ARMA 3 devs release massive performance overhaul 12 years after launch, announce plans to stop supporting 32-bit machines

Bohemia Interactive is currently working hard on future updates for ARMA Reforger, as well as working on the as-of-now-unseen ARMA 4. In a surprise move, the studio has released a massive ARMA 3 update that completely overhauls performance, bringing huge framerate gains to the now 12-year-old milsim.

ARMA 3 gets true multithreading after over a decade

Releasing in Update 2.20, Bohemia announced that they have actually added true multi-threading to ARMA 3 to massively improve performance across the board. While the developers explain that the development of this improvement has been “slower than expected”, the team has worked a miracle.

“Even now that we’re steadily traveling the road towards ARMA 4, there is still plenty of life left in our pinnacle Real Virtuality (RV) title,” the developers explained in a blog post.

Technically, ARMA 3 has enjoyed some level of multi-threading ever since release, but it wasn’t a great implementation. Due to the game’s weird optimisation quirks, the game would suffer from significant lag spikes with major hangs that would disrupt the action and even get you killed.

The new ARMA 3 update may see your rig pull in a higher maximum FPS, but “it may even be slighly lower”. However, the experience will “feel significantly smoother” as frame times stick to their render budget and the game no longer suffers from major performance dips.

Bohemia Interactive revealed that the team is “still not done” with improving the performance of ARMA 3. While the studio is largely moving on from its Real Virtuality engine for future games, the team doesn’t want to leave the still-massive fanbase behind for its older titles.

In order to keep pushing the game forward, Bohemia also announced that ARMA 3 2.20 will be the last update for the game that will support 32-bit systems. While some players are still using older machines, the studio has data that proves nearly all players are actively using 64-bit systems.

“We will no longer maintain both builds, and will focus any future efforts purely on 64-bit,” the developer explained. “The vast majority of Steam users and ARMA 3 players have long since switched over, and we hope everyone else will too, especially those who may be unintentionally using the 32-bit version.”

Additionally, the studio is also dropping support for Windows 7 and 8, something that the majority of developers did years ago. The move to strictly supporting modern Windows and 64-bit systems will be quicker development time for the small dev team still working on the game and “unlock some more optimisation opportunities,” the developer says.