FPS issue when playing ARMA.

[Molloy]

I've been having a strange FPS issue that's only started up in the last couple of days. I'll start out in a server at around 40 fps then once fighting starts it'll drop down anywhere between 20 and 30 fps, however recently about 20/30 minutes in it'll suddenly start dropping to between 3 and 5 fps making the game unplayable. At first I thought it was related to internet issues I've been having but that doesn't seem to be the case as they've since been fixed. It's happened in operations with a lot of people in but also squad-level trainings with only about 10-15 people on the server. It only started happening on Saturday, on Friday my FPS was normal. Anyone else have this issue or know how to fix it?

[1LT (Ret) Aston]

I had a similar issue. When my fps dropped to 3-5, going to the graphics settings and changing the preset graphics setting to something different, causing the little loading screen, and then changing it back fixed the issue for me.

[Molloy]

I'll try that Aston, thanks.

[B. Cavanaugh]

Having been plagued with the FPS curse myself I can only offer what I've found as to  Arma 3 hardware /software related experiences.

First,
I started off with an AMD FX 8150 Black Edition and a ASUS Sabertooth 990FX motherboard and an AMD HD 7970 GPU. running in 5760x1080 resolution.  With every other game this combination was decent enough to experience 60 +FPS in most shooters and MMO's with high to ultra graphical settings. Now comes Arma 3. With Arma 3 I was lucky if I got a stable FPS in the mid 30's- to low 40's with most settings recommended in this guide http://day0.com.au/forum/arma/638-arma-3-performance-tweaks-and-settings-guide  (as recommended  in another post by PFC Montana) .  This seemed to help a bit  with mostly single player and the campaign, but even then often the FPS would dip widely  into the low 20's when the bullets started flying, that is unacceptable. During our large scale operations my FPS would drop into the teens and single digits making combat impossible. The screen stutter as my pc tried to catch up to the rendering environment made it so I could barely react to contact. Now some of this performance hit is contingent upon the server, some on the assets created by Zeus, and then some on your hardware. So with everything going on it was hard for me to narrow down the actual root of the problem. After talking with other members of the 506th and watching their YouTube video's of large scale gameplay, I knew I couldn't solely blame it on the server, so i began to spend countless hours reading guides and tweaking my Arma 3 settings. Some of these changes and tweaks had marginal performance boots and others none at all, or actually worsened my gains I began to look at my hardware.

First I opted for a Amd R290x Gaming edition GPU which still wasn't that much of an improvement over my Amd HD7970. So then it was on to overclocking my CPU to 4.00 GHZ which did little to improve my  FPS in most of our missions. I had kept reading comments about how AMD CPU's just did not work well with Arma 3 and at first I did not believe the authors thinking them fanboy's of Intel or boasting on their latest and greatest CPU's. However when a friend of mine who has an I7 was playing king of the hill with me side by side and getting much greater performance than I I knew it was time for a change.

So I picked up a bundle at NewEgg that offered an ASUS Z97 mbo and I7 4790K with 16gb Gskill ram for 660$ and set off to upgrade.  After getting everything up and running I am now getting a solid 65-80 FPS in the campaign.  I have not as of yet played with it in a 506th large scale mission but I can only assume there will be a significant FPS increase from what I'd been experiencing.

In closing, I wasn't sold on the AMD vs. Intel war in relation to Arma 3 but I can not refute the hard evidence of my performance gains from the upgrade. I did not want to fork out such a cash investment just for one game, but being that I love the gaming experience from Arma and the 506th it was kind of a "must do".

Sadly your CPU COMPLETELY matters in Arma 3. I hope this can help some people who are on the fence about upgrading their current hardware or contemplating making the switch to Intel .  I know , I know, I should have waited for the next gen Intel and DDR4 but, I didn't want to sink even more money into a pc, nor play with shitty FPS until the price dropped.

[Goldberg]

I know , I know, I should have waited for the next gen Intel and DDR4 but, I didn't want to sink even more money into a pc, nor play with shitty FPS until the price dropped.

Eh, you wouldn't have seen too much of a difference performance wise in games between DDR3 and DDR4.

<a href="//www.youtube.com/watch?v=utWnjA4NzSA" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utWnjA4NzSA</a>

[B. Cavanaugh]

Wow , negligible boost to gaming , such that I'd say it's completely not even worth bothering for those waiting to upgrade. Strike now while the current generation performance prices are low.

Good video Goldberg thanks for sharing...

[M Lawrence]

I've had now experienced at least 2 flavors of the fps curse, where everyone else is getting decent framerates except me. 90% it's a mod issue because it never seems to happen in vanilla. Resetting the video system as SGT Aston suggested worked once, but other times it doesn't help at all.

[Morisi]

I use both CPU Park and Process Lasso. CPU Park allows you to control whether any of your cores will go to sleep for "power saving." Running it on max performance mode helped me quite a bit, but setting Arma3 to high priority in Process Lasso nearly doubled my FPS. I have a GTX 960 with 4 GB of RAM and a 3.6 GHz 8 core processor and I was still only getting about 24-26 FPS. Now I get 60, no problem.

EDIT: Also, don't forget to use the command line switches when launching Arma. I use "-maxmem=2047 -maxVRAM=3000 -nosplash". Setting the maxmem, 2047 is the max value (per BIS). They also state that max VRAM values over 2000 don't seem to make much difference either, but I keep it a 3000 because I have a 4GB video card, so why the hell not?

Animal

https://bitsum.com/processlasso/