Quad core testers are needed

[PhatVybz]

i did dl procexp
but i have no clue how to use it and where to find the details you need
can also someone confirm my question with a answer
if device shows 8 cpu does cpuCount needs to be 8 or 4 on that i7
and its weird but disbaling HT is better for arma?
its confusing to me to disable performance technologies

BTW the latest ati drives increase and stabilize from alot the fps tho it seems ArmA locks fps at 60

[karoshi]

i did dl procexp
but i have no clue how to use it and where to find the details you need
can also someone confirm my question with a answer
if device shows 8 cpu does cpuCount needs to be 8 or 4 on that i7
and its weird but disbaling HT is better for arma?
its confusing to me to disable performance technologies

Depends, you can try with cpucount 8 and no affinity or cpucount 4 and affinity 1&2&3&4 or 1&3&5&7. I dont know how the virtual cores are assigned, maybe first real core is virtual cores 1&2 or 1&5 and last real core is virtual cores 7&8 or 4&8.
The idea is that you only have a thread per real core. If you have 2 threads per real core you are kind of reducing your per core cache in half. You can tell us what works best on i7.

I dont have arma2 yet and only a e21xx dual core, cant test myself.

What im curious about is the load on the different threads

• Run procexp (as admin under vista/w7). Open menu view->"update speed"->10 seconds
• Run arma windowed, create a shortcut adding -window to the command line parameters. Let arma run in a smallish window 800x600 or even less.
• Start (editor?) a mission with 100+ AIs in a firefight, should tax your cpus. If you have a uber-system, copy-paste a few more hundred AIs until you see your frame rate go down.
• Switch to procexp while arma is running the heavy firefight.
• In the list of processes locate arma2.exe and double click on it
• A new window appears with information about the selected process (arma2.exe). The window has multiple tabs on the top, select the threads tab.
• The threads tab shows all the threads the process is running, you can sort by CPU usage by clicking on the top of CPU column (2nd column from the left).
• Bring the small arma window to the foreground, while keepin the threads tab in view. The foreground arma window should not overlap the procexp
  window with the CPU per thread usage data. This way the game runs in the foreground but you can still see the reported data in the other window.
• Report on how many threads there are. Each line in the threads tab is a single thread. Each thread has a "start", thats the address where the thread started running, i believe. In any case, let's name the thread by it's start address.
• Now report how much % of CPU each one is getting. Usually not all threads are running all the time. See which ones are running (using the "name" from the last point) and report what CPU% column for each thread reports. The cpu usage % usually is not constant, just try to give us an average for it.

Now repeat with cpuCount set to 1, 2, 4 (and 8 for i7).

Doint this test will tell us: how many threads is arma2.exe starting for each configuration selected (1,2,4,8). And how much are those threads doing.
For example, if there is a thread calculating sounds, that thread should be doing around 5% or less. If you are in the menu, possibly only 2 threads are running, one doing sound and another drawing. If you start a heavy firefight with 1000 AIs, 8 threads should show CPU usage as arma2 lets each thread handle some AI each.

DO NOT SET AFFINITY, please.

Also, running fraps while testing could be usefull to get a quick and unscientific feel for performance.

thank you

[PhatVybz]

it runs 27 thread count and 18 working hard no matter what cpucount
when on the editor 10X10 infantry group units fighting each other
and sometimes some threads go disabled and end up with 24 or 25 thread
otherwise my fps and cpu usage is same
is this as it should be or am i doing something wrong
i cant check the procxp while doing the stuff on arma but i have it in front of me while doing arma
arma was windowed mode taking half of my screen and procxp taking the other half of my screen
is there a way to create a log file with procxp??

also i can confirm that the i7 show 8 core but cpu 0 and 1 use core 0
cpu 2 and 3 use core 4
cpu 4 and 5 use core 8
cpu 6 and 7 use core 13

[choC]

Hey guys I'm going to test cpucount=4 and cpucount=8 with my i7's hyperthreading disabled and enabled respectively. I'll post back with results.

My rig:
i7 920 @ 4.00ghz
6GB DDR3 PC-12800
ATI HD 4870 512mb
Asus P6T Deluxe
Win7 64-bit

Test Settings:
Video Memory - High
Post Processing - Low
Anti-Aliasing - Off
All other settings - Normal
Resolution - 1680x 1050

RESULTS:

Test 1: Hyperthreading Enabled in BIOS -cpucount=8
1nd Run - 4440
2nd Run - 5129

Test 2: Hyperthreading Disabled in BIOS (max 4 cores)
1st Run - 4626
2nd Run - 5353

