Gaming rigs

[Sparks]

Have you considered picking up a used i5 2500K /3570K + Motherboard and overlocking the bejeus out of it?

I hadn't, but I just peeked on ebay and they look to be going for about 220 euro plus 50 euro shipping from the US, are you seeing lower prices somewhere?

Haskell prices will be dropping later this year when all the benchmarkers / "must have the latest" crowd move to Sky Lake / Z107.

I love the "must have the latest" crowd, they're why I get to have nice things on Dad money

Alas, as far as all the ArmA engined games go, there is no substitute for a fast Intel CPU.

True But with my software engineer's hat on (no, it's not a fedora), multithreaded programs are hard...

[Aqarius]

3570Ks hold price stupidly well. Even on Haswell release, they didn't dip AT ALL.

[Sparks]

the SSD won't do much for frame rates, just drop the loading times, and maybe reduce stuttering as the game loads textures on the fly

Yup, it's the texture loading I'm thinking of, Arma uses a lot of textures compared to other "games" and you wind up worrying about the overall system rather than just cranking on the CPU or GPU in isolation. If I had the RAM, I'd use a RAMdisk, but with only 8Gb and running Windows, you'd lose on the roundabouts what you gain on the swings.

i use the -nologs option, placebo if anything (benchmarks showed slightly better frame times, but only slightly)

I'm using a small host of options: -cpuCount=3 -exThreads=5 -maxMem=8192 -maxVram=2048 -noBenchmark -noLogs -noPause -noSplash -world=empty -skipIntro -high and a few others (some of those just affect the initial startup time, or help with recording). I'd use Fred41's custom malloc, but he's stopped active maintenance of it and a recent BI stable release broke the LBA settings as well, which is a crying shame because that was an extra 20% on your FPS right there.

Tom's Hardware has/had started doing Arma 3 benchmarks, not sure if they ever did any CPU tests. You may also want to check out Tech Report's system guides.

Oooo, engineer porn!

Arma 3 is, unfortunately, fairly poorly coded.

I keep seeing this, but I keep wondering how much is Arma3 and how much is Real Virtuality 4. I suspect it's a lot more of the latter than the former.

[SuicideKing]

Yeah, of course it's RV4...but I don't know how much to separate the game and the engine, seeing that RV4 was made/upgraded for Arma 3 itself. And I think some of the blame lies with PhysX and its x87 floating point nonsense. And of course DX11.

I wish I could dream about a DX12 upgrade for RV4, but who am I kidding.

[Sparks]

I wish I could dream about a DX12 upgrade for RV4, but who am I kidding.

Problem's the money - developers who actually grok stuff that low down in the stack are rare and expensive, and optimising for performance, especially if you have to port a large legacy project across fundamental layers of the stack to improve that performance, is non-trivial (and the bughunt if you port something that large across systems is downright terrifying).
If BI ever do that - you'll know someone had a serious amount of courage to make the call.

In the meantime, I guess we optimise our systems for throughput and crank those motherboard clocks as high as they'll go... /sigh

[SuicideKing]

Yeah, true...I just may have got a form of occupation so I think I should be able to upgrade too by November/December.

EDIT: Looks like there's new SSD hotness on the block.
https://techreport.com/review/28050/int ... e-reviewed

[Sparks]

Ha-ha! Saitek rudder pedals ordered! Competency in helo piloting here I come, one explosion at a time!

[Sparks]

And thanks to the new job, my new (small) SSD just arrived and my new CPU is en route (along with a better microphone/headset thingy to try to get my transmitted audio up to the "I can just about understand what he's saying if I've had a few" level).

Giggity giggity giggity, as the kids would say.

[boberro]

My 2008 machine knows hardly anything about gaming rigs. Hell, my IT background makes me doubtful towards gaming hardware, but I know one thing: 1920x1080 is not a full resolution. Your vertical resolution should be 1200px

[Sparks]

My 2008 machine knows hardly anything about gaming rigs. Hell, my IT background makes me doubtful towards gaming hardware, but I know one thing: 1920x1080 is not a full resolution. Your vertical resolution should be 1200px

From your lips to the monitor manufacturer's ears boberro. 1920x1080 is a sop to the HD TV mob, with their 1080p specification. Gits cost us 206,400 pixels and screwed up our aspect ratios overnight, damn their eyes.

BTW, the SSD? Didn't bump up my FPS at all, but did raise my average FPS, if that makes sense. No more micro-stuttering (or macro-stuttering either), and I was able to raise the texture quality without losing FPS or getting that annoying pop-in as the texture loads. So it's still slow, but feels much smoother and looks much better. Yeah, Arma loads a little faster, but not much (it was only a 40-quid SSD, 120Gb in total, and Arma 3 is all that's on it right now, I didn't move the OS over so the Arma loading time is down from 30 seconds to 20 seconds, ie - not worth writing home about it. Honestly, setting world to none in the command line did more for that than anything else).

Also, the new CPU has arrived in Ireland, says DHL. Might be able to get it by tomorrow which would mean I get to test it saturday and possibly play on Sunday, so we'll see if that helped any. Athlon to Phenom (ie. hello L3 cache) and three cores to six and an extra 0.2GHz clock speed. I think it might have an impact