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ARMA 2 Review: A tale of wasted FLOPS

Posted by Ted Pollak and Robert Dow on February 10th 2011 | Discuss
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Tags: gpu nvidia amd review games arma

For the uninitiated, ARMA 2 is widely known amongst Enthusiast PC Gamers as one of the most system intensive and realistic games on the market.

This is so because the environmental effects are dynamic, view distance can be set to 10,000 meters and is affected by light, reflection, rain, and mist. As in real life if you are walking thought the forest with the sun in front of you, the terrain can take on a shadowed nightmare as your retinas struggle with both light and darkness. Additionally there is what is known as the "the sandbox element." Sandbox games can be setup for unscripted play where you do not know where the enemy is coming from. It's no coincidence that PC Gamer Magazine hosts an ARMA 2 server among only two other games hosted by the magazine.

We decided to test this beast on some of our hottest hardware, and unfortunately, the results were what I expected. ARMA 2, and many other advanced simulations, are "bound" to the CPU and do not properly utilize the power of modern day graphics processing units; which is probably why the GPU suppliers never use them as benchmark examples.

We ran a number of graphics settings combinations, at various common gaming resolutions. We ran these tests on enthusiast and performance AIB's and found that, in the case of Nvidia-based AIBs, there was little performance variation between a $350 GPU and a $550 GPU – and we got similar results with AMD AIBs.

The GTX570 and GTX580 are almost in a dead heat on average performance across all benchmarks, as measured in FPS using the in-game FPS counter. Yet the GTX580 has 176 Gigaflops more computing power (1581 vs. 1405). We even tested the GTX560 (1262 Gigaflops) in a few scenarios and there was still no significant drop in performance. To put this in perspective a Playstation 2 is capable of about 3.5 Gigaflops. It's almost like having 91 PS2's just sitting around watching us sweat and not helping! Well get to work you little buggers!

I think it is high time for simulation and advanced PC gaming companies to write CPU/GPU load balancing code into their products. Simulation gamers often have the best equipment, spending well over $2,500 on their machines. If Bohemia Interactive were to write such engine code and supply it with some kind of expansion pack, it'd be a hit.

In fact let's not stop at games. Adobe didn't. During my recent installation of Premiere Essentials I was asked if I had Nvidia GPUs in my system so that the software could use the available cycles on those chips. Let's start this kind of thinking for games as well, and let's make it brand agnostic. Granted since I'm not a programmer, I don't know the complexity of what I am asking for, so any comments from those in the know would be welcome.

If you play these types of games and are building a system, here's my advice if you do not have unlimited budget. Focus on the motherboard, CPU, CPU cooling, and hard drive for your initial investment. Those things are harder to upgrade. A current performance level (i.e. mid level) gaming GPU is all that is needed and super easy to upgrade later.

What do we think?

There have been tens of thousands of forums posts of people trying to unlock the secret to increasing this game's performance. In fact an entire benchmark has been created called ArmaMark and thousands of people have run it with many posting their scores. One of the popular Nvidia tweaks is to force VSync off and increase pre-rendered frames. (this helped me). Believe it or not one of the AMD tweaks is to rename the executable Crysis.exe??? There are even settings that increase performance when graphical complexity is increased. Totally counter-intuitive; I am still a bit perplexed myself but hope that game engine designers can write engines to survey system usage on the fly, and dynamically change the threading so as to load balance the game. From my relatively primitive viewpoint, a FLOP is a FLOP.