Arma 3 - Unplayable FPS; ONLY in Multiplayer..Help!

[Chaos21]

So here's my problem. I can go in Singleplayer, have hundreds of infantry and vehicles fighting and have 25-45 fps on all high. Then, no matter the amount fo players, if I join ANY servers online, and I mean like even servers with one person and little or no mods; I get 8-12 fps on multiplayer, 15 being the absolute best. I don't get it, I have no problems like this on any other game, even Arma 2 I have zero FPS problems when playing multiplayer. So what could be the problem? I've searched and searched some more, a lot of people are having this problem, and there's either no solution or it's something silly that isn't the problem for me.

I'm kinda mad I uninstalled Arma 2, because I can't play any Arma multiplayer now and I don't want to download and install Arma 2 over again. So, who wants to help me figure this out?

Windos 7 Home 64-bit
AMD Vishera FX-6350 OC @ 4.1GHz (I've already tried taking overclock off too)
Radeon Sapphire 7770 GHz editon (plan on crossfire soon)
2x 4GB RAM DDR3 2400 MHz

Anything else you need? Just ask please.
Thanks,
Chaos

 

[Mr_Venbeer]

Arma 3 is a very demanding game. Even my system can't run it at above 40fps on singleplayer. It is also not optimized/coded well. Might want to upgrade your GPU if you want to play this game with high FPS

 

[doubletake]

From what I've read, it's not you but the game itself. In multiplayer, the game relies heavily on the server for many world calculations (player positions/some physics/etc), and to put it simply, the game is a piece of crap on anything but Altis servers due to bad optimization. To make matters worse, you have an AMD FX CPU which apparently is no good for this game without several software fixes that'll allow the game to actually utilize more than a fraction of it's resources. I think your best bet would be to specifically search for "Arma 3 multiplayer low fps" or something along those lines and look in the many dedicated gaming forums where people have posted some various fixes (configs, unofficial patches, etc).

 

[Mr_Venbeer]

Also one more thing. Don't crossfire 7770's, just sell your current one and buy something like an R9 280.

 

[Chaos21]

Arma 3 is a very demanding game. Even my system can't run it at above 40fps on singleplayer. It is also not optimized/coded well. Might want to upgrade your GPU if you want to play this game with high FPS

The problem is specific to multiplayer only, and changing video setting have no effect on FPS on multiplayer.

@doubletake
I'll look around for some unofficial patches, I've tried a lot of things already, spent hours messing with settings and lookin up ways to optimize. I also noticed that Arma doesn't use my CPU fully. I know it won't use more than 4 cores, but none of the cores ever read 100%, the highest I've seen it go is 80%.

I've got a new lead on the problem, some say that there's a problem with anti-virus's conflicting with Battle-Eye. It require uninstalling my anti-virus and I'd like to try other options before I go that far.

Anyways, I found a huge guide on optimzing Arma 3 for anyone else having this problem: http://day0.com.au/forum/arma/638-arma-3-performance-tweaks-and-settings-guide

I'm going to try all these tweaks, if any of this helps I will post it on here. Any other help and advice is much aprreciated. I will keep updated with any changes.

 

[Mr_Venbeer]

Arma 3 is a very demanding game. Even my system can't run it at above 40fps on singleplayer. It is also not optimized/coded well. Might want to upgrade your GPU if you want to play this game with high FPS

The problem is specific to multiplayer only, and changing video setting have no effect on FPS on multiplayer.

@doubletake
I'll look around for some unofficial patches, I've tried a lot of things already, spent hours messing with settings and lookin up ways to optimize. I also noticed that Arma doesn't use my CPU fully. I know it won't use more than 4 cores, but none of the cores ever read 100%, the highest I've seen it go is 80%.

I've got a new lead on the problem, some say that there's a problem with anti-virus's conflicting with Battle-Eye. It require uninstalling my anti-virus and I'd like to try other options before I go that far.

Anyways, I found a huge guide on optimzing Arma 3 for anyone else having this problem: http://day0.com.au/forum/arma/638-arma-3-performance-tweaks-and-settings-guide

I'm going to try all these tweaks, if any of this helps I will post it on here. Any other help and advice is much aprreciated. I will keep updated with any changes.

The same thing happens to me on Arma 2 Dayz mod. No matter what settings I use, I get 20fps in the cities. Maybe a slight 2 fps increase when on Low compared to High.
No cores reach 100% means there is no bottleneck, which is good.

 

[Chaos21]

I tried all the tweaks in the guide. even unparked my cores by setting minimum power to 90% on them all. FPS in singleplayer is better, but multiplayer is still horrible. I didn't find any patches for it. Someone please help? Who else has the same problem as me? The more we know, the closer we get the the solution, please say something if you do.

@Night Owl, I can play DayZ on Arma 2 with no problem. Even heavily modded and populated ones, I've never experienced a problem with FPS that's so isolated on a video game. I want to play DayZ now. Off topic but I bought a game called "Infestation:Survivor Stories", not knowing it was WarZ in disguise. I watched reviews heavily deciding if I wanted DayZ SA or WarZ. I didn't like WarZ, but I unforntunately bought it on sale without knowing it was that game because I briefly looked at it, but I will try it out.

 

[bystander]

The same thing happens to me on Arma 2 Dayz mod. No matter what settings I use, I get 20fps in the cities. Maybe a slight 2 fps increase when on Low compared to High.
No cores reach 100% means there is no bottleneck, which is good.

