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Okay usually i tend not to comment on these kind of posts. But seeing as you state you are a fan, I'm going to try and talk some sense into you :P Like bcharlez already explained above. Big engine changes were not a plan at the start of DayZ SA DayZ SA became an overwhelming success in terms of sales With the newly available funds the team decided to drastically upscale the scope of the entire game (which is great cause they could have taken the money, build the game that was planned and leave us with a game that is not nearly as good as it's budget could afford) They soon realised the engine in its current state would not be able to support this new scope They started planning and working on a large engine overhaul (game logic transferred to enscript for faster processing, new renderer, new sound module, new player controller)In short this is what happened and it hopefully explains better why development is slow. I know that there are some worldclass dev teams out there that would have done a better job given the same time and resources. But that's not the case here is it? You can hardly expect top notch results from a couple glorified amateur modders. Cause in all honesty that's what we are dealing with, especially at first. I do feel they have come a long way since the early days and are starting to develop into a decent gaming company. So yes they have not met their goals and yes progress expectations have not always been realistic. Still here we are and I'm 100% sure they are still working their asses off (devs regularly show making stupid long hours, working weekends etc.) in order to build a game that hopefully someday will be as good as we all want it to be. Until then instead of complaining, please help them achieve that goal by offering feedback in a constructive manner. Also for a little in-depth about the DayZ dev team; Chris Torchia recently gave an interesting speech on the growth of their company and how hard it has been at times. It can help put things in perspective if you are not familiar with gaming development.

Hey Brian, Can you tell us a bit more about "Small Object Interaction (W.I.P.)" and to what scope this is planned to be implemented?

As far as I'm aware per Bohemia's rules there can only be 3 instances per server (quad-core) max. I think by default server hosts assign 1 core and 1 extra thread to each server. I'm not sure about other hosts, but Fragnet does assign an extra core on demand. Same IP does not mean same server, it could easily be internally redirected to other machines, although that doesnt sound too smart given denial of service attacks are IP based.

Correct, still ivy-bridge though which will get outperformed by most of the Haswell chips. Which is something they know and probably why they are upgrading to the E3-1271 which is one of the best performing single thread processors out there and a full 12% extra performance per core. Depending on how many threads DayZ server utilizes the impact that will have is pretty big. Yes probably hopefully. If i'd had to host a server I would go with Fragnet. Hardware wise all of the hosts seem to follow guidelines set by Bohemia (which are decent), but Fragnet by far has shown best response times, knowledge and hardware dedication. It's just that when I know performance could be much better with a few hardware tweaks, i don't really feel like hosting at all. For instance a 4790K with a reasonable overclock to 4.8Ghz will perform about 25% better per core then a E3-1271 (which is yet to be introduced). Given that per bohemia's guidelines there can be 3 instances on a 4 core server i'd say the game currently is not able to utilize more then 1.33 +1.33 thread. It means the performance gain will be probably be between 25% and 40% percent which - in my opionion - is pretty huge.

Yes and if you will check actual server performance it won't be anywhere near 50FPS, how come? Simple, DayZ is hardly optimized to use more then one thread. Let alone 8 which most of the processors that the GSP's are using currently have. This is why single thread performance is important. Let's say a server has 4 cores and 4 extra threads but the game is only able to utilize half of that (not real numbers). It would seem like even when the server hits 50 players, it would 'only' use 50% of the server capacity, but in fact it is using 100% of it's maximum capacity and although the server has resources left, DayZ SA cannot utilize them. In the mod and i think for A3 (not sure) this has partly been solved by the use of a headless client, which is basically another dayz_server.exe (running on another thread) chipping in and helping the main server with it's tasks (like zombie AI) but I don't think that is already the case for DayZ SA and I'm not sure it ever will. In order to get the server to perform better, you have to make sure that the sum of the core speed that are actually viable is the highest it can be. With that in mind it could very well be that a dual core processor (e.g. G3258, ~$75,-) operating at 4.3Ghz+ will outperform (meaning higher server FPS under same circumstance) a quad-core E5-1630v3 (~$500,-) operating at max speed of 3.8Ghz. I don't know the real statistics and how much a DayZ server really can utilize, this is something probably only the devs and the hosts know or can test. The closest things we can test are Arma 2 and 3, 2 being the platform DayZ has been build upon and we know that one is barely capable of utilizing more then one thread.. Yes they have made progress in that department, but how much exactly we do not know and we cannot test. There has been little or no talk about it in their dev updates.

Okay over the past few days I have been having contact with all the different GSP's (and even Bohemia) about their services and possibilities. It's a sad fact that market right now is really non-existant, chosen GSP's have all the power and although it seems they work on upgrading their services to comply with Bohemia's wishes, and Bohemia in fact has reasonable guidelines to make sure game servers aren't overpopulated and run on decent hardware. It's hard to order anything of them when none of them can really guarantee anything and are so tied in the contracts they signed that even if they wanted to, they could not offer any kind of server we would be interested in. The only thing we want is the best possible experience of DayZ, for us that means it has to run on the best possible (within certain pricing limits) hardware currently available. Why is it so hard to achieve something that should not be. The market won't change anytime soon (Bohemia told me no new GSP's will be considered in 2015), which leads me to believe that not much will change in the near future and i think it might be wise to reconsider things. At the very least give GSP's some freedom in hosting servers better then the minimum specs you have set without them having to upgrade all the other services. Why would i even consider an official host when the best they can offer me is a shared E3 processor (4 core that runs 3 instances) that operates at a max of 3.9Ghz and a cheap SSD with throughput speeds below 600MB/s. The only offer i got that kind of came close to what we wanted involved us buying 3 hosting packages plus a dedicated server package to at least get the core control we want (meaning we could - if we wanted - actually host a DayZ server with 4 dedicated cores assigned to it). However it would still be on hardware that doesnt come close to maximum performance and I'm definately not paying 300+ a month for a mediocre server. Certainly not when i could build a server under 1K that would outperform (by a good 20%) every single DayZ server money can buy right now. This sucks so much.

Okay so i had an e-mail conversation with Fragnet. They are using Intel E3-1270v2 CPU's per Bohemia's recommendation, which is a 3th generation (Ivy Bridge, about 3 years old now) processor with 4 cores (+4 threads). They have a policy of max 3 instances per machines which means you get about 1.33 core (+1.33 thread), by default you will only get one core assigned and if you host there it might be wise asking them to assign a second one (they will do so free of charge). They seem convinced the 1270v2 is the best possible CPU to host a DayZ SA server on (lol), which is why i feel i can't take them too seriously. Other then that i like the fact how fast their responses were and they seem like a decent choice if you are not obsessed about performance like i am.

Thanks, i did know private hosting is not available but was simply interested if any of you guys were aware of a host that offers other specs then they show on their website. Right now I'm not really interested in anything they are offering. Like ARMA 2 and 3 i feel like you need at least 4Ghz single core performance to be able to host a decent high capacity server in DayZ's current state. I'll try to contact them individually to see if there is room for upgrades. -- Also, since i have no experience with any of the GSP's, which one do you guys feel is most passionate about performance?

Looking for an extreme performance driven server host Hi everyone, I'm contemplating the idea of starting a new DayZ server. Money is not an issue but I'm not settling for anything less then maximum performance, meaning: At least 2 cores (Intel 4th gen+) operating at 4.2Ghz+ speed;Either a dedicated box or dedicated cores, i have no intention on sharing CPU power;Fully SSD driven.Are any of you aware of providers that offer these specs? If not, are there any providers that let you assemble your own hardware?