Arma 3 came out in 2013 and as I wrote in my PC Performance Analysis back then, it suffered from major CPU issues. A lot of Arma fans attacked me for stating the obvious; the game was single-threaded and that had a major negative effect on its performance. And, here we are 12 years later with a new beta version that finally has proper CPU multi-thread support.
Right now, owners of Arma 3 can download a beta and test the new multi-threaded version of Arma 3. And, as expected, it can completely transform your experience.
Thanks to the CPU multi-thread support, big battles will no longer make your high-end PC drop below 60FPS. I know it sounds ridiculous, but this has been an issue with this game all these years.
This is exactly why we criticize the performance of many games. And I get it. If you’re a fan of the “X” game, you might defend it no matter what. But listen. The only reason we’re complaining is because we care about PC games. We’re not doing it for the “clicks.” For that, we have the UE5 stories that everyone loves (*wink *wink).
This is also one of the reasons we do not constantly upgrade our PC system. A lot of readers were criticizing us for using an i7 4790K or an i9 9900K (ah, those were the good days). The thing is those CPUs were good enough to expose issues that a lot of games had back then. And now we are with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D which some believe to be an overkill. Talk about a 180-degree turn.
With Arma 3, our record and credibility have increased even more. I mean, we’ve been proven right about CPU issues. We’ve been proven right about Doom’s and Hitman: Absolution’s driver API overhead issues. We’ve been proven right about Forza Horizon 3’s single-threaded issues. Remember Far Cry 6’s CPU single-thread issues? Or how about the NVIDIA driver overhead issues on older CPUs in DX12 games?
And look, I don’t like pointing out when we were right and you were wrong, but… well… f’ it. I’m definitely going to say it because some of you were acting like jerks. So, it’s payback time.
Anyway, below you can find two videos that showcase the beta version of Arma 3. Just look at how smooth everything looks. It took 12 years but damn, it was worth the wait.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
Contact: Email
FINALLY, Rejoice.
They're more than 10 years late to the party but at least they went back and actually did it rather than just waiting for Arma 4.
They may have done it to reignite interest in the game, prior to the launch of Arma 4.
how these decisions happen ?they just realized it?
I think I opened a request in their feedback system in the early days of Arma 3 requesting proper multithreading support in the game. This issue was known the entire time, and they just took this long to do anything about it.
I actually got annoyed at Arma 3 years ago due to this issue, and stopped playing it.
They probably achieved it through development of Reforger or Arma 4 (if theyre even working on that yet) and ported the work over to Arma 3. They did the same with some of the newer tech added to Dayz version of VRE4 a few years back.
Dear God, it's about time. That game always ran like crap, and the lack of proper multithreading was one of the reasons. I don't understand why it took so long, since they had time to write a new game engine for DayZ years ago that performed better than the Arma 3 engine…
Arma 3 is much more complex than DayZ and there are different development teams. Also, Arma already got Reforger and is getting a sequel while DayZ won't get any sequel any time this decade.
DayZ also wasn't around for anywhere near as long as Arma 3, and the single-threaded issue was a problem in Arma 2 as well that those of us who struggled with performance on the AMD FX series of CPU's were very much familiar with. There's literally no excuse for this incredibly important change taking this long.
DayZ runs just as bad as ArmA 3 if not worse, the difference is ArmA 3 is way more complex.
DayZ doesn't run half the logic that ArmA 3 does while in Multi-Player.
Honestly the videos shared by John are very poor, cause we could easily get stable 60FPS during flight, it was during massive battles that performance went down the drain (something DayZ does not feature).
Who's talking about multiplayer? All I ever do in Arma 3 is load up the vehicles showcase, screw around for a bit, see how poor the GPU utilization still is after all these years (and multiple new PC's), and then uninstall the worthless thing.
If you getting poor performance in Single-Player then you have bigger problems.
In Single-Player we always could achieve high FPS with no effort, is during Multi-Player that the CPU issues arise for obvious reasons.
Is the difference between stable 60FPS and drops to 25FPS in choke points.
Big ai battles consume alot of cpu too, hence why SP players are finally happy. Our battles are much more bigger than these koth matches. I like to run upwards of 800 – 1k ai.
The FPS varies, but in recent versions of the game I get anywhere from 80FPS to 110FPS at 2560×1440 in the vehicle showcase, but with only about 70% GPU utilization, meaning the game should be performing better.
CPU = Ryzen 7 5800XT
GPU = RTX 3070 Ti
RAM = 64GB DDR4-3600 G.Skill
Soooo ARMA4 will have multithreading day one right??
Nice. Is it worth single player though? All I see is people playing multiplayer always
i only played the singleplayer campaign. Not once have i touched its multiplayer crap.
Wonderful. I hope it's good. I'll give it a go now that it's in a better state. Thanks
Congrats to pimple face 17 year old virgins who like to pretend they're adults by playing sh*tty video games.
Still Run like crap just tested the new update …..
It's time to upgrade that GeForce 3 buddy
You are not the only one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi-O1WjwY_U
So he used a free Frame Generation tool (which is NOWHERE as good as DLSS 3 or FSR 3.0) and calls it amazing? With the base framerate at 31FPS? And yet the same people are angry about NVIDIA advertising DLSS 4’s performance improvements? Oh the hypocrisy xD
You get defensive? You don't even know this guy. He is fighting to keep Arma lII alive. You also worship UE5 with its Nanite and NVIDIA's DLSS3 and yet every other article I read says they are buggy in UE5, at least. I've seen games remove them, just to stop the jank. I think the streamer is more reputable, though I agree 3rd party should never be better than hardware manufacturer solutions. You don't provide any scientific testing with well-defined metrics to show the benefit, only gameplay videos.
Ding ding ding, and we have a winner. You don’t even know what “base framerate at 31FPS” is, what Frame Generation actually does and why it’s so bad to use Frame Generation with that low framerate. Because if you knew, you’d agree. I’ve explained those terms BTW. But feel free to believe whatever you want 😛
I need several performance comparisons rite now…
Hallelujaah !!
https://youtu.be/nsBByTiKfyY?si=lfPwHNNmLtPZI7QT
John, you said that the game would not drop below 60fps anymore, but the 2nd video shows dips to low 40's (there's small fps counter, bottom right), so it seems that this game still needs more optimisation
Considering the developers are working on a new engine and game, don't hold your breath for heavy optimisation on ArmA 3.
That's mainly because he pushed the view distance to ridiculous values. 15K view distance is an overkill even for modern-day PCs, and it has nothing to do with the CPU multi-threading optimizations.
PS: Also, look at that draw distance. Wonderful without major pop-ins, right? Well, in Arma 3, a game that came out 12 years ago, you get drops below 60FPS. So now people may finally appreciate what UE5's Nanite brings to the table.
500,000 copies for Summer sale will help realign some priorities maybe? 😀
Damn, it didn't have that sh*t in 2013? Crisis is one thing but to still be on a single thread after 2010 is crazy. I was always put away by the awful performance of these games even on decent machines so maybe in the future I'll check them out again and try 'em.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi-O1WjwY_U