Super low GPU usage on MP only???

[rob151515 10]

I posted a new thread in this forum (http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?t=130220), but I've just found this thread and this looks to be what I am seeing in SP. As Burdy puts it:

as soon as the shooting starts, your FPS dies, and your GPU usage hits the Shitter.

Maybe it's not my hardware after all?

[burdy 11]

Yeah im starting to believe that to, I have tried Everything but nothing seems to work :mad:

[burdy 11]

Well just updated my GFX to a ATI 7970, and nothing is diffrent, still 20 or below fps with AI on the map

[Horus 83]

Did you try to disable core parking, CPU tweak, and see if that makes some improvements to your game play?

[burdy 11]

I use Cpucount=4 and exthreads=7, but Ive been using that since the thread started. I just tried disable core parking, and FPS is a little bit better, but doesnt make any big improvements. What other tweaks are there?

[MavericK96 0]

What is "core parking", anyway?

[Horus 83]

Core parking

What is "core parking", anyway?

How to disable core parking and throttle states on CPU from advanced power options

• Open regedit, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Power\PowerSettings\54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00
  
• Export a copy of this selected branch as safeguard
  
• Navigate the subkeys, switch the "Attribute" value from 1 to 0 for every subkey you want to appear in Control Panel\System and Security\Power Options\Edit Plan Settings\Advanced Power Options.
  
• The key ones you probably want to view there are:
  
• 0cc5b647-c1df-4637-891a-dec35c318583 "Processor performance core parking min cores" SET IT TO 100% so no cores will park.
  
• 3b04d4fd-1cc7-4f23-ab1c-d1337819c4bb "Allow Throttle States" Off
  
• Warning: don't disable Processor Idle, this will only increase your CPU temperature, wear & tear and energy bill without performance gain.
  
  

Edited January 27, 2012 by Horus

[burdy 11]

Alright, So I ran Benchmark 1 for ArmA 2 with my 7970 2 times, one with a overclock on, and one without... The results were the same for both (Average of 43 fps). So I guess the Low GPU Usage is linked to a CPU issue?

[MavericK96 0]

I turned off "core parking", which I never noticed as being an issue anyway, but it can't hurt.

Did some testing in Firestorm with the UNS mod. Tons of AI and foliage on that mission, so it was a good test.

With my settings I was getting like 20-30 FPS most of the time, possibly dropping down to 10 or 15 FPS. I checked both CPU and GPU usage, and they ended up being:

CPU: About 60-75% across all 4 cores, never hit 90%+ at all

GPU: Never went above 40% utilization on both GPUs, typically more like 30-35%

Not sure what is going on but something is definitely preventing the game from running at its maximum potential.

EDIT: Some other interesting conclusions from Utes editor testing (stock CO)

1) AI seems to be a big reason for slowdown over 100 units or so. I was getting pretty good slowdown with 10 squads of each OPFOR and BLUFOR fighting it out on Utes. CPU usage was about 75% at the most

2) Cores 0 and 3 (the first and last basically) never went above 50% load or so. The middle two cores (1 and 2) tended to be around 75% most of the time. Uneven distribution.

3) With AI, looking up or down doesn't help, but in some situations with a lot of foliage (like that Firestorm mission) looking up or down boosts framerate to 60+ FPS. However, looking out toward the horizon drops FPS very low. Interestingly,this is also when GPU utilization is low (~30%). So the more that has to be rendered, the less the GPUs are working. Hmm.

Hard to pinpoint exactly what the issue is here. The only conclusion I can come up with is there is some sort of unoptimized code in the engine preventing both CPU and GPU from working to their full potential.

I did note a few graphics settings that made some difference when turned down (though this is still not the issue with CPU/GPU utilization, but still could help if you are getting unplayable framerates)

-Try turning Terrain Detail to Normal or lower. High and Very High seem to have a fairly large FPS hit, especially on maps where there is a lot of foliage.

-Turn Anti-aliasing to Normal or lower. Above that has a fair FPS hit as well.

-View Distance to 2000 or lower. Kinda sucks but it does have a pretty big impact on framerate above 2500 or so.

Again, these can make the game more playable in the meantime, but does not address the issues with low utilization at higher settings.

Edited January 29, 2012 by MavericK96

[Frozen111 1]

Same problem here. In my case it happens mostly when playing Chernarus in MP. I host a mission to play along my brother (client) and I get really low FPS. In Taki it goes smooth but sometimes it starts to slow down after around an hour of play. Pretty random, but as I said in Chernarus it happens quite often at the begining. The strange thing is that my brother has a lower end system (Core2Duo E6300, 4GB RAM, nVidia 9800GT) and never have this kind of slow down, neither do I in SP.

I play only Domination missions in MP.

My system:

AMD PhenomII X4 955 @3.6GHz per core.

Kingston ValueRAM 8GB DDR3

MB Gygabyte MA770T-UD3

AMD Radeon HD6850

[Mayrhofen 1]

I'm having similar problems as you guys. My original thread can be seen here, it was locked though - http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?131394-Bad-FPS-with-no-apparent-bottleneck

To sum it up - my problems are not AI related, I've tried pretty much I can think of. Problems occur only in MP for original ARMA2 and the mod MP I'm playing, but weirdly enough not for OA:MP.

Can someone confirm that these problems are present for someone with Windows 7 32 bit version?

[dukenukem. 10]

i think it affects most versions of windows, not just 7/32bit. i get it on 7/64bit and xp-32 as well...

[Mayrhofen 1]

There has to be a common trigger. Otherwise there would be a lot more people complaining. If it's not the operating system, then what?

I was having a quite decent FPS in MP today after clocking my CPU. But, I'm afraid it's a coincident with server/map/something. Ten minutes later everything turned back to it's old self.

