CPU & GPU Utilization

Just a couple quick questions regarding this game and it's engine.

I've been watching my ASUS AI Suite II application while running the ArmA 2 benchamrks 1 and 2. It's kind of odd actually because my CPU cores are hardly being utilized past 50% and my GPU temps never go above 58 degrees celcius... Is this normal? If I run a Prime 95 test all cores are utilized at 100%, of course this has nothing to do with the way games are handled by the CPU, however it gives you an idea that my CPU is fully functional.

Arma 2 Benchmark 1 (128fps average)

Arma 2 Benchamrk 2 (33fps average)

All video settings are at normal @ 1680*1050. Ansiotropic Filtering Max and Antialiasing at normal.

System:

ASUS P8P67 Deluxe

i7 2600K o/c@4.7

8GB G-Skill 2133mhz Mem

ASUS GTX 580 Direct CU II (833 core 4133 memory)

Creative Xfi Extreme Music

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

You're not alone mate, I like to leave the task manager (performance tab) and MSI afterburner windows open while I play so I can see whats going on. Pretty much the same deal with me. I'll play some warfare later and take some screenies of the usages, might be useful.

It seems the game does indeed support multi-core CPU's, but when it's spreading the load across say 4 cores at only 30-50%, it makes it kind of pointless. Perhaps the engine is just a little outdated in terms of taking advantage of these new CPU's and thier advanced instruction sets.

Thats the only guess I can make it.

---------- Post added at 10:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:18 PM ----------

Hey Easy, if you don't mind me asking, what are you using for a HSF? Are you on air or water? I'm using a Noctua NH-C14 but I'm really not very impressed with it. It works fine up to 4.5ghz with a v-core of 1.20-1.30, but when you start upping the voltage any further it really starts getting overwhelmed and the temps sky rocket. Right now 4.6-4.7 is my limit because of temps even though this batch CPU could easily hit 5ghz.

IMO ARMA2 OA benchmark show more multi-core optimization than ARMA2's

Try the E08 Benchmark and let us know if there is any difference.

I believe improvements were made regarding multi-core utilization.

I forgot to mention, this is when launching the combined ops shortcut, not the green Arma 2 shortcut. Sorry for the confusion.

My bet would be that the multicore sync is the reason.

You cannot throw unlimited power at the stuff without any thinking so to speak.

It all needs to be synced and processed in the pipelines.

Was it not so that A.I calculation are not multithreaded and at least this causes the low core usage cos other cores have to wait for the A.I calculations to finish or something...

A good program to monitor cpu and gpu usages (and temps if needed) is www.playclaw.com, 2 week free trial. It has a in-game overlay so no need to alt-tab all the time...

Here's my usage about 2hrs into a warfare game.

Hey Easy, if you don't mind me asking, what are you using for a HSF? Are you on air or water? I'm using a Noctua NH-C14 but I'm really not very impressed with it. It works fine up to 4.5ghz with a v-core of 1.20-1.30, but when you start upping the voltage any further it really starts getting overwhelmed and the temps sky rocket. Right now 4.6-4.7 is my limit because of temps even though this batch CPU could easily hit 5ghz.

I'm using a Noctua NH-D14, I'm really liking it. Maybe you could try re-seating yours? Did you get Noctua's TIM (came with mine)? It's actually really good from what I've read on OCing forums. Ambients have a big effect too, I remember when it was about 33c and I ran LinX.....temps got to low 80s......then another day when it was about 25c temps hit mid 70s.

Yeah, I picked up the wrong one at the store unfortunately. I installed it without even knowing the differnce until I started reading up on it. It's the only thing I didn't fully research before I bought my computer parts. I'm using the C-14 model, not the D-14, theres a big difference. I'm going to grab one this morning instead; the C-14 just isn't getting rid of the heat quick enough as it's not your typical "tower Cooler", it's a top down cooler which basically faces your motherboard. It's great for keeping your chipset and RAM cool, but unfortunately it's not going to cut it for hitting 5ghz and keeping the temps down. BTW, your CPU stats screenshot is very close to what I see when I run OA.

