at this point. Arma's load times weren't horrible but it always had lots of lag for me turning fast causing the game to load in all the new models and textures for what i was looking at. I moved Arma 2 to a RAID 0 array of HDDs which helped a bit.  Arma 3 was doing the same thing so I finally moved it to an SSD and it's much smoother now.

 

Those games also get extra hammered if you have them on the same HDD as your windows page file.  The delay in moving the read/write heads around on an HDD is death for trying to load in new objects and textures quickly as you move around the world.

 

 

 

[Paul Rudd]

9 minutes ago, trufret said:

lots of lag

Do you mean stuttering? Where the fps drops a good 20-30 fps for a split second and then returns to where it was?

[trufret]

4 minutes ago, A Random Dude said:

Do you mean stuttering? Where the fps drops a good 20-30 fps for a split second and then returns to where it was?

For me, fps would drop briefly and objects would load in as simple untextured models and then over the course of a couple seconds they would get their correct Level Of Detail texture applied. It would do this every time I'd spin around or turn my head quickly.

 

If I moved forward and looked forward it was pretty stable as the game had time to load in the objects and textures at distance and update the level of detail as I got closer.  This was true unless I was in a helicopter or plane which could see further and cover distance faster than the game could load in.  View distance also played a role in this but Arma doesn't draw a lot of stuff past 4500 m anyway even if you set your view distance to 10 km

[WereCat]

Installing the game on SSD helps a lot with micro stuttering but you will still have the same 30-40FPS on crowded servers. 

But the game is definitely more playable on SSD, it makes for quite a big difference. 

[Paul Rudd]

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Installing the game on SSD helps a lot with micro stuttering

I see. I got to playing it last night and the stuttering was off and on. When it's not stuttering at all and the game is playing fine, I'm not exactly a huge fan of it. I like the aspect of a gigantic world that feels empty but the shooting just doesn't sound or feel right for me. I have not sniped yet so I can't say anything about that and I hope it's better than using the assault rifle. The moment I finally found people to shoot at, I found the hit detection awful with that thing. It might get better over time but it just didn't feel right at all.

9 minutes ago, WereCat said:

you will still have the same 30-40FPS on crowded servers

I have yet to even worry about playing the game online. I want to at least be decent at the game before entering online action. The single player part of the game feels like a lot to do anyway. Thanks for your comment, it's pretty informative with what's going on.

 

Thanks to everyones comments on this topic as well. I really appreciate the help.

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, A Random Dude said:

I see. I got to playing it last night and the stuttering was off and on. When it's not stuttering at all and the game is playing fine, I'm not exactly a huge fan of it. I like the aspect of a gigantic world that feels empty but the shooting just doesn't sound or feel right for me. I have not sniped yet so I can't say anything about that and I hope it's better than using the assault rifle. The moment I finally found people to shoot at, I found the hit detection awful with that thing. It might get better over time but it just didn't feel right at all.

I have yet to even worry about playing the game online. I want to at least be decent at the game before entering online action. The single player part of the game feels like a lot to do anyway. Thanks for your comment, it's pretty informative with what's going on.

 

Thanks to everyones comments on this topic as well. I really appreciate the help.

Youre welcome.

The controls are clunky at times because you can do a lot of things which you cant in other games. Also, its a lot "slower" shooter than others because it relies more on an approach than a aiming skills and flick shots, etc...

Its one of the few games where just shooting into the air to keep enemy pinned down to the ground makes sense... but then again, that doesent work well against AI in SinglePlayer. The Multiplayer plays quite differently but you definitely need to get used to the controls first before trying the MP aspect.

[Paul Rudd]

3 minutes ago, WereCat said:

its a lot "slower" shooter than others because it relies more on an approach than a aiming skills and flick shots, etc...

I picked up on that and I actually like that aspect of the game a lot. I like how quiet and wide open the game is and that you have to walk this giant map just to find anyone and the only thing you really hear is what your feet hit and the sound of bugs and ambient environment noise. They got that part of the game right. Pretty close to realism.

6 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Its one of the few games where just shooting into the air to keep enemy pinned down to the ground makes sense... but then again, that doesent work well against AI in SinglePlayer. The Multiplayer plays quite differently but you definitely need to get used to the controls first before trying the MP aspect.

I saw this aspect of the game in the few MP game play videos I watched on YouTube. It's actually one of the aspects that drew my interest to play the game. I forgot all about this too since I just play the single player missions. They're great so far. Even if all I've done is walk around the woods and beach area like I'm in that game called The Forest. Felt just like it. The controls do seem clunky, especially when using a controller. I hate K&M. They're not too clunky to not want to get used to them though. What's weird is holding left trigger to zoom in and having to click in the right thumbstick to aim down sights. I wouldn't say it's bad, just weird and not ideal.

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, A Random Dude said:

I picked up on that and I actually like that aspect of the game a lot. I like how quiet and wide open the game is and that you have to walk this giant map just to find anyone and the only thing you really hear is what your feet hit and the sound of bugs and ambient environment noise. They got that part of the game right. Pretty close to realism.

I saw this aspect of the game in the few MP game play videos I watched on YouTube. It's actually one of the aspects that drew my interest to play the game. I forgot all about this too since I just play the single player missions. They're great so far. Even if all I've done is walk around the woods and beach area like I'm in that game called The Forest. Felt just like it. The controls do seem clunky, especially when using a controller. I hate K&M. They're not too clunky to not want to get used to them though. What's weird is holding left trigger to zoom in and having to click in the right thumbstick to aim down sights. I wouldn't say it's bad, just weird and not ideal.

Well, I play only with controller when I fly with helis or jets but otherwise I use M&K. Controller doesent have enough inputs for all the infantry controlls... not even close enough.

[trufret]

Yeah, I'd defiantly suggest trying to get used to mouse and keyboard for infantry controls as well. Once you get past basic move and shoot controls you run out of buttons on a controller pretty quick so you'll still need a keyboard handy at the very least.

 

The built in mission editor is also very useful for being able to build a quick scenario and drop in enemy units to fight or test out vehicles ect...

Arma is very much a coop game so if you've got any buddies with it, it's good times to make up a quick mission in the editor to do together or download a mission from the steam workshop to play. Dynamic Recon Ops mission is good for random simple quick missions you can play over and over.

 

From there, the amount of different Mods and Missions available from the community is staggering. You'll always have something to do.