Actually kind of pissed off already.

Config File:

GPU_MaxFramesAhead - Didn't notice a change, despite different tried values like 0, 1, 80, 1000.

GPU_DetectedFramesAhead - Ended up setting it on 3, maybe gave me 5 FPS here and there.

sceneComplexity - Tried 110k, 150k, 300k. No change.

fovTop & fovLeft - Multiplied original values by 1.3. No change.

shadingQuality - Had it on 10. Changed it to 0, if anything, I lost a few FPS.

AToC - Tried 0 and 7. No change.

Videocard Settings:

Tripple Buffering - No change.

Tesselaton - No change.

Texture Quality - Set it on Performance. No change.

Shortcut Attributes:

cpucount - No change.

exthreads - No change.

maxmem - No change.

world - No change in FPS or loading times.

winxp - No change.

In-game Settings:

Video Memory - Had it on default, left it on High. 5 FPS raise.

Left Column Settings - Change between everything on minumum and normal was a couple FPS, literally. But the quality difference was huge.

Vertical Sync - Lost around 5-10 FPS, but overall game was smoother.

Other:

Game process priority - Set it on High in task manager. No change.

Gamebooster - No change, even though it closes a lot of unnecessary stuff. If anything, I lost a few FPS.

Closed open background windows - Minimized steam, etc to tray. No change.

Disabled my second screen - No change.

Ran benchmark twice with same settings - Second time loading duration was brief, but average FPS was still the same.

Clocked GPU - Raised core clock about 100mhz. No change.

Running the game without anti-virus on

Running a thorough defragment

Putting ARMA files on the outter tracks of my harddrive

Testing ARMA without PR mod.

Changing mipmap detail level.

Changing Power Saving Options

Updating every possible driver

Running diagnostics tools examine my HDD speed/health.

Changing HDD mode from IDE to AHCI.

Tried latest beta patches.

Installed quite a few windows updates.

Ran the game as admin.

Tried some compability modes.

Bought additional 4GB or ram.

Bought an aftermarket cooler to clock CPU from 3.4 to 4.0 ghz.

This is so retarded! The better my hardware gets, the game is using less and less resources.

[MavericK96 0]

This is so retarded! The better my hardware gets, the game is using less and less resources.

Which further makes me think it is an engine limitation.

My guess is on higher detail settings the game bogs down with a lot of foliage or AI regardless of your hardware. Probably the people getting smooth gameplay have lesser hardware and are therefore probably using lesser settings.

This is just a theory, but at this point it's hard to see a common thread among all this.

[Mayrhofen 1]

I'm not playing on high or very high. I've gone down to Normal and Low, with AA and all the fancy stuff off. Graphic settings don't really make much of a difference.

• Low CPU and GPU usage in Multiplayer. At times as low as 20%. (even ALONE in LAN Server)
  
• Normal resource usage in Singeplayer.
  
• Changing graphic settings has a rather mild effect.
  
• Unstable FPS - personally varies mostly from low twenties to 40.
  

There is something specific causing it to this rather small group of people. I'm trying to figure out what it is, in order to bypass it or get rid of it.

Not really relying on the devs to fix it any time soon. It was reported over three months ago if I recall correctly.

Edited February 22, 2012 by Mayrhofen

[MavericK96 0]

True. And it doesn't seem to be a GPU brand-specific issue, so I wouldn't say drivers are the cause.

Unfortunately if it ends up being something in the engine itself there's probably not much we can do about it.

[contrails 10]

I'm running into the same issue - recently my Nvidia 9800GT died, so I upgraded to a Nvidia 450GTS which runs superbly in SP (40-50 FPS), but drops to 30-40% GPU usage in MP, getting around 10-25 FPS. I have no data to back it up, but I feel like ArmA 2 ran better with the 9800.

Have only tested with graphics settings and launch options (maxmem, CPU count, exthreads) with no effect, will roll back drivers to see if that does anything.

System info (same across the upgrade except GPU):

Intel® Core2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz (2 CPUs), ~2.1GHz

4096MB RAM

NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450

[griffz 1]

you said it ! the gpu is nowhere related to what you describe. it's waiting for the cpu .

try to overclock your E6400, or buy a cheap one for socket 775 , and overclock it ;) !

arma is HEAVILY cpu dependant. and when i mean HEAVILY , it's still an understatement ...

ps:i might misunderstand here, but the G92 had 64 texture unit , where the G106 has only 32. i remember well mine , and i could cranked up anisotropic to 16x in forest without problem. in other performances area , the GTS450 is better. but for texturing, i don't know. but it's out of topic , anyway

Edited March 8, 2012 by griffz

[burdy 11]

Its Not A GPU related Issue- I just upgraded to a 7970 and have the same performance Issues as I did with the GTX 470, Its 100% CPU Bogging down on the GPU, and the GPU running at 20 or so % usage

[MavericK96 0]

It seems bizarre that this game is being bottlenecked by a 4.0-4.5 GHz processor, though.

Personally I'm waiting for Ivy Bridge to even consider upgrading. :p

[burdy 11]

Any news on BI working on a fix? Been 5 months :/

[dukenukem. 10]

i think what we need is a proper repro condition for this, if not its kinda hard to fix?

[On_Sabbatical 11]

When GPU use reaches 100% on arma ,you get either a CTd or Flushable blackscreen.

[burdy 11]

My GPU and CPU barely hit 50%

[EasyC 10]

i think what we need is a proper repro condition for this, if not its kinda hard to fix?

It's not hard to repro. Go into a full warfare server and watch your usages tank.

When GPU use reaches 100% on arma ,you get either a CTd or Flushable blackscreen.

Not an issue when gpu usage never hits 100%, or anywhere near it.

My GPU and CPU barely hit 50%

You're not alone.