A Demanding game.

[A7RIXl3LUE]

OK as some have now figured out this game is CPU/GPU demanding.

My Rig. 5 years OLD is having trouble running it FPS wise.
intel CORE 2 DUO E7400@~2.8GHz OC'D ~3.53GHz (code name Wolfdale) on thermaltake DUO ORB heatsink.
1066Mhz 2x2Gb kinghston hyper X DDR2, 2x2GB crucial ballistix tracer series on loan from FOGGY!
p45 chipset ASUS P5Q socket 775 mobo.
gainward GTX550Ti GS (golden sample).
hyper type M 650watt PSU.

ive managed to tweak it a little to give me some FPS but its at a cost of quality visually but playable.

first off is to launch the game, CTRL-ALT-DEL select task manager go to applications rick click on planetside2 and then select go to process, then once the process is highlighted in services for you, right click planetside2 and go to set priority, set it to high (do not realtime this game), this will hopfully increase your FPS by upto 5FPS )down side is you have to do this everytime you launch the game.

now go back into the game (it would be handy to run FRAPS here to see what FPS you get constantly rather than having to press ALT F and end up getting the games own FPS tech up its wrong as it shows a higher FPS to Fraps.

the game always run smoothe at warpgate no problem go outside look around, whats your FPS compared to previously has it increased? yes, but goes to crap when in battle? but maintains around 10-18 FPS rather than 5? this is where tweaking starts.

go in the games settings, (notice GPUphysx is grey'd out thats because SOE has disabled t in the last phase of beta due to high problems with stability theres no notice when a majour patch will be out to enable gpu physx,cure some stability issue's and some bugs last patch was 21st december 2012) now here you really have to decide what you really need, and what you do without, flora, particle, fog, shadows ive turned down turn OFF vsync it limits your FPS ive left ambient occlusion ON because without it the game looks horrid ambient occlusion will give off the illusion of some quality there in game.
the next things to do is to see what resolution you have the game set at, higher res means lower FPS, try something inbetween, and turn down the quality settings also.

now go back in game see what your FPS is when near battle, i have about 18-22 FPS but i do often get lock ups of 1 FPS before it bounces back up to 20FPS.

this is where you need to exit the game now.

those running steam based PS2 go into you c drive program files steam steam apps common planetside 2. look for useroptions (somehwere near uninstaller.exe those who run the game on its own youll find it in planet side folder somewhere)

(its handy here to just right click copy and pAste into documents to keep the original settings) once a copy has been made of this file, in useroptions (open with notepad) you need to adjust renderdistance: this is either set at 1.5 or 9999.0000 set it to 1250.0000 go down look for flora enter 0 (zero) particles enter 0 fog 0 this turns these off, you can adjust shadows and everything else you wish that would give you some FPS but bear in mind that the more you turn off the more quality you loose.

now for those with Nvidia control panel, ATI figure how to do this because long time since i had a ATI catalyst system, go into control panel, got to manage 3d settings a dialog box will appear with 1.select a program to use, go to add, and another dialog box will come up, select you hardrive (windows) program file,steam,steamapps,common,planetside2 (look for the planetside 2.exe) highlight and click add at the bottom, this will place the program into your nvidia 3d settings, now you can play around with the features settings, anastropic should be set to 4x fxaa should be set to on antialiasing should be application controlled, AA tranparancy should be set to 8x supersample (for performance) cuda gpu select all, max pre frams set to 4. single display mode (for those with single displays) power mode prefure max performance (hopefully will stop the GPU going into parked mode whilst playing the game) anastropic sample option ON threaded optimization OFF tripple buff and the last three OFF. so now your loss in quality over the game has now been replaced with a little more quality via you setting in you nvidia settings.

start the game back up (dont forget to switch the priority in the task manager process tree and see what gains you have, i hop it gives you a little more performance and slightly more quality over the game to make it playable for those with older CPU's or OLDER GFX cards.

over and OUT

BLUE!!

[PaulyP]

wow - thanks for the post blue and well done for finally finding us

lol - never been on before and then posts 20 normal sized posts in one go... trying to catch us all up

I'll have a go and see if it makes any difference. My one query would be - wouldn't setting fog to a high level (instead of turning off), block out distant objects & improve FPS. I know that's the old way of doing it in older games but I guess if planetside's engine is as crap as it seems it could make it worse?

