PSA: Your FPS is bad because of your view distance and/or servers you join

[Phazed]

Just thought I'd throw this out there as someone who has a 560ti and 2500k, experience with BIS games before, and run the game at 60+ FPS on medium/high mix settings.

If you want to benchmark how good your FPS is, load up one of the showcases - what you get in these showcases (especially the ones that take place on Altis, like the NATO demo) is for all intents and purposes your "real" FPS with the game.

The two major things that make your FPS "artifically low" are:

1. Having your view distance setting way to high. The view distances are NOT meant to be higher than half way even for really good PC's. Especially object view distance. You should only max this out if you are taking screenshots. I.E. for me, I have my view distance set to 8000 or so and my object view distance around 2500-3000 or so. Maxing both of these out is a sure fire way to run your PC at sub-10FPS levels. They are settings that predominantly are only achievable for people taking screenshots only, or those with insanely high-spec machines.

2. The multiplayer mission you joined. Multiplayer SHOULD NOT run signifigantly slower than SP (slightly slower is to be expected) if the mission designer made the mission properly. However, many of the most popular user-made missions that servers like to have up are all crappy-done ports from Arma2 missions that have none of the optimizations put in place specifically for Arma3. 404's wasteland for example is the worst offender of this - the mission designer straight up manually places and loads every single object in the game world on the whole server for every refresh, which makes the FPS slow to a crawl. Invade & Annex is another very bad offender of this.

The problem isn't multiplayer, the problem is the missions you are playing on being made by community members that don't want to bother optimizing it for Arma3 before porting it to Arma3. The result is you get a ton of servers running these missions, that all run at terrible FPS, so if you join such poorly-made missions you will find yourself running the game at 20FPS at best when normally you'd get 45-60.

[Dj Otacon]

"The problem isn't multiplayer, the problem is the missions you are playing on being made by community members that don't want to bother optimizing it for Arma3 before porting it to Arma3. The result is you get a ton of servers running these missions, that all run at terrible FPS, so if you join such poorly-made missions you will find yourself running the game at 20FPS at best when normally you'd get 45-60."

Agree 100%

[Kurtovicz]

Agree, too.

[X39]

just a short question
where is the "vote up" feature for the steam community (lets call this) forum feature?
this is a needToRead for all those idiots out there which are saying arma has poor FPS and things like that ...
horrible that its not possible to vote this up

[Conure]

Hi,

I have a similar machine to you - 2500k at 4.2ghz, GTX 660ti, 8gb of ram and SSD. Could you give me your settings so I can match them please?

[white]

Your cpu is way better than the RECOMMENDED specs, your argument about performance is irrelevant.

http://i.imgur.com/edQEN7H.jpg

X6 1075t @3600 watercooled, 16gb, 256gb ocz agi 4 ssd, 660ti oc, xfi titanium. 50 player server.

[Dj Otacon]

Originally posted by white:

Your cpu is way better than the RECOMMENDED specs, your argument about performance is irrelevant.

He is speaking about servers.

Do you read the post?

[white]

Originally posted by Dj Otacon:

Originally posted by white:

Your cpu is way better than the RECOMMENDED specs, your argument about performance is irrelevant.

He is speaking about servers.

Do you read the post?

Yes, no matter the server if there are players enough the performance goes down. But if you have a CPU a lot better than the recommended your experience is different. Thats why i said its irrelevant to draw conclusions from that. He ALSO mentioned view distance, clearly shown on the screenshot.

And before blaming solely servers and "badly made missions", the heli showcase also suffers from performance loss, simply because there are more stuff going on, i gather that following the same line of though BIS can´t make good "optimized" missions aswell.

[Shiro]

Make a video of you playing multiplayer with 8000 view distance and 3000 object distance, getting 60fps with that rig.

[Dj Otacon]

Originally posted by white:

Originally posted by Dj Otacon:

He is speaking about servers.

Do you read the post?

Yes, no matter the server if there are players enough the performance goes down. But if you have a CPU a lot better than the recommended your experience is different. Thats why i said its irrelevant to draw conclusions from that.

The server rendering speed is critical for mp games.

If the server is not suited for the amount of players you have lag even with powerful pc.

His conclusion are very relevant.

[Flacracker]

Invade and Annex is THE WORST. All of the co-op servers are running this and it is terrible.

[Pèpè Silvia]

If only there was a way to see the server specs in-game then this whole issue would be easily "verified".

IMO server admins need to list their specs for the server in the server info! I have a feeling that a lot of admins are running from their desktop PC's and not a dedicated server box

[GoverningLaw]

Sorry, I dont believe your getting that kind of performance Korjax.

[^dr!an]

They need to release a patch for the FPS issue's

[Rhym3z]

Originally posted by Flacracker:

Invade and Annex is THE WORST. All of the co-op servers are running this and it is terrible.

What i dont understand is, there are a lot of people on the servers running this mode, and they obviously seem to be playing it fine, but im not sure how

[^dr!an]

Even in the PC gamer review they said the game bottlenecks

http://www.pcgamer.com/review/arma-3-review/3/