ARMA 3 Gaming Performance on 780m

Good day all,

I just bought a Sager 170SM with the GTX780m, Haswell 4700QM, 16 GB RAM, SSD, etc.

Would I be able to enjoy ARMA 3 in full detail mode with 60 FPS?

 

No. Should have gone for the faster CPU. If III is anything like II it will suck up your CPU cycles.

 

I agree that a faster CPU would definitely help.
HWingNut, Remeber ARMA 2 was only written to take advantage of 2 cores though.

 

The game is still fairly unoptimised as it is right now and I suspect will remain so right through until the full release. It has been the most upvoted ticket since the alpha was released so fingers crossed Bohemia are able to smooth out the framerate in the coming months, else there will be a lot of annoyed gamers. My money is on there being not much more improvement however.

 

So I think about 3 weeks ago I was going to make a video explaining the poor optimisation in Arma 3, I have yet to do so but the quick answer to your question

In single player, maybe
In editor, yes, 100%
In multiplayer, you'll be lucky to get over 20 on lowest of settings, its all server dependent
(By that what I mean is, some servers I will get around 30% GPU utilisation, regardless of what the detail is set to. The highest GPU utilisation I have seen online would be around 80%, which for me is an acceptable 40FPS.)

 

I haven't played the beta multiplayer yet, but I'm shocked by the reports of performance. Singleplayer runs pretty well at least from my limited time playing. Hopefully they can improve things.

 

They probably won't, this problem was with Arma 2 and has followed to Arma 3.

I don't know how, or why you FPS is determinded by the server you are on, it's performance.

I'll promise to have a video out by tomorrow, it'll include:

Single player mission, both day and night
Single player editor
Single player editor, spawned units fight
Multiplayer co-op, from servers with 60 players to 10 players (will test 3 different servers)
Multiplayer wasteland mod, from servers with 60 players to 10 players (" ")
Multiplayer co-op, hosted by myself with two friends on

 

Well for some silly reason Arma 2 servers dictated how much Visibility you are able to use. It might have been a match balancing thing.

 

From the "All Alienware Laptop Gaming Videos" thread

"A video I have been saying I would be making for about a month or two now
I guess it is finally here"

 

I played the alpha and it was an unoptimised POS. Like ARMA 2.

Crap devs are crap.

 

Hmm, the devs aren't really the problem.
My video above shows pretty clearly how some online servers offer me brilliant game play, whereas the most of the servers are horrible.

 

This is because the server needs to be capable of running the game at a decent framerate, even if it only needs to run a simple window. Single player ought to show you how well it runs for you without any performance hitches not on your end.

 

So that is why! Thanks for the info

 

Well, I'm guessing ARMA 3 will still be CPU heavy, just like most mmos. So my question is, would an 8970m and 780m both paired with the 4700QM have relatively the same performance, but if the CPU was to be upgraded to the 4800QM, can it still be expected that both GPUs will provide the same fps, however, with a moderate fps increase due to the upgrade in the CPU?

 

Both are excellent CPUs, fps increase should be minimum
Mobile Processors - Benchmarklist - NotebookCheck.net Tech

 

If it's Arma 3, then you probably will see a bit of an increase; but it won't be game changing. At BEST, maybe like 10fps?

 

Well said.

 

Apologies for raising this thread from the depths... but figured it better to post here where it fits rather then start something new. I own a Clevo P150SM with an i7 4700MQ / GTX780M / 16GB RAM and this game is driving me totally nuts!

First off, I understand there are some really well documented CPU/GPU utilisation and general optimisation issues with ARMA 2 and ARMA 3. I can get ARMA2 to run decently on lower settings, so despite paying good money for ARMA3 I had essentially given up on ever being able to play it. It's totally unplayable for me, and I've tried every variation of in-game settings plus config file and command line tweaks - I never get over 22 fps, even on the menu. Usually it sits ~15fps.

As I said, I had basically accepted that the game was lost to me, until I saw these two videos: Arma 3 With the Asus g750 jx g750Jx Laptop ! - YouTube and ARMA3 on Laptop (GTX 850M / i7 4700MQ) gameplay TEST 01 - YouTube. What the hell! Both are at roughly equal, or slightly less powerful systems and are playing fine.

I'm desperate. Is there anyone here that can offer some insight on something I might have missed? Maybe something laptop-specific?

