Increasingly horrible performance in official events

[Yoors]

The past couple of FTX's I was aware of the poor performance I was getting on ARMA but this first deployment mission made me realize something's clunked up. I loaded in and I was just immediately hit with 10 FPS at max, with regular stuttering in 5 second intervals. My screen was occasionally freezing when I looked around to the point where my TFAR disconnected- and then reconnected as it unfroze. This went on for a while but it did eventually settle down a bit. After a good hour in I was having a liveable stutter maybe every five minutes but still, no more than 15 FPS if I was lucky.

The first time we took contact, it was an RPG that hit the second vehicle and while everbody reacted, my game stuttered when I tried to turn around. My squad was ordered to line the platoon's MRAP's up for a convoy and I had to drive incredibly slow in order because of my horrible low FPS and even then, I almost rammed into the MRAP infront of me. It genuinely rendered me combat ineffective and the thing is, it's only this bad when it's in official events whether that's a platoon training, FTX or deployment. During squad training I get about 30 FPS give or take and I understand it's probably server and CPU related but I'd still like to try and do something.

i5-2500k, GTX 970 & 8GB RAM. If anyone's got any idea that might help please feel more than welcome to pitch in. I'm pretty annoyed and desperate.

[Hito]

You should try Process Lasso, to prioritize Arma3 over other programs

[S. Murphy]

Thank you Sergeant!  Anything that can keep my Battle Buddy on point with me is greatly appreciated!

[Yoors]

You should try Process Lasso, to prioritize Arma3 over other programs

Just installed it and it looks quite promising actually, just a shame I can't really test it. Thank you for the input sergeant.

Thank you Sergeant!  Anything that can keep my Battle Buddy on point with me is greatly appreciated!

Somebody's gotta alert Doc that you've been run over, right? 

[S. Murphy]

You should try Process Lasso, to prioritize Arma3 over other programs

Just installed it and it looks quite promising actually, just a shame I can't really test it. Thank you for the input sergeant.

Thank you Sergeant!  Anything that can keep my Battle Buddy on point with me is greatly appreciated!

Somebody's gotta alert Doc that you've been run over, right? 

That's my boy!!

[Hito]

In the settings put arma3.exe as game, with bitsum highest performance , priority I/O high.

[MSG (Ret) Main]

I would check your power settings in the control panel. Make sure that it is set to performance. I set my to energy save and dropped me to 5 fps. I have my settings high -ultra and get anywhere between 24-50

[SSG (Ret) Beard]

Also make sure your parameters in the launcher are set correctly. For the core count, you want to have it showing the number of logical cores, not physical. I have a quad core with hyperthreading which makes windows see 8 logical cores. I believe the 2500k is quad with no hyper threading so you may have to set it to 4.

Also, enable external threads and all 3 sub options. It will force allocation of cores to specific tasks and helps to stop those annoying momentary pauses that are caused by the system deciding which core is doing what task.

Another performance boost that I use is similar to the process lasso, I tab out once arma is loaded, open task manager, click the processes tab, right click arma3 and set priority to high. Don't set to real time, as it usually crashes the system.

Make sure you follow 1SG Main's advice on power management. Windows will do all manner of dumb shit (like parking all but 1 core mid game, or putting hdd into power saving at ridiculous times) when the power saving is on.

[Yoors]

Also make sure your parameters in the launcher are set correctly. For the core count, you want to have it showing the number of logical cores, not physical. I have a quad core with hyperthreading which makes windows see 8 logical cores. I believe the 2500k is quad with no hyper threading so you may have to set it to 4.

Also, enable external threads and all 3 sub options. It will force allocation of cores to specific tasks and helps to stop those annoying momentary pauses that are caused by the system deciding which core is doing what task.

By the 3 sub options you mean like this, correct?

Another performance boost that I use is similar to the process lasso, I tab out once arma is loaded, open task manager, click the processes tab, right click arma3 and set priority to high. Don't set to real time, as it usually crashes the system.

Make sure you follow 1SG Main's advice on power management. Windows will do all manner of dumb shit (like parking all but 1 core mid game, or putting hdd into power saving at ridiculous times) when the power saving is on.

Will try out Project Lasso at first, looks promising. I checked out the power settings and it's at the recommended "balanced" setting. Should I change that?

In the settings put arma3.exe as game, with bitsum highest performance , priority I/O high.

Like this? Should I enable Gaming Mode?

