Huge drop of FPS

I think this subject have been talked already before the patch release. But why is still the same?

I just would like to know and understand why there is a Huge drop of FPS when we get near to some 1,5m vegetations.

Note:

I have a average of 70 fps in the desert island and then when i look near or walk in these vegetations/bushes i get a 12 fps with Fraps program.

can someone explain me this please?!

I am sure there already is some thread about this issue.

But before mods close this one, i can tell you that IT CAN BE related to the shaders - maybe you set the shading quality too high for your hw specs (which you forgot to include in your post).

Here are my settings for my AMD 64 3500+, 3GB RAM, gf7900 256MB:

Resolution: 1280 x 1024

Visiblity: 1280m

Terrain detail: Very low (to get rid of the fps eating grass)

Objects detail: Low

Texture detail: Normal

Shading detail: Low

Postprocess effects: Low

Anisotropic filtering: Disabled

Shadow detail: Disabled

Antialiasing: Disabled

Blood: Low

With these settings the game still looks acceptable - and as you can see, almost everything is on LOW or Disabled, so in case you haven't SIGNIFICANTLY better (in terms of ammount of gfx memory and pure gpu and cpu power) hw than i have, i suggest simmilar settings.

I can't tell you how much FPS i usualy have because i am right in middle of something and i don't wan't to restart ArmA.

But right now i have STABLE 30 FPS while running in windowed mode, no matter what i do, or where i go, with dozens other apps running in the background (including OFP

I know that 30 FPS is horrible performance, but for windowed mode it's ok.

I agree that shading and shadow are the FPS KILLERs.

I have turned the them off, now I can get 30fps too.

I often switch the grass off depending on the mission, for example missions in very grassy areas are a a pain for me cause the aiming gets completely sluggish otherwise ( even more if you zoom in the optics view ).

Always wondered if it would make more sense to just draw a few bushes and a bit grass in a larger circle around me instead of the big grass circle that moves with me and only is a few meters big ( in lower land settings ) but very dense.

Drop of FPS in vegetation is caused by overdaw, it means that grafic card is not able to draw so many pixels that scene needs. When GC draw scene, it automatically cut hiden pixels, BUT only if this pixels are not alphatransparent. Vegetation is builded from polygons with some opacity textures, so this cuting (early Z test on HW) not work here. There is no simple solution, better performance will be with low shading detail settings (simplified pixel shader), but overdraw is still there. Also using of worst LODs will not help so match, because less polygons means worst tree shape aproximation and final surface (what is most important for overdraw reduction) will be similar. We are still woring on some research in this area.

Awesome to hear! Well not about the stubbornness of the problem, but the straightforward explanation and the notion of working on it

We are still woring on some research in this area.

I apreciate alot all your answers.

And thanks for the official explanation.

nice to know that the team will try to solve or improve this matter.

cheers.

by the way i forgot to mention my settings and specs:

my sepcs:

Intel p4, 3,0 Ghz

1,5 G ddr 400 (1x1G + 1x512mb)

X1950 pro 512 mb AGP DDR3

Power supply 550watts

board Guru abit ai7

HDD 250G sata II 16mb (working as sata I)

ARMA settings:

terrain detail: Very Low Anistropic Filtering: Low

Object detail: Low Shadow detail: High (to see the shadow in 1st person view)

Texture detail: Normal Antialising: Normal

Shading detail: Normal Blood: Low

Protprocess effects: Low

Awesome to hear! Well not about the stubbornness of the problem, but the straightforward explanation and the notion of working on it

I don't find that statement awsome. Infact i find it unbelievable. I thought ArmA coding was a more optimized version of flashpoints, but by reading statements like oharas i'm beggining to think this whole game is just a beta test for game2. If there still working on how to make the vegetation less gpu hungry then it sounds bad. I too get fps drops and i'm running on Quad SLI 7950GX2.... If my gpus struggle to keep smooth fps then there's no hope for this game with regards to optimizing the islands vegetation.

I'm using an 8800GTX and have the same problem. Walking up to a bush drops my fps down to around 7fps. Interestngly if I tab out and back in again this fixes the problem for a few minutes. This happens with shading and shadows on both high and low settings.

My processor is a Core 2 Duo E6600, so the 2 put together should be okay for a simply bush.

Quote[/b] ]Shadow detail: High (to see the shadow in 1st person view)

You could easily put up almost all the texture and detail settings if you set shadows on low or disabled them totally. I´m not sure if I´d want to trade all the nice textures for shadows...

Speaking of grass, would I not be at a huge advantage completely turnning off grass on my system when playing against others online with High terrain settings? I would imagine that my view would not be obscured at all and theirs would be? Kind of like that HDR tweak where you can turn off glare by setting it to 16 rather than 8.

Quote[/b] ]Speaking of grass, would I not be at a huge advantage completely turnning off grass on my system when playing against others online with High terrain settings?

It´s handled by server so you can´t turn it off on your comp while the server runs a different set. Server will override your local settings.

Quote[/b] ]Speaking of grass, would I not be at a huge advantage completely turnning off grass on my system when playing against others online with High terrain settings?