 

uhh... ex-what-cuse me? You should be 10000000000000% able to run that thing. Bro, I stream that game (Arma 2 Operation Arrowhead DayZ Epoch mod) while playing at 1080p maxed graphics (in-game MSAA set to off, but SMAA turned to very high) while getting up to and over 60fps on single-GPU (sever permitting)... WHILE LIVESTREAMING IT. You have a serious utilization problem going on there, and I am more inclined to believe that it's actually running on your iGPU and not your 780M at all. You should probably try forcing it to use your dedicated GPU and see how that runs. Good luck!

 

Did you make sure it wasn't using the Intel GPU? Double check your Nvidia control panel and make sure the arma exe is set to use Nvidia GPU.

 

Thanks a lot for the suggestions guys. I feel like maybe there is still a ray of hope now!

I can't be 100% sure it's using the 780M... but know I have definitely set both Arma2OA.exe and Arma3.exe to use the 780M in the nVidia Control Panel, so I am not sure what else I can do to force it. When I am in-game, the Nvidia GPU Activity icon in my system tray does confirm the executable is using the 780M, so I'm thinking it would have to be a pretty major glitch if that turned out to be false.

I've tried enabling the MSI Afterburner/HWInfo On-screen Display during an ARMA3 benchmark (result was 15fps average). The results seemed bleak: of the 8 CPU cores listed, CPU 1 is always at 99-100%, while the other 7 never go over 15%. This is with CPU parking disabled. The GPU (which is unfortunately listed as GPU #1 so I can't even be sure it's the 780M) never goes over 25% utilisation, and as expected at such low usage, the temp never goes over 52 degrees either.

I don't suppose there is a way I can temporarily disable the Intel GPU is there?

Thanks again

 

You shouldn't be using 1 CPU core at 100% either. Something is set up incorrectly on your system. If your CPU cannot push data to your GPU the util won't rise, and if your 780M was not running its util should be at 0%. I suggest doing some googling for Arma 2 and Arma 3 only using 1 CPU core on a i7 and see if you get anything.

 

Also check your battery settings in windows. I've had it happen on my 8278 as well an older Acer, where it switches to balanced or power saver.

 

In case anyone else ever has this problem, I may as well post my resolution here... as quirky as it is.

I definitely keep my laptop on High Performance mode so I ruled that one out. It turns out as I clarified the GPU #1 / GPU #2 readouts from HWInfo/MSI Afterburner that despite the usage indicator in my system tray claiming that the ARMA3 executable were using my 780M, it was in fact sitting at 0% usage the whole time. I had no real idea how to correct this, so I threw a hail mary and simply set the game to specifically use the Intel GPU in the Nvidia Control Panel, ran the game, then exited out and swapped it back to the 780M.

It seems to have done the trick. I was able to return the game to native 1080p res and it still runs much smoother than it did before. 780M GPU usage seems to vary between 40-60% now, and while there is still a heavy load on the CPU, it's a little healthier now with CPU1 varying between 78-95% and the remaining CPU's spiking around between 20-85%. The same approach also saw improvements to ARMA2.

It's hard to say for sure if CPU parking makes any difference. I seem to see a minor-decent improvement in CPU utilisation across the board, but there's no FPS improvement. I suspect it would really only come into play in more intense situations with a lot of players/AI units. Lastly, disabling the laptop screen (leaving only my external monitor) also seems to improve performance somewhat, but isn't essential.

Thanks again for all the suggestions. While nobody had the solution (who could have thought of that!?), I would have just given up if it wasn't for a bit of prodding and a push in the right direction

 

You still sound like you're using too much CPU to me, unless you have an i5 (though you have an i7) but I can explain away the lack of FPS improvements. The game is server-limited (like most online games are). If the server cannot render the game above ~40fps, you WILL NEVER get above 40fps in that spot. End of story; you can overclock the life out of your system and it won't change. I've gone so far as to sit in 1 spot in DayZ Epoch getting 20 fps on max graphics and change the game to run on minimum graphics and at BEST I hit 22fps maybe? And the FPS usually fluctuates anyway. As long as you're not hitting 100% either CPU or GPU util, you shouldn't really be bottlenecking. Though some games will cap out CPU util at 50%, but in a game like that you'll probably be sitting at 100% GPU anyway.

Hope you enjoy the game!