Yes it is a fair comment but do those games enable you do interact from 1000m above the ground down to ground level with such a view distance because that is what this engine has to do and that adds immersion. Yes you can get a generic combat experience like BF to look better because it is doing something completely different. If you are drawing at such distances then you are not going to get the fidelity you can with shorter draw distances but those draw distances add a significant part to the experience. I like that kind of thing so for me this game is stunning but I also like Prince of Persia (graphically) but I wouldn't weigh the two against each other because they are very different games and designs.
I think the best example of a game that could go against ArmA 3 is Just Cause 2. It 32km by 32km, huge draw distance, runs flawlessly, but it has a quite small draw distance of small objects around the player.
ArmA's biggest problem, it's still the ground textures that look awful from distance and just like in A2, there is no grass at hundreds of meters away. This and the explosion effect (game/special effects in general).
Seem to have 30fps in 8 man coop games, like 15-20 in wasteland
both sli and single gpu utilization is about 30% lol
Try to set a lower view distance; by increasing it, it also drops the GPU usage. and of course, the frame rate.
Surely optimization is a given thing though, doubt they'll leave it in this state performance wise. Considering the fact people are getting about the same kinda performance out of this alpha as they did ArmA 2, and it looks a lot better. Also that's pre-beta, pre-driver updates and pre-patched, so I reckon a few months after full release tops, it'll have pretty nippy performance.
The problem comes from the CPU side, not the GPU/drivers side. I can run ArmA 2 and ArmA 3 close to top settings with an 7950OC, but the drops in performance comes from low GPU usage. If you play around with the editor and add units, you'll see the video card just laying casual around with 20%+ to 50-60% usage if lucky. I've put 6 squads (3 vs.3) of infantry against each other in the main town, and FPS dropped to around 27-32FPS when they were fighting. Again, the video card hardly break a sweat in the mean time. CPU usage was like: first core around 95-99% usage, the other 3 were ~ 50%. Same stuff as it is in ArmA 2. If they don't fix this somehow, we can have as much as 4 Titans in our system, they'll just do nothing.
The CPU was a i5 2500k@4,5GHz.