Just another cooler to toss into the box I've collected over the years, lol. I have coolers dating back to 1996. ;)

Hi,

Posted this last week in the Arma 2 (low) performance thread:

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FPS is steady at 24-29 (chernarus) but system is far away from utilizing all resources. CPU usage stands at 40-55%, none of the cores rarely exceed 75% usage. GPU usage is at 40-60% on average.

Visibility at 2000. With 10km visibility framerate goes to 15, at 500m to 35. Little gain there. Settings at fairly high but lowering to ugliest possible, resolutions and all, fps is not affected. As if I was CPU limited and I would be happy accept that if CPU usage was even close to full on even one core!

I used playclaw to record gpu/cpu usage and task manager to analyze each core. Arma 2 runs on each core but like I said above, none of the cores is working at full.

What could be the problem? Help highly appreciated.

i5 760 @ 3,0ghz

HD 5870

4gb Kingston HyperX CL7

Win 7 x64

Arma 2 1.08 (steam)

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In case anyone has any tips/resolution I'd be very happy. It kinda sucks running the game at 50% of my system's potential.

I've tried updating drivers, cpucount=4, exthreads=7 etc. to no avail. I've seen a some discussion on problems like this and it is definitely related to quad cores and most also seem to be running x64 Vista or Win 7. What's your OS Jocko-Flocko?

Just out of curiosity, have you tried running Arma2 with 2 cores only to see if the usage goes to near 100%. I have only C2D and Arma2 CO brings it to its knees all the time, everywhere. Vanilla A2 seems to use a tiny bit less cpu than OA/CO. And buddy of mine with Q9300 with only vA2 has about the same usages as you.

Also try chernarus with different amount of AI soldiers so you see where your limit goes before the fps drops. I assume that without AI or with just 1-2, you should have quite good fps in most places, except inside villages.

"FPS is steady at 24-29 (chernarus)"

Where abouts on the island? And are you basing your FPS during major combat operations during the campaign missions, or just standing alone in the editor?

I'm running Windows 7 64bit btw.

This afternoon running DAC (a scripting dynamic AI generator module that creates A MAJOR AMOUNT OF AI) I did see the CPU usage increase to around 75% on all 4 cores with an average framerate of about 65fps, so I think it has a lot to do with the amount of AI that you have running around on the island trying to kill each other.

"I have only C2D and Arma2 CO brings it to its knees all the time, everywhere. Vanilla A2 seems to use a tiny bit less cpu than OA/CO. And buddy of mine with Q9300 with only vA2 has about the same usages as you."

Yeah I had a Core 2 E6600 @ 3.3ghz a couple weeks ago before I upgraded to what I have now, and yeah I know, Arma 2 really spanked my CPU and my old Geforce 8800 hard. Now it runs pretty smooth since I fixed the issue I was having that I metioned in my other thread.

Please remember that when a core actually is not working at 100% it probably means the related thread waits for data from threads actually calculated by other cores.

A game is extrmely difficult to code multithreaded so that never a thread would have to wait for another thread to finish. Not much room to parallelize things since timings are quite relevant.

In other software it might be easier, namely offline renderer or picture manipulation software as there it doesn't matter if pixel #64537 is done before pixel #9674893.

This also explains that often FPS goes down and GPU usage aswell: the CPU is pretty busy and can't feed the GPU with enough data to keep it busy at 100%. So the GPU has to wait longer for the complete data set from the CPU to complete a frame, therefor the usage goes down.

In such cases you would see a direct impact of increasing/decreasing CPU clocks in resulting FPS.

Kinda like real army. Everyone is waiting for someone and nobody's working at 100%. They shouldn't have model army workflow in arma 2 thread handling :)

Kinda like real army. Everyone is waiting for someone and nobody's working at 100%. They shouldn't have model army workflow in arma 2 thread handling :)

LMAO, you got it mate, you got it. ;)

Jocko, you have to be having a laugh right?

If your specs are true then you are lucky you don't hear snoring coming from your PC on that resolution.

Treat yourself to a bigger monitor so you get the benefits from all that nice hardware, as it is right now it won't be feeling much stress.

I picked up another ASUS GTX580 last night to run in SLI. I'm looking forward to playing Arma 2 across my 3 monitors and not just the one monitor I am now. I imagine that should smack around my hardwre a bit. ;)