The idea of supporting a game long-term has been… hit or miss, for many studios. Some games don’t get the support they need for the longest time, and others areNo Man’s Sky. Then you have cases likeHalo Infinite, where things get over-promised and under-delivered.
And today, we haveArma 3. A 12-year-old title getting a fairly major update - and it’s not even to try and sell a big DLC or anything. It’s a performance upgrade, one whose correspondingdev blog posthas no shortage of charts to show you exactly how things have improved.
The word of the day is “multithreading”, and, if you’re not super technically-minded, one of the big perks here is that you’ll be able to run the game at much higher settings without taking too much of a performance hit. If you’re into the nerd stuff though, well, that’s what the charts are for.
“Some 12 years since its initial release,” the post reads, “we still find ourselves releasing free platform updates to the game. This is something we can hardly believe ourselves, and we think you’ll agree that it’s a splendid situation!”
Don’t just stare blindly at the numbers. Play the game. Most everyone who’s tried the update has said the game feels smoother.
After a brief intro, the post puts some effort into clearing up possible misinformation: “We did not ‘add’ multithreading in update 2.20. The RV engine has had multithreading since Arma 2. But we did overhaul all of our multithreading code and made some optimizations.”
This is fantastic news for pretty much everyone involved - whether you want a vanilla experience on the highest settings, or want to push things even further with several hundred mods, you’ll see less lag and a higher framerates than ever before. Even thoseviral fake war footagevideos will look a bit shinier.
Arma 3 Developer Warns Outlets Of Game Footage Being Used As Fake War News
Bohemia suggests some tips to recognize the fake news.
The post does provide a bit of a warning, though. The devs are aware that many players have set up custom command-line parameters, in an effort to improve Arma 3’s performance on their hardware. These are still safe to use, but you’ll need to be sure you know what you’re doing first.
If this applies to you, checkthe postfor a list of which parameters are relevant here.
Another noteworthy bit of information is that the game’s hardware requirements have gone up. The changes are live on the game’s Steam store page as we speak. In particular, the game’s 32-bit version is no longer being supported. Make sure you’ve upgraded to the 64-bit version instead.
Players React To Arma 3’s Performance Overhaul
The changes to Arma 3 have been immediate and incredibly stark. One player describes their experience in aReddit thread, saying they used to average somewhere between 15-20 FPS in their zombie scenarios. But that was before the big change.
“I hopped on today, and put in a hundred zombies for a last stand in the desert map,” the post reads, “and it was staying at 50-60 FPS the whole time.”
The lowest it went down was to like 45 FPS when I was in a helicopter.
A bump in frames like that, even during a stress test, is no small feat! The work that Bohemia Interactive is willing to put into a 12-year-old title would be appreciated even if it was a minor touch-up, but it’s hard to describe a patch like this in that way. Dedication like this is exactly what players want to see.
