How To Get Better Frames From Somone With 3000 hours.

[Rekkless]

First of all sorry for the Essay, but I think we need some proper explanation on the subject of FPS in ArmA 3.

Ok so I don't expect this thread to stick around long. But checking these forums it seems multiple times a day someone is complaining about their frames and frame rate. Even with solid machines that get decent frames on other games.

Now when it comes to ArmA 3 I've been around the block. With close to 3000 hours in game I've tried it all and I'm here to say there is no magic button, no magic thing you, the server owners or developers can do to increase your frames from 20fps to 60+fps.

But there are small things you can do that can help a little bit. and here they are.


1. Have ArmA 3 and your mods installed on a SSD. One of the biggest causes of low frame rate and in particular sudden dips or stuttering frames is the resources required to load the textures. With SSDs being the faster than mechanical hard drives you won’t notice a FPS increase so to speak but you will isolate and remove FPS dips and Stuttering from your game.

If you don't have a SSD, make sure you regularly DEFRAG your HDD to keep it running as optimally as possible.

2. Graphic Settings: Everything under GENERAL is largely taken care of by your CPU and everything under AA & PP is taken care of by your GPU. But one massive things to consider is you must balance both setting sections otherwise everything will be transferred and taken care of by your CPU which will result in less frames on LOW settings than on ULTRA.

If you have a good GPU like a 2gb card or above, you should have your AA & PP Turned all the way up to maximum or at least high settings. If you have a solid CPU you should have most settings on Very High or Ultra. Also understand ArmA is about CPU speed not cores a faster 4 core CPU will perform better than a 6 core slower CPU so if you can OVERCLOCK your CPU. Over 4ghz gets very nice results.

Me personally I have a i5 3470 @ 3.2ghz and a AMD R270x in other words a pretty average PC. I run ArmA 3 at everything in ULTRA and AA&PP and I get the same FPS like that as I do on any lower settings.

So I highly recommend you put your settings up pretty high.

3. Draw Distance – This is the single biggest killer of frames. So many players have it up way, way too high. Understand Draw distance is the view distance as a diameter running through the player. Meaning your machine is rendering objects and graphics that are behind you and on angles you can’t see unlike most games.

Unless you are into Invade and Annex long range 1-2km sniping, setting your Draw distance to 1000 – 1500 is ideal. You very rarely will need to engage anything longer than that. If you play on Tanoa less than 1000 is perfectly fine as most gun fights in the jungle will happen less than 200 meters in front of you. Now if you typically fly Jets or a Heli Pilot you also might want it higher. But understand the lower it is the better FPS you will get.

Some find shadows are killer too, I personally don’t find that and leave them at 200 all the time. But experiment with your shadow settings too.

4. Optimize Your Server and missions – If you play on public servers there isn’t much to do here. But if you run a server or make missions for your friends, cache your AI, don’t fill your mission with anything not needed. No one needs a fancy FOB start it only serves to use system and client resources. Your objectives and mission structure are what makes mission exciting not all the crap you put in the way.
Also running unnecessary scripts or poorly written scripts will kill frames. Make sure anything you are trying to achieve is using an efficient script and an updated script.

5. MODS – Lets face it, ArmA is ALL ABOUT the mods, if you aren’t modding your ArmA you are missing out on 90% of the fun. But Modding ArmA comes at a cost. It is important to run mods that are optimized as best as they can. Mods that have a too high quality will kill frames, mods that have lots of scripts running in the background will kill frames, Maps that have too many objects will kill frames. I assure you there will be a big performance difference running Chernarus or Altis than running Esseker or Mogadishu. But let’s face it some mods are worth the cost.

6. RESTART, RESTART, RESTART – ArmA doesn’t force you to do this. But anytime you change your graphics settings you MUST restart ArmA. Any changes don’t seem to do anything at all if you do it in game and if you just change them in the menu before you start a mission they seem to have limited results. So anytime you make a change to your graphics RESTART ARMA for them to make the most benefit.


So to reiterate on a i5 3470 @ 3.2ghz and a AMD 270x with 16gig ram with ArmA and mods installed on a SSD and I get 20-30 FPS all the time in arma on ULTRA settings and AA&PP on max settings and all the filers at 100 with a 1500 draw distance, 1500 object distance, 200 shadows.



If you find this guide somewhat helpful, I urge you to bump this thread. Lets keep it at the top as best we can and hopefully we can help some newer players and prevent these forums with being filled with multiple "Bad FPS" threads.

[2+2=5]

I got over 1000h and agree on multiple issues here.
I just wrote a guide too, actually. Here's my own approach
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=778281147

[Jax]

I agree. I think this should be stickied. Think you should have mentioned that servers get poor fps... and word it better somehow.

[IM SORRY BUFFALO]

the ssd does not help framerate, just removes the stuttering(most of it anyway, i still get a little here and there) however it makes the overall experience feel smoother.

[👑KingZer0👑]

Don't forget to add in the fact that in the launcher, you can select parameters, and change more stuff there. Select how many cores are used, mem allocating. I'm not 100% if those work for everybody, but they did work for me. Also changing power settings made a big difference. If you are on WIN7, unpark CPU...there is a ton of little things you can do also. Outside of AMRA. Just my 2 pennies. :)

[Sgt Smash]

Originally posted by Rekkless:

Me personally I have a i5 3470 @ 3.2ghz and a AMD R270x in other words a pretty average PC. I run ArmA 3 at everything in ULTRA and AA&PP and I get the same FPS like that as I do on any lower settings.
.

That means your GPU is the bottleneck if you get the same fps on both low and ultra!! i used to have a 270x and had the same problem as 2gb vram is not enough to play ultra in the first place, since i upgraded to a GPU with more than the required 4gb vram the setting make a big diffrence from low to ultra!!