Test 3: Hyperthreading Enabled in BIOS -cpucount=4
1st Run - 4410
2nd Run - 5201

Core Utilisation


Conclusion & Findings:
Firstly a caveat to my results, since I'm using an ATI card I have VSync forced on and cannot disable it so my frame rate was capped at 60fps throughout significant portions of the benchmark.
Now to the results, there doesn't seem to by a big difference between HT enabled and disabled, however I must say there was a significant increase in texture pop-in pauses and frame rate dips with hyperthreading enabled. You should be able to discern from the graphs that the hyperthreaded cores are acting quite erratically with sudden drops in thread utilisation. Even when I added the -cpucount=4 command to my hyperthreaded processor, erratic behaviour was observed.
So what does this mean to i7 users? The game definitely has issues with hyperthreading, and there is definitely room for improvement for i7 processor performance with this game. Bohemia Interactive just has to get around to optimising the game for HT.

[Gringo85]

Guys I gotta tell you that I just over clocked my CPU and I noticed a little bit of improvement, myself, I'm definitely, determined that ArmA II prefers Quad Core CPUs plus high GHZ CPUs since I was doing 3.0GHZ and pushed up (Factory Over clocking in BIOS) to 3.3GHZ and noticed little but stable increased in FPS without those suddenly drops in the city.

My rig:

AMD x2 Dual Core 6000+ @ 3.3GHZ OC
3.5GB DDR2 RAM
ATI HD 4890 1GB OC (940/1095)
Asus M3N72-D
Win XP Pro

[galzohar]

I don't know about the benchmark, but with hyperthreading on I tried loading up chernarus with a large amount of aircraft and it stuttered like crazy. Looking at task manager it seemed like only 1 thread (out of 8 threads) was running heavily, which probably shows ALL the AI use a single thread. Turning hyperthreading off obviously helped to reduce the stuttering by a significant amount as now that thread was running on its own core rather than 1/2 a core. I wouldn't be surprised if a no-AI scenario didn't show a difference with HT on vs off.

I don't know how many heavy threads the game runs in other situations, though. It would be nice to have some info from BIS regarding this topic, after all those who write the software should know how many threads they placed in it and how many of them can actually take noticeable CPU power to the point of slowing down your game.

In the end the first step towards multi-core optimization is spreading the load around with different threads. For example if the game only has 3 (heavy) threads that load up the CPU, then you're not going to see any real benefit going above 3 cores, and definitely won't see any benefit from HT.

[Gringo85]

i did dl procexp
but i have no clue how to use it and where to find the details you need
can also someone confirm my question with a answer
if device shows 8 cpu does cpuCount needs to be 8 or 4 on that i7
and its weird but disbaling HT is better for arma?
its confusing to me to disable performance technologies

BTW the latest ati drives increase and stabilize from alot the fps tho it seems ArmA locks fps at 60

Make sure you dont have vSync on in your video card settings in the software (ATI Catalyst or Nvidia's) since ArmA II has no setting for this unless in Arma2.cfg file 60 sounds like refresh rate issue to me so that's why I suggest you take a look into vSync, for me it seems like I'm capped at 30 FPS but after my CPU overclock I' had got to 35 when raining lol, wierd yeah.

[ArmedAnarkie]

My system is using core 2 duo but for comparison purpose,

3246 at 2nd test.

Core2 Duo 6750@3.2 GHz
3.5 GB ram
4890 1GB at 1.0 + GHz
XP SP3
Arma2 on Raptor 74GB drive
Resolution: 1680x1050

I wonder it is really using Quad core..or just fast HDD.

---------- Post added at 02:44 AM ---------- Previous post was at 02:38 AM ----------

my settings might have been higher then demanded
but my results are
test 1 -35.1197
test 2 -39.854
test 3 -31.9574
test 4 -44.2478
test 5 -16.61
OFPMARK =3355.78
i run 8 core i7 cpu 940 @2.93Ghz
6MB triple channel ddr3
vista sp1 64bit
ati 4890 crossfire enabled X2

anyway when they say multicore suport it means it support as many cores you want
this post is ridiculous ..just cpuCount=X if the game cant read the cores
and other target parameters
mine looks like this -cpuCount=8 -maxmem=2047 -winxp -noCB -nosplash

Your score is not much better than mine....But you have i7 core and mine is Core 2 duo (OCed to 3.2GHz)

Looks like what BI said about quad or dual core before Arma2 is released is right. They said higher clock is better and quad is better in the same clock.

[galzohar]

Based on observed CPU load during different situations, it seems like the game is running 2 heavy threads for the actual game and then a 3rd thread for the AI, and that 3rd thread would go anywhere from very little use all the way up to using up an entire core 100% and slow your game down since your 3rd core can't keep up and the effort can't be split to the 4th due to it only being 1 thread.

Of course it would be very nice to get an official or at least more definitive information from someone who actually knows how to check how many threads a process is running and how much processing power each is taking.