Gaming rigs

[boberro]

And I think, arma-wise, all you'll get is 0.2GHz, as Arma spits on your cores. On the other hand it might have an impact if you'll thinking of joining the streamers bunch (in my time streamer was the name for a tape-drive ).

[Sparks]

And I think, arma-wise, all you'll get is 0.2GHz, as Arma spits on your cores. On the other hand it might have an impact if you'll thinking of joining the streamers bunch (in my time streamer was the name for a tape-drive ).

I think the L3 cache may help somewhat though.
And the cores will help because if worst comes to worst, I can lock the OS stuff on one, the OBS stuff on another, the TS stuff on a third and leave three dedicated to Arma.
So Arma's cores won't get much faster, but they won't be shared anymore, if you see what I mean.

[Eagle_Eye]

Sparks how feasible would it be to do that? I have an i5 4670k, so arma runs ok, but would you actually be able to force arma to run on the second core and leave windows/ts/music on the first? It seems obvious but ive never heard of anyone doing it before.

[Sparks]

Sparks how feasible would it be to do that? I have an i5 4670k, so arma runs ok, but would you actually be able to force arma to run on the second core and leave windows/ts/music on the first? It seems obvious but ive never heard of anyone doing it before.

I've done it before, it's pretty straightforward. But when you only have three cores to play with, you are a bit mangled even then. With six, I'm hoping I can squeeze out another 5FPS or so on YAAB (but YAAB is kindof a worst-case scenario really, it's hitting 13FPS on my machine when flying about stratis in the editor is holding steady above 70fps).

(Incidentally, it seems Arma *is* multithreaded, it's just that it doesn't use that many threads, so it doesn't fully take advantage of lots of cores, hence the underperformance on AMD machines, where they push for more cores rather than pushing for more per-core performance the way Intel does. So three or four cores devoted to Arma while the other two or three run everything else should give a performance boost. I hope).

[zitron]

When I was on my Phenom II 955, I found that overclocking the RAM and FSB gave me 10-15% more fps, more than any other setting change. Switching to an i5 (which has more than 2x memory bandwidth) tripled my fps on the same setting...

I think you should still get a decent boost in fps compared to that ancient Athlon. So instead of 2fps you will have 4fps .

[Sparks]

Just remember that on 2fps I've still lost zero chalks

[Sparks]

Ha! DHL got the CPU to me just in time for the bank holiday weekend. Excellent

[SuicideKing]

Arma 3 is multithreaded, but it mainly runs into the DX11 issue of really just using 1 thread at above 75% and keeping the others around 50%. I've observed with Borderlands 2 that turning PhysX up a notch improves CPU utilization on the other cores, but then that hits the GPU harder as well.

[Sparks]

When you say...

turning PhysX up a notch

... Any details?

[Sparks]

YAAB results (in fps):

Athlon x3 : 13.8
Phenom x6 : 17.1
w/cpuCount option increased from 3 to 6: 17.3
w/PhysX told to use the GPU and not automatically switch: 17.7
w/resolution increased from 1152x720 to the native monitor resolution (1920x1080): 17.4 (it wouldn't even break 10 before with the old CPU at this resolution)
w/OBS, OpenTrack &c running and CPU-affinitied to their own cores: 13.5
w/OBS, OpenTrack &c CPU-affinitied to one core while arma got the rest: 13.8
w/Razer stats collection disabled (wth was that doing on?): 14.5
w/Objects set to Ultra (and almost everything maxed out in video quality after the SSD went in): 14.2
w/OBS retweaked to record the native 1920x1080@30fps to the SSD: 13.8
w/MSI accelerator instead of OBS to record: 11.8 (and a 22.5Gb video file from under 5 mins of a test!)
w/MSI accelerator configured sanely (this took a while and involved downscaling the video and tweaking compression): 13.8
w/Arma CPU affinity set for every CPU bar the first one (because MSI said that one was always the most heavily loaded): 14.2
w/Arma CPU affiinity set for every CPU bar the first two and everything else kicked onto those two and MSI's encoding tweaked: 14.6

/sigh
Looks like I can either have reasonable framerates or record the game, not both.
On the other hand, I'm now getting 1fps more while playing at my full native resolution, with all the textures and objects cranked up and headtracking and recording running, so the game looks fabulous dahling. And MSI splits the audio so I get my mic and the game in different tracks, which is handy.
MSI says the GPU's never getting above 40% utilisation though, which is depressing...