I can not get my FPS up for the life of me!

[hockeyfreak186 1]

Hi all,

So I've been watching DayZ awhile now and finally bought Arma2 OA about 2 months ago. I was really excited to get started after watching a lot of game play and hearing about it from friends until... I booted it up and it plays like a slow slideshow :( . I average about 10 FPS when playing and it will drop as low as 5 FPS in larger cities. The weird thing is in arma 2 single player I rarely drop below 40 FPS. I have tried multiple servers and messed with my video settings countless times to get minimal or zero gain. I make sure I have nothing else going in the background and set the program priority to High. I have read multiple forums and tried just about everything (or at least I think so) to no avail. Should I be getting that low of FPS with my system, or am I missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I wish to play this game, but the FPS issues are keeping me from doing so!

Here are my Specs:

ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 1GB

AMD Phenom 9600 Agena 2.3GHz

CORSAIR XMS2 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

600W power supply

Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Windows 7 64 bit

1600X900 Resolution

Thanks in advance

Edited February 19, 2013 by hockeyfreak186

[BelMarduk 169]

Do a search for RAM drives. There are a few of them free out there (Its software that allows you to designate an area of RAM as a 'virtual' hard drive). There are also youtube tutes for setting one for up for dayz. I went from 25-30FPS (which isnt real bad) to 40+FPS. Your specs are kind of dated as it were (slow ram, slow vid card). If the ram drive doesn't help you out enough, you could use a system upgrade;)

*EDIT clarity on what a RAM drive is.

Edited February 19, 2013 by BelMarduk

[naizarak 41]

Hi all,

So I've been watching DayZ awhile now and finally bought Arma2 OA about 2 months ago. I was really excited to get started after watching a lot of game play and hearing about it from friends until... I booted it up and it plays like a slow slideshow :( . I average about 10 FPS when playing and it will drop as low as 5 FPS in larger cities. The weird thing is in arma 2 single player I rarely drop below 40 FPS. I have tried multiple servers and messed with my video settings countless times to get minimal or zero gain. I make sure I have nothing else going in the background and set the program priority to High. I have read multiple forums and tried just about everything (or at least I think so) to no avail. Should I be getting that low of FPS with my system, or am I missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated as I wish to play this game, but the FPS issues are keeping me from doing so!

Here are my Specs:

ATI Radeon HD 5700 Series 1GB

AMD Phenom 9600 Agena 2.3GHz

CORSAIR XMS2 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)

600W power supply

Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

Windows 7 64 bit

1600X900 Resolution

Thanks in advance

if lowering video settings doesn't improve FPS, then it sound like the CPU is the culprit. get a GPU monitoring program and watch your gpu's usage. if it's not being utilized fully then your cpu is to blame

[Acix 132]

Most likely is that AMD chip of yours...

[hollenfeuer88 124]

I'm sure it is your CPU. 2.3 Ghz is not going to cut it. You should upgrade you CPU, Mobo, and RAM. I did all that for under $300 and I get about 30 FPS in Cherno. I do not have a video card in here yet. I have been trying my best to spread the word around lol, the AMD A10 5800k runs this game great. Don't be afraid of AMD, though not as good as Intel, they are a great budget CPU. They WILL surprise you. I have been an Intel user for most of my gaming career, so I was pretty nervous about it.

AMD A10 5800k

MSI FM2 A85XA Motherboard

Kingston HyperX XMP 4GB x2

Like I said no video card yet, but you can crossfire it with a low profile ATI card.

And defrag. Defrag the poop out of your hard drive. After you defrag, do it agian.

[hockeyfreak186 1]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I wont deny that my system is a bit outdated, lol. But I can play most everything else at least halfway decently. I was monitoring my GPU usage during play for a bit and it would jump from 0% usage to 22% for a bit then back to 0% while my CPU was around 60-70% and the same old 10 FPS. I tested out Arma 2 single player and the GPU and CPU usage were both around 50% and i was getting a steady 35 FPS. I also tested out Skyrim and the GPU usage was pretty steady around 85% with the 70% CPU usage. So I feel like for some reason the GPU isn't being utilized in the DayZ mod, but just cant figure out why, or how to fix it. I will look into some RAM drives tomorrow when I have some more time.

[hollenfeuer88 124]

The zombies eat the shit out of your CPU. Try to keep your setting at about normal, if they are set to low it will feed off you CPU.

[Gooober 34]

Nvidia just had a driver update today.... Just throwing the info out there..

[hockeyfreak186 1]

So i defraged, messed with my config files, used RAMdisk, used launch parameters, and tried different dayz commander options (directx 9, steam, etc..). The best I saw was about a 5 FPS increase, if that, to bring me to 15 FPS. So, progress? lol. I think I'm fresh out of ideas. I read somewhere that someone reapplied thermal paste to their CPU and saw a jump so i might do that. I don't know if I want to drop money for a new CPU. If i went that route I would probably just upgrade my whole system. So if anyone else has any other suggestions, I'm all ears! Otherwise I guess I'll just have to deal with it.