ARMA III Video Card Performance and IQ Review @ [H]

I managed to get higher gpu usage and frame rate by creating a 11gb ramdisk and coping the /addon folder to it, then pointed to it with a junction. It was as if the game wasn't utilizing enough memory, and was starving the gpus with slow access to data.

I'm running 3930k @ 4.9, 680 sli, for the record
 
Voidy said:
I managed to get higher gpu usage and frame rate by creating a 11gb ramdisk and coping the /addon folder to it, then pointed to it with a junction. It was as if the game wasn't utilizing enough memory, and was starving the gpus with slow access to data.

I'm running 3930k @ 4.9, 680 sli, for the record
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That is interesting , it might stream data from HD as needed . the area is big so maybe it can not load everything into vid memory .

Edit: I have ArmA 2 demo and the benchmark GPU usage was only 35-64% , mostly around 45% and only 1018mhz . So this is something thats been like this for a while, at least on these Nvidia drivers (314.07 ) .
 
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EdKiefer said:
That is interesting , it might stream data from HD as needed . the area is big so maybe it can not load everything into vid memory .
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That's exactly what it does. They've been streaming their texture data in from HDD since their first Arma/OFP release on Xbox (as it was the only way to get it to work with such low ram). Then when they made Arma 2, they realized they could make MASSIVE worlds on PC using the same technology.

An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can get for the Arma series.
 
TheCapulet said:
An SSD is the single biggest upgrade you can get for the Arma series.
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I Have the rest of the install on a new ssd, but it still cant hack it compared to a ramdisk. The game just doesnt seem to take advantage of the massive amount of ram most computers have these days.
 
I've got 2 titans a 3770k at 4.8 and a Samsung 840 ssd with 16gb ram. When playing online and hitting the map button. I still get buffering pauses as the map is being drawn, as I'm trying to scroll to the objective point. with the Titan's 6gb vram, my 16gb desktop memory and my ssd, you would think buffering would be pretty much nil, but alas it isn't...
 
Looks like shit, runs like shit... don't know why I'd purchase this.
 
EdKiefer said:
I take it Vsync is set off ,does same thing happen in game , low usage and clock freq ?

The fps are low so not sure whats up there, could be driver issue too .

Does running power management on max performance in Nvidia control panel help ?
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Yeah i already had it set to maximum performance. I will try fooling around with settings. i playedthrough the infantry single player mission w/ literally everything turned up and was avging 30fps.the benchmark on ultra preset also gave me 30fps avg :/
 
A single core, 32bit application utilizing a maximum of 2GB of system memory, streaming all that data from the HDD... this is what you get. I don't know why people are still surprised ARMA plays like this since it's essentially been the same engine for the past 13 years.
 
Boggins said:
A single core, 32bit application utilizing a maximum of 2GB of system memory, streaming all that data from the HDD... this is what you get. I don't know why people are still surprised ARMA plays like this since it's essentially been the same engine for the past 13 years.
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I am not sure its just because the engine is old . The issue is any game that displays very large distances and has high detail up close has issues .
Look at any flight sim and they don't need high detail cause you never up close much and they can get away with a tile rendering type system to lower overhead .
but that won't work for game thats mainly FPS .
It main reason many engines lower visibility at far distances .
 
Not too sure why the author is gushing about Arma III here.

I love the game, and make missions, but it's hardly anything to use as a benchmark.

As has been noted here in previous posts, it is in no way optimized. It typically uses around 50% cpu and even less gpu no matter the system specs. Not to mention that the GPU usage starts low and actually falls to around 10% over time in game.

HardOCP should rethink their stance on using Arma 3 as a benchmark. It really only shows how a game can seem resource hungry while really being resource unaware. Pointing to it as a measure of anything will only serve to diminish HardOCP's reputation.

I will keep on playing the game, though. The CPU/GPU problem has been there since Arma2 (perhaps even in arma, but I don't recall noticing it back then) and is something that many fans of the franchise have hated but have been made to ignore as some think the dev's are doing.

About the only thing factual that can be said about Arma 3's engine with regards to GPU's is that setting the game to VeryHigh or Ultra reduces the use of the CPU and passes the processing off to the video card.

Take the article off the front page or change it to an opinion piece. The testing is irrelevant due to problems with the game engine and the writing... needs work.

Until some real testing--cpu usage, gpu usage, system bottlenecks, etc.-- are done this isn't an informative article other than to say you can spend over $1k on video cards alone and still not be satisfied with the performance as Arma3 doesn't scale...
 
RGFrog said:
HardOCP should rethink their stance on using Arma 3 as a benchmark. It really only shows how a game can seem resource hungry while really being resource unaware. Pointing to it as a measure of anything will only serve to diminish HardOCP's reputation.
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I agree. I'll preface by saying I really like the hardware (esp. GPU) reviews here and find them essential, but the editors seem to equate "resource utilization" with "demanding". The two concepts are not directly proportional. A game can be demanding because it poorly utilizes hardware resources (e.g. game A looks a little better than game B but runs half as fast), just as a game can utilize hardware properly and run wonderfully on a variety of systems (this is what developers mean by "scalability"). To congratulate a developer on creating a system hog makes no sense, regardless of how the games looks.
 
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