[Hito]

If you are using process lasso, for arma3 put your power settings on Bitsum highest performance. Select arma3.exe right click

1. " Aplication power profile"  then drop menu, always, "Bitsum Highest Performance".

2. select the option that saids " Exclude it from Probalance restrictions"

3. Select the option that saids " Mark as a game"

Those are the settings that I have and them keeps me running during heavy firefights.

[Yoors]

If you are using process lasso, for arma3 put your power settings on Bitsum highest performance. Select arma3.exe right click

1. " Aplication power profile"  then drop menu, always, "Bitsum Highest Performance".

2. select the option that saids " Exclude it from Probalance restrictions"

3. Select the option that saids " Mark as a game"

Those are the settings that I have and them keeps me running during heavy firefights.

Alright, thanks. Did that, then tried some benchmark mission where I got an average of 16 FPS in some pretty intense situations so lets hope this gets us somewhere next week.

[Katz]

It doesn't sound right to be honest, I have almost the same setup as you and (although I've never played an official mission) I can play fun ops with most Ultra settings no problem.

The only differences is I have a 4690k but on the CPU benchmarks they're not much different in performance.

What is your CPU, RAM, GPU usage like in Arma missions? What temperature does your CPU hit?

Do you have an aftermarket cooler? If you can rule out thermal throttling the next step I would suggest would be to overclock both your 970 via MSI Afterburner and then your Processor via BIOS settings. I'm happy to help if you don't know how to. I upped my I5 clock from 3.5 to 4.4 Ghz which enabled me to go from 50 to a solid 60 fps.

[Hopp]

i5-2500k is your bottleneck.  I also have a 970 and my system doesn't even ramp up past 75% usage.  You already bought a significant upgrade, just finish it out when you can.

Current specs:
i5-6500 with 16gb ram
gtx 970

Incredibly fast, no slow downs, I upgraded from an i5-2500 like you.  Arma is not using your GPU at all.  It's CPU and for you architecture (mobo) limited.

[SSG (Ret) Beard]

The biggest issue in arma, especially in large scale engagements, is the insane number of ballistics calculations. Every single bullet fired is a very complex algorithm. The SAW fires at up to 1000 rounds per minute, the M4 is ~600RPM, the A10 is firing 4000RPM! Plus there is the processing of the physics for aircraft and ground vehicles and the ragdoll physics of the dead are also huge. Even the sound package is processor intensive, as it has to calculate a whole bundle of variables to give you the distance delay (when you hear the explosion a second after you saw it cos sound took a while to cover the distance).

That is what makes genuine simulators so processor intensive. The problem is that ARMA 3 still only uses one core to do the bulk of the work. That's why an I7, even a dodgy old one like mine manages better than the I5's. With hyperthreading, we are still only using one physical core, it's just that the physical core can process 2x threads at once across 2 logical cores (Windows sees the second thread as a second core) effectively doubling performance.

One of your options short term is overclocking. If you can only process one thread at a time, a decent increase in clock speed will have the next thread not waiting in line too long. It can be risky, as it is always a good way of killing a processor. On the flip side, if you cook your processor, you have a really good excuse to go and buy an I7 (this reasoning doesn't work on AMD graphics cards. Mine is stupidly overclocked cos it is stupid slow, runs at nearly 200 deg F all day every day and the POS won't die).

[Nunes]

Hey Yoors, have you solved your problem ?

Indeed your problem is likely CPU bottlenecking. I assume you tried the aforementioned methods, so I will only add two things:

1st, use your Nvidia control panel to set a few things to ARMA exclusively:

• Maximum pre-rendered frames: 1
• Multi-Display management mode: Single display performance mode
• Power management mode: Prefer maximum performance

You can also disable some features here as well, like Vsync and so on..

2nd, try using a new memory allocator. It has shown improvements in some systems.

Here is the one I use (and I believe Murphy is now using as well): https://github.com/fred41/tbbmalloc_arma

Also, the newest Nvidia driver (365.10) from May 2nd, has also improved my performance in some games (I still have to test it with ARMA). Try updating it.

My system is an 2600k OCed at 4.0ghz, 1x GTX580 and 12GB runnin  at 1600mhz.

As you see, it is not the best out there but I can get stable frames during operations (25~30 minimum).

Hope it helps, bud!

-- EDIT --

Also, try using "Park Control". It's a program that allows your core to be set completely unparked which can cause significant improvements, but also increased power consumption, so use it with care. You can also set this to a particular Windows Power mode (only for High Performance or Gaming, for instance).