Unfortunately that does not mean you don't have a bottleneck due to how Windows handles threads these days. In order to prevent cores from overheating, and keep temps as low as possible during load, a thread no longer stays on a single core, but it still can't go faster than what a single core would do. Instead of running on a single core, after each instruction, Windows will send the next instruction to a new core. This means that you will not see a single core hit 100%, even if you are completely CPU bound on a single thread.

If settings do not change performance, you are bottlenecked. Either by the CPU, or maybe the server if it some how effects how many FPS you can perform (not likely, but if it really is poorly coded, it is possible).

 

[Mr_Venbeer]

I tried all the tweaks in the guide. even unparked my cores by setting minimum power to 90% on them all. FPS in singleplayer is better, but multiplayer is still horrible. I didn't find any patches for it. Someone please help? Who else has the same problem as me? The more we know, the closer we get the the solution, please say something if you do.

@Night Owl, I can play DayZ on Arma 2 with no problem. Even heavily modded and populated ones, I've never experienced a problem with FPS that's so isolated on a video game. I want to play DayZ now. Off topic but I bought a game called "Infestation:Survivor Stories", not knowing it was WarZ in disguise. I watched reviews heavily deciding if I wanted DayZ SA or WarZ. I didn't like WarZ, but I unforntunately bought it on sale without knowing it was that game because I briefly looked at it, but I will try it out.

The same thing happens to me on Arma 2 Dayz mod. No matter what settings I use, I get 20fps in the cities. Maybe a slight 2 fps increase when on Low compared to High.
No cores reach 100% means there is no bottleneck, which is good.

Unfortunately that does not mean you don't have a bottleneck due to how Windows handles threads these days. In order to prevent cores from overheating, and keep temps as low as possible during load, a thread no longer stays on a single core, but it still can't go faster than what a single core would do. Instead of running on a single core, after each instruction, Windows will send the next instruction to a new core. This means that you will not see a single core hit 100%, even if you are completely CPU bound on a single thread.

If settings do not change performance, you are bottlenecked. Either by the CPU, or maybe the server if it some how effects how many FPS you can perform (not likely, but if it really is poorly coded, it is possible).

Yeah I think my CPU bottlenecks in Arma 2. Mainly because Arma 2 uses like what, one core? In games like BF4 (uses all 8 cores) I get 99% GPU load on Ultra, and pretty good FPS. It's just has to do with the optimization of the game and the technology being used.

 

[Chaos21]

Okay, I've found some interesting threads on this. I also ran an Arma 3 Benchmark on Statis and Arma on Singleplayer.
On Medium/High setting, high aa, view distance 2,000: Statis-52 fps average Atlis-42 fps avg
On High/Ultra, view distance 2800: Atlist-34 FPS Statis: didn't test
I like eye candy so I'll go for the High/Ultra.

Anyways, Multiplayer still is unplayable, now with jumps from 0 to 55. It freezes, stutters, or stays at 7-12 fps. This sucks. I enjoyed Arma 2 OA less because they took original Arma 2 servers off when GameSpy shutdown so every server was DayZ. I was really looking forward to Arma 3's multiplayer with much less zombies.

I noticed the FPS drops started exactly as BattleEye initialised. Then I found this: http://forums.bistudio.com/archive/index.php/t-159930.html
Then this: http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=15182

I uninstalled my expensive AVG that I lost the activation key to. That's how bad I want this. It did nothing . I have no other Anti-Virus except Malwarebytes and that program doesn't really block programs, I don't have it running except for scans. Any suggestions, anyone? It's obviously not a bottleneck when I get such high FPS on Singleplayer. I know about how servers have its limits that can't always fully match the clients. But people woudln't play on them if they got the FPS I'm getting at every different game mode and server. Its just freezing for 2 seconds every other second.. It would be impossible to even get a kill.

So does anyone see something I can do that I haven't already done?

EDIT: If this helps any.. Every single time I start Arma 3, it spends like 10 minutes installing Microsoft N.E.T. Framework 4.5.1 cmd, even thought I've done it a hundred times. I don't know if that could have any impact on it.

 

[Mr_Venbeer]

Well I don't know anything about Dayz SA because I have never played it.

 

[Chaos21]

I figured it out, finally! It was AVG, I took RevoUninstaller and hit it with a deep uninstallation, and restarted. Multiplayer works great, getting 30-40 FPS on High/Ultra with 50 people on wasteland. So happy to get it working again, and yes Anti-Virus programs are interfering with BattleEye and causing big problems. Hope this helps others, bye.

 

[Chaos21]

How can I pick my answer as solution?

 

[abc_def]

Arma 3 is a very demanding game. Even my system can't run it at above 40fps on singleplayer. It is also not optimized/coded well. Might want to upgrade your GPU if you want to play this game with high FPS

arma 3 is not a demanding game, it is a poorly developed game (all arma titles are). it does not utilize multicore CPUs and has poor GPU utilization as well. do the test for your self, see how much of your hardware is being used while playing arma 3 multiplayer by using performance monitoring software. you will see that arma 3 can only use about 30% of your hardware power. that is the reason why arma 3 gives low fps in multiplayer. no amount of usd spent on CPUs or GPUs will get you decent fps in arma 3 multiplayer. try the same test on battlefield 4 and and watch your CPU and GPU cry under pressure. battlefield 4 has many, many flaws, but it makes good use of your CPU and GPU, unlike arma. also a note to everyone interested in arma 3: by buying arma 3, you are supporting a company that sells software to real armies that frag real people for profit. while the army gets the real deal (virtual battlespace) that performs properly, you get crappy unoptimized software for the stupid masses that we are.