It´s handled by server so you can´t turn it off on your comp while the server runs a different set. Server will override your local settings.

wrong :P

If you're correct, B6, that's a cheat enabling bug. Please elabourate.

bear in mind that fraps is not an accurate indicator of FPS, by no extent of the imagination.

if server runs all vegetation high, your not forced to use it on high quality. You can use low or very low quality, removing the grass.

So it does not depend on the server. You can change it yourself.

Its not cheating. If he wants to play the game with no lag, why cant he change it then. Im glad BIS made this possible so people can choose. Thats not cheating.

If it´s true what you´re saying it is enabling cheating.

As with viewdistance this should be a serverside override option.

Serverside settings should be mandatory or at least server should be able to read out user settings and display. Along with the server config a message should pop up and either disconnect the player or give the others a warning.

Can one of the Dev´s comment ?

If it´s true what you´re saying it is enabling cheating.

As with viewdistance this should be a serverside override option.

Serverside settings should be mandatory or at least server should be able to read out user settings and display. Along with the server config a message should pop up and either disconnect the player or give the others a warning.

Can one of the Dev´s comment ?

well i tryed in mp games and i can change my vegetation during the game. If im not glad with my FPS i change the settings in order to have the game how i like and playable.

I understand what you mean, but if a person cant handle high vegetations why is he forced to use it and not be able to change it. (Hope BIS made this intencionally so people have the option to choose, same thing happens to those o like to play with very high vegetation. If the server is set to very low vegetation and if he wants to play very high, why not let him choose freely)

Can one of the Dev´s comment ?

i would like to hear also. i wait for an answer.

cheers

edit: typo

Awesome to hear! Well not about the stubbornness of the problem, but the straightforward explanation and the notion of working on it

I don't find that statement awsome. Infact i find it unbelievable.

Hardly. It's a very tough problem. How do you know if you can skip drawing things that are behind a polygon, if part of that polygon is see through, with weird shapes (leaves)? It would be a lot easier with voxels (since you just move outwards from the player along the z axis once per pixel until you hit something instead of trying to calculate which polygons are behind other polygons), but you don't see that tech used a lot anymore Man, Outcast looked amazing for 1999..

Anyway, there isn't an easy solution, and I'm glad BIS is working on it. If they can solve it that'd be a huge boost but we gotta be realistic.

regarding the mentioned "cheating", by turning off the grass:

The grass can be turned off by setting the TERRAIN DETAIL to VERY LOW.

I admit i haven't tested it yet, but as i understand it, you can set the server to force certain terrain detail on clients.

So if you don't want this "cheating" to be possible, you just set your server parameters accordingly.

Or is this feature not implemented yet?

From a human vs human standpoint it makes the grass a positive drawback. How can you trust that everyone else is playing with grass enabled? If you have it switched off they will be laying out in the open with the false sense of security of being concealed.

Awesome to hear! Well not about the stubbornness of the problem, but the straightforward explanation and the notion of working on it

I don't find that statement awsome. Infact i find it unbelievable.

Hardly.  It's a very tough problem.  How do you know if you can skip drawing things that are behind a polygon, if part of that polygon is see through, with weird shapes (leaves)?  It would be a lot easier with voxels (since you just move outwards from the player along the z axis once per pixel until you hit something instead of trying to calculate which polygons are behind other polygons), but you don't see that tech used a lot anymore  Man, Outcast looked amazing for 1999..  

Anyway, there isn't an easy solution, and I'm glad BIS is working on it.  If they can solve it that'd be a huge boost but we gotta be realistic.

What do you mean if they can solve it...If they don't solve it then the idea of having such a large land mass is not a realistic goal. They'll just have to scale it down and then what would the game be. The only appeal this game holds for me is the size of the game world. If ArmA was played on much smaller maps it would be crap by todays standards. The graphics would be far better (not that i'm complaining about them now) but the gameplay would flat out suck.

What do you mean if they can solve it...

It means it's possible that there are only two ways to solve it. You render less polygons, ie less vegetation or you get/wait for more powerful computers.

If you look back on ofp, the solution became the latter. It's not unthinkable that it will be so again.

Edit. Though I will add, it sounds like there are some performance hogging bugs as well which could probably smoothe the problems on at least the more powerful computers. ie I don't get 7fps looking at grass and my computer is only mediocre at this point.

What do you mean if they can solve it...

It means it's possible that there are only two ways to solve it. You render less polygons, ie less vegetation or you get/wait for more powerful computers.

If you look back on ofp, the solution became the latter. It's not unthinkable that it will be so again.

Edit. Though I will add, it sounds like there are some performance hogging bugs as well which could probably smoothe the problems on at least the more powerful computers. ie I don't get 7fps looking at grass and my computer is only mediocre at this point.

So basically there's no point in Arma having settings above high, even when it's installed on very powerfull PCs. It's like BIS is always one step behind when there games released because it's not playable on very high settings.

Hmm with 1.05 there has to be a memory leak somewhere. I dropped the grass off alltogether to gain lots of fps but still it only helps for a short while. Because when the textures sadly also in 1.05 start turning into boxes, fps goes to the floor.

I have a S754 3000+ with 1GB and GF7800GS.

When I just checked task manager it said Arma.exe uses only about 480000 kB of memory. However at the same time free memory was at 11000 kB! And page file was maxed out at 1.1GB...

Not very efficent memory usage I'd say.