[Rekkless]

Originally posted by InfantryOIFvet:

Don't forget to add in the fact that in the launcher, you can select parameters, and change more stuff there. Select how many cores are used, mem allocating. I'm not 100% if those work for everybody, but they did work for me. Also changing power settings made a big difference. If you are on WIN7, unpark CPU...there is a ton of little things you can do also. Outside of AMRA. Just my 2 pennies. :)

Nope all that parameter garbage is just garbage. it is left over nonsense from the Arma 1 days. Feel free to use it, it won't break your game but all that parameter stuff is a waste of time.

[IM SORRY BUFFALO]

Originally posted by Sgt Smash:

Originally posted by Rekkless:

Me personally I have a i5 3470 @ 3.2ghz and a AMD R270x in other words a pretty average PC. I run ArmA 3 at everything in ULTRA and AA&PP and I get the same FPS like that as I do on any lower settings.
.

That means your GPU is the bottleneck if you get the same fps on both low and ultra!! i used to have a 270x and had the same problem as 2gb vram is not enough to play ultra in the first place, since i upgraded to a GPU with more than the required 4gb vram the setting make a big diffrence from low to ultra!!

no that means its the cpu, not the gpu.

[Jax]

Originally posted by Sec8gokitty199:

Originally posted by Sgt Smash:

That means your GPU is the bottleneck if you get the same fps on both low and ultra!! i used to have a 270x and had the same problem as 2gb vram is not enough to play ultra in the first place, since i upgraded to a GPU with more than the required 4gb vram the setting make a big diffrence from low to ultra!!

no that means its the cpu, not the gpu.

Could be he's playing on a server.

[Jax]

Originally posted by Rekkless:

Originally posted by InfantryOIFvet:

Don't forget to add in the fact that in the launcher, you can select parameters, and change more stuff there. Select how many cores are used, mem allocating. I'm not 100% if those work for everybody, but they did work for me. Also changing power settings made a big difference. If you are on WIN7, unpark CPU...there is a ton of little things you can do also. Outside of AMRA. Just my 2 pennies. :)

Nope all that parameter garbage is just garbage. it is left over nonsense from the Arma 1 days. Feel free to use it, it won't break your game but all that parameter stuff is a waste of time.

Parameters do help. No logs removes the error popups that I get when playing with mods, which hault the startup of game until I click ok. -noSplash -skipintro = faster boot times.

In the arma config I have found it has detected my cpu properly, but still choose to set cpu count and extra threads. I assume -enableHT helps for intel cpu's with it. Memory limit is good if you don't have much ram and don't want windows to be bugging you that it's almost out of ram.

[Rekkless]

the no splash and skip intro yes ok does help you boot the game a bit faster. No logs does not prevent error pop ups it prevents your machine writing .RPT files where there is an error.

as for the EnableHT and all that it has been documented time and time again. Even by Bohemia themselves that it does nothing. It is left over code from ArmA 2 and the Alpha veriosn of Arma 3. As I said earlier it won't decrease or hurt your game, but it won't do anything else.

[Dwarden]

@Rekkless you do realize -enableHT works as designed in Arma 3 ?
it tells engine to utilize hyperthreaded non-native cores with microjobs
you can't use it with -cpucount= as that negates it ...

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3_Startup_Parameters#Performance

[Rekkless]

Originally posted by Dwarden:

@Rekkless you do realize -enableHT works as designed in Arma 3 ?
it tells engine to utilize hyperthreaded non-native cores with microjobs
you can't use it with -cpucount= as that negates it ...

https://community.bistudio.com/wiki/Arma_3_Startup_Parameters#Performance

Well I'll take your word for it Dwarden, myself and most players I know have never seen anykind of tangible or significant improvement by running those parameters. I quite literally had zero benefit from running them.

But you're a dev so I'll take your word for it.

My question is why doesn't the game auto detect these settings? Why are users in 2016 required to write some complex and abstract code starting the game up like it is some kind of MSDOS program from 1992? I mean come on.

Anyway like I said I've noticed far better performance improvements from running the game on a SSD, balancing the quality and PP and adjusting my draw distance.

[Sgt Smash]

Originally posted by Sec8gokitty199:

Originally posted by Sgt Smash:

That means your GPU is the bottleneck if you get the same fps on both low and ultra!! i used to have a 270x and had the same problem as 2gb vram is not enough to play ultra in the first place, since i upgraded to a GPU with more than the required 4gb vram the setting make a big diffrence from low to ultra!!

no that means its the cpu, not the gpu.

Well i had my 6700k when i had my 270x and it wasn't untill i changed to a 1080 low to ultra made a big difference! so i could only put that down to the gpu!

[Chad Thundercock]

It's the servers (or missions) their ♥♥♥♥ and cause lag it's simple. I do agree they need to optimize the engine or whatever

[👑KingZer0👑]

@Dwarden Those are the parameters I used. :)

To the ones say something about the auto-detect things...I think that is just for the basic settings in game. I don't think it has anything to do with making sure ARMA uses say, all 8 cores, or making sure the game uses every single thread from the CPU, or using all the VRAM from the GPU. You can even go into the config file, and change some things.

I'm not running on a crappy toaster with Win95. I have a nice rig. But I have played with different settings. I HAVE noticed big differences being on an SSD compared to an HDD. I HAVE noticed a difference using the parameters, and the 'custom' config.

I agree 100 percent with everything in here. But just from MY expierence, the parameters seem to do something. I think maybe if you have a higer than normal rig, you wont see changes with the parameter settings. That could be the cause of the many that say it doesn't do anything. I'm not sure. Just my thoughts.