Arma 2 not utilizing cpu?

[hiddengearz]

I made a new rig about 5 months ago and when i first installed all my games i realized there was a big improvment in the cpu usage compared to my old rig. Games that would take 70-100% of my cpu usage would only take 10% on the new one. Especially arma 2, i would have to close almost everything to play it on my old rig.

My current rig is:

FX-8120
4 X 2GB Ram
HD Rade 7770 1GB Direct CU
Gigabyte GA-970A-D3 AM3+ mother board

There was an improvement in fps on some games when i upgraded but only like ~15 fps on arma 2. I thought my old graphic card GTX 430 may have been bottle necking the CPU so i went out and bought the 7700 to see if that was the case and i got a like a 10 fps boost but arma 2 was still only using ~20% of my cpu even during high stress situations. Everywere i go i see people saying the fx chips are garbage but why is arma 2 using such little cpu usage? Is it because the game is just that old or is this a fx 8120/8150 issue? This has been happening for a while and i thought it was just because the cpu was that good but its starting to bother me.

I'm curious if this happens with any other fx user's and whats the cpu usage like on the intel chips? Also arma2 only takes up like 1.2gbs even when i try to force it to take more in the mod line.

P.S my mod line looks like -maxMem= 8000; -cpuCount= 4; -exThreads= 8;

[LITOralis.nMd]

Yes, Arma2 is horribly unoptimized. And old.

You will do better heading to the Arma2 specific forums for help on this, thought there are regular PRAA players with your CPU who post on this forum. Look back for threads relating to optimizing Arma2 for the 8120 when the 8120 was first released, there were guys who did extensive becnhmarking tests using different combinations of optimizations.

Keep in mind the HD7770 is also a bottleneck for Arma2.

Arma2's benchmark utilities are designed to make you cry no matter how much you spend on a gaming PC.

[hiddengearz]

Didn't find much from searching but I guess ill head over to bis's forums and see if. Someone can helpme out there. One thing how is the 7770 bottlenecking arma 2 when I bout it I could of sworn it was above the recomended requirments and from the reviews I read it could run games like bf3 @60fps on ultra. Plus most people say arma 2 is cpu heavy so I thought that may be the problem. Thanks for you're help anyways.

[mangeface]

Yeah, like Lito said, ArmA 2 is old and horribly optimized. It came out in 2009, and if I looked it up correctly hex core CPUs had just started coming around.

Don't fret too much, ArmA 3 is just around the corner and it's supposed to be optimized to utilize 6 cores on CPUs. So...do I regret trading in my FX-8150 for a i5-2500K? A little cause I wanted to see how a 8 core would handle A3, but I'm extremely happy as is.

[LITOralis.nMd]

Someone else on the forum asked the same question some months ago, he got a 40% FPS boost using some command line options, check it out:

https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f329-h ... reads.html

READ THE ABOVE LINK!!

Have you messed with these settings in: C:\Users\-your username-\Documents\ArmA 2\Arma2OA..cfg
Code:
GPU_MaxFramesAhead=1;
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=1;
HDRPrecision=8;
lastDeviceId="";
localVRAM=2094391296;
nonlocalVRAM=1874419712;
vsync=0;
AToC=6;
FXAA=0;
Windowed=0;
PPAA=1;
PPAA_Level=1;

Try adding this to the start parameters:
-nosplash -nopause -maxmem=8192 -exThreads=7 -cpuCount=8

If you're using steam, right click the game, go to properties, and then start parameters. If you're not using steam, just go to the icon, right click, and then after the last " in the target, add those.

In addition, go to:
C:\Users\[Your user name]\Documents\ArmA 2
and open Arma2AO.cfg (or Arma2.cfg, if you dont have AO).
Set the following:

GPU_MaxFramesAhead=0;
GPU_DetectedFramesAhead=0;
AToC=6;
PPAA=1;
PPAA_Level=1;

LOL, just realized I never optimized my own Arma2 install when I reinstalled last month.