the elephant in the room, a ancient engine with poor MP FPS

[monkie 30]

"we" all know there are 100's of threads about tweaking arma to get decent performance online, the same is true of the BIS forum, and the bug tracker at devheaven. i am one of the 1000's (if not many more) who in the last year paid money for arma II purely for the multiplayer experience, to play dayz (and recently wasteland). there are many people who upgraded their PC in the hope of improving performance, as i did, there are many who tried every tweak there is to improve performance, as i did.

after upgrading and tweaking i was shocked to find out that my CPU and GPU were running far below maximum. in multiplayer games/modes based on arma my CPU load is around 50% and my GPU around 30%.

BIS is aware of these issues but say that they cant or wont fix this, as can be seen on the bugtracker at devheaven:

https://dev-heaven.net/issues/6963

Updated by Suma over 2 years ago

One would expect that the server should offload most/all the AI calculation

and that the AI numbers have little effect on the client FPS.

One would expect wrong. This is not how MP works in our engine. While path-planning and some decisions are done owner-side only (which is server side for most AI), the simulation itself needs to be performed everywhere (the only optimization done is that simulation of far away units is done much less frequently).

I am sorry to disappoint you, but some things are really too hard and we are not willing to spend the time on them.

https://dev-heaven.net/issues/59932

updated by Fireball 4 months ago

• Status changed from Feedback to Rejected
  

doveman wrote:

Why? If the CPU/GPU has plenty of spare capacity and yet it's not being used to keep the framerate at a reasonable minimum, surely that's a bug?

I also tested E08 with the same settings which gave an average of 31fps (...).

Well, this is not a bug but a limitation of the engine and its implementation. Often the AI, which ties directly into graphics performance and can't be singled out from the overall engine - in turn also brakes down the graphics - is guilty for that. Also, particle systems such as smoke and complex vegetation are other sources for bad FPS. It's been discussed in quite some "Performance breakdown" tickets before (you can filter here in CIT on those). The combination of those three main factors are the reason why you have a such bad overall performance.

Yes it is bad, but no it won't (can't) be fixed in OA according to repeated statements of Suma, BI's lead programmer.

now i know some people will say that its a old game, i should not complain, but BIS is still selling this product, they have sold a lot of units in the last year based purely on the multiplayer experience, together with rocket they are now developing dayz SA based on a version of this engine, considering this i dont think its too much to ask for them to use some of those resources to fix this issue for the good of all, dayz SA, dayz the mod, and for all the other cool mods and missions that are still hugely popular.

i know that rocket has said that some improvements have been made for dayz SA, since i am not a developer i have no idea of those improvements have anything to do with this issue that BIS wouldnt fix in the past, but if they are i would like to appeal to rocket to make these improvements available to vanilla arma II OA, if they are not i would like to appeal to rocket to have BIS allocate time to properly look at this issue.

there is still one open issue/bug on devheaven that has not been closed/rejected that is related to this problem, but it hasnt been assigned and its priority is set to normal, it was started in 2011 and was last updated 7 months ago, which i find disappointing for such a massive lack of performance.

https://dev-heaven.net/issues/26297

Low GPU Usage MP Only (low and stuttery FPS, GTX 400 series)

Added by Burdy over 1 year ago. Updated about 1 month ago.

maybe if people here that purchased arma II in the last year and have similar issues could add their experiences something can be done about this.

i expect to be criticized by some fans for posting this, but i hope people understand that i too love this game/engine, and i hope that if you read this and have similar issuess that you spare the time to at least post a quick message saying that you agree this should be fixed. :)

[novogeek 253]

I am not sure it would be fixed, as stated it is an old engine and I even surprised that they are still providing updates for the engine (Arma2 not DayZ). Also with SA now on the horizon, I am surprised that they are even updating the mod (DayZ). It would be cool if they did, but I play DayZ for the survival experience and not the PvP ... and it plays fine for me.

If they do fix it ... then kudos to them ... but as a business I can't actually see how if would benefit them when they are putting so much effort in Arma3 and DayZ SA.

[SmashT 10907]

Shouldn't this be taken up on the BIS forums? It's an engine issue unrelated to DayZ.

[Argamore (DayZ) 110]

Shouldn't this be taken up on the BIS forums? It's an engine issue unrelated to DayZ.

I think that people that play DayZ should know information like this, because when they start DayZ and see FPS 10 they WILL blame it on DayZ, e.g. non experienced people that know nothing about PC's and engines, and stuff like that.

[monkie 30]

I am not sure it would be fixed, as stated it is an old engine and I even surprised that they are still providing updates for the engine (Arma2 not DayZ). Also with SA now on the horizon, I am surprised that they are even updating the mod (DayZ). It would be cool if they did, but I play DayZ for the survival experience and not the PvP ... and it plays fine for me.

If they do fix it ... then kudos to them ... but as a business I can't actually see how if would benefit them when they are putting so much effort in Arma3 and DayZ SA.

well, BIS seems to be a "oldschool" developer in that they update their products and encourage modding, it can make sense for a business to support its customers, a good reputation is valuable, many people bought a old game purely for the multiplayer experience, i dont think it is asking that much.

Shouldn't this be taken up on the BIS forums? It's an engine issue unrelated to DayZ.

this has already been taken up on the BIS forum in the past, and from what i undestand the basically the same engine is going to be used for standalone, many people purchased bis products for one reason only to play this mod.

rocket now works for BIS, i think his game is now going to be a important product for BIS in the future, i think this is a excellent place to raise this issue :)

[Dayzo 182]

I get 14 FPS in the country and 9 in the cities, at a resolution which makes the beautiful map look like pixelated garbage, and I have to say that it is very frustrating for me to look at the resource manager and nVidia Inspector, and see the CPU and GPU at 30% and 50% respectively. It seems really stupid to have a game that doesn't use every single resource available to it. If both CPU and GPU were around 100%, then maybe I'd have enough frames to see what was going on instead of a slideshow?!

Edited February 25, 2013 by Anti