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I7-3960X, 16GB DDR3, GTX 960 4GB performance expectations

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Hi all,

 

I've not played Arma 3 in a couple of years now due to playing on my old Q9650 and CF'ed 5850s being a distinctly painful experience.

 

I've recently upgraded to the above and was a bit disappointed to find the performance to be around the same (~30fps), but with extremely low CPU and GPU utilisation (yes, I saw the stickied post). 

 

Core 0 approx. 70% usage, with every other core around 5-10% (hyperthreading seems not to be utilised), with GPU usage averaging around 64% even on this low end card. Don't get me wrong, it's a lot smoother, as in there's no real jitter or massive drops, but still far from pleasant. Adding the launch parameter seemed to have no effect - but should I be setting CPU count to 6 or 12?

 

Before I waste any time on this (my friends no longer play and hence I've not been bitten by the bug this time around), could someone give me an idea with what to expect from this CPU/GPU combination? aka what detail levels (at 1080p) and expected FPS?

 

Thanks in advance!

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Profiling performance build seems to have some small increase. In spawn I now see ~40 sometimes 50fps, but we're straight back down to a 30fps hardlock in town. Changing v-sync to adaptive in nvidia control panel (as suggested by a Youtuber) made no appreciable difference

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ARMA is mainly CPU, RAM and hard disk I/O access limited. If you can overclock your CPU, increase your RAM speed and move ARMA to a SSD, you will find better (smoother) performance. It is very sensitive to cpu and ram speed.

 

Once you have done this, you can lower your graphics settings to achieve ~ 60 FPS or so. That 960 is not really that fast (ARMA is ROPS sensitive unless you have the Apex expansion then the trees become geometry limited).

 

So a fast video card with lots of ROPS 32 or more, and lots of stream processor in that order would work.

 

ARMA DOES scale well with SLI or Crossfire. 

 

I had AMD 6950 in crossfire mode and peak at 38 FPS with YAAB benchmark. I just got a 1060 GTX 3GB and it peaks at ~ 32 FPS in YAAB. This is just to hold me over until AMD release VEGA and then I will decide on a monster video card to max out graphics settings.

 

So far in online play, I am getting around 48-60 FPS with low mods so it is bearable.

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Thanks for replying.

 

I've not installed YAAB yet (although have seen it in videos and screenshots), is this a Steam workshop affair to install nowadays?

 

With regard to the rest, I can certainly overclock up to ~4.4-4.5ghz however I see little point with such low CPU utilization - even single core. With regards to storage, I'm not having any jitter/stutter/caching issues - two striped WD RE4s take care of that for me, but I can move it onto my SSD cache to test, but I don't expect any revelations. 

 

The RAM is aging at only 1333, however since moving to this quad channel architecture I've not had any problems (and AIDA64 correlates this) in anything else that is RAM throughput intensive, I've run server applications far more intensive than any game in that regard and have seen a 4-6x improvement over the P45 architecture I've migrated from. Again, with the same settings I should be seeing an improvement but honestly there's not that much.

 

FWIW, I'm basing this running on "very high" - but I'll reduce to "high" to see what difference it makes. Again, at 64% GPU utilization I'm not expecting any grand revelations there either. Would purchasing the Apex expansion really make a difference?

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Wow. It seems even though deleting my Documents\Arma 3 directory, my old graphics settings from 2 years ago were still in place. It seemed a bit glitchy - having now reset to "Very High" preset and turning textures to Ultra and AA up to 8x, I'm now sitting pretty at an almost constant 50fps.

 

Odd, but thanks for your help!

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