[Confusion]

Do you have to install the game before trying this fix

[A7RIXl3LUE]

UPDATE: NVIDIA USERS ONLY get the new driver update for you GTX card from the nvidia download site the driver you looking for is 310.90. its made a whole lotta difference in my FPS, its atleast stable in battle at 30fps wich makes it playable on mid settings with fog and ambient occlusion and full render distance.

im killing people rather than having to guess when i gunna get a lock up because their too close.

[Black]

For me its running somewhere around 30fps, sometimes a drop to 20fps.
PC hardware is around 4years old now. I'll post it later cause not home at the moment don't know the fully specs

Indeed at the warpgate its running towards 80-90 FPS for me, its more or less the big fights that are a bitch for my pc. But its verry playable for me(what it wasn't in beta ).
And to be honoust I have to run black ops 2 on low settings aswell to keep running it without anny stutters...

[A7RIXl3LUE]

OK so thought i'd update as im awake 4:15am here.

after some hotfixes by SOE, there seems to be rendering issues and more subtle bugs.

fear not theres supposed to be a optimization for older systems and bug layouts that are going to be fixed, this was supposed to have happened on 30th jan 2013, but as it goes the DEVS have NOT passed this update 2.0 through quality assessment and has now been delayed by a weeks or so .

as it goes, there has been an increase in the number of cheats in the game, and SOE rules are not to name and shame or post any kind of youtube FRAPS i caught a cheater video on the forums. but to use a support ticket and report them that way, as using the ingame /report {player name} in chat doesnt work, or is not a priority to SOE to look at so a support ticket gets their attention quicker. you can raise a support ticket by using the launchpad screen and going to the bottom left hand courner and clicking on the spannar there.

for some reason this cheat looks special, i have seen youtube video's of it, and it looks scary theres aimbot wallhack speedhack and anti-ban theres also a feature in the program that alows a cheating player to BAN (24hours) any player they wish so if you flame them ingame they can kick you for 24 hours. so mods cant kick them and infact are open to being banned themselfs by this program.

ive made a suggestion in the forums for the devs to develope somekind of active scanner to run with the launchpad/splash/and ps2.exe's as an extension program feature.
heres my brainstorm (and yes it did hurt) this active scanner once installed would report back to SOE under you account name your hardware ID, CPU ID, it will aslso detect whether its run with steam or a stand alone installer, the scanner is launched at the same time as launchpad/splash then onto planetside.exe***shipping*** and then continues to scan whilst your playing.
What will it scan? it will scan planetside current file system in other words all the .DLL all the .GIF all the .CFG and all the .EXE and .IMG .XML files for any changes or unrecognised files, in addition the scanner will have its own list of known cheats on the market in its database aswell as a list of injector.exe programs to scan the desktop, upon finding an altered file the scanner will flag the file or program and tell the user this program/file is not recognised by SOE please close (copy of the file path) then relaunch planetside 2 and prevent the game from running if the option to continue to run is checked, now once this has happened, another notepad is sent by the scanner to SOE it will contain station name of the account and hardware and cpu ID and steam user ID, and the file/program that caused the scanner to flag the user there a SOE MOD team ccan look at the notepad and see what was causing it, he/she can then either ignore (safe program and pass onto devs to include in the list of scanner database files) issue a temp ban (an attempt to alter the files was detected by the scanner) or perma ban a program was run whilst in game that the scanner detected.

in addition to what is scans it will scan for overlay type programs aswell it will have steam overlay framps xfire etc in its database of OK files, so even running an overlay type hack will get you detected.

now your thinking yeh but they will just open a new account because its a free to play game, Wrong! the MODS can ban the CPU ID or the Hardware ID thats come from that computer in addition if steam user, the user ID will be blocked and will flag that user on steam with a ban(s) on record, so when they do download it, no matter what they wont be able to get in a server to play on that current PC they will either have to buy a new harddrive or CPU create a new steam account aswell.

oh wwell we can all dream and hope cant we!