Computer hardware

This is the tweak/upgrade guide posted by the devs in the forums. Give this process a try and use it to guide your upgrade decisions. If your results fall under scenario A, upgrading your card should yield benefits. If not, there may not be an easy solution for better performance.

If a GPU upgrade looks like the best option for you, I'd suggest against a second GTX 295. Performance gains seldom scale as perfect multiples when using SLI; plus you're more likely to experience micro stuttering in your frame rates unless both cards are really strong. My suggestion would be to sell your 295 on ebay and use the proceeds to supplement the purchase of a GTX 660.

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[Step 1]
Delete or rename your UserOptions file and start from scratch with your settings in the game. During this part of Beta, you should probably do this each time we announce a significant patch. Once you do this, launch the game.

[Step 2]
Set everything to medium, well everything except Render Quality – leave this at 100% for the moment. Once all settings are at medium, logout and EXIT, then restart the client. There are a couple of settings that might not get reset properly unless you exit, so please remember to actually EXIT, not just log out.

[Step 3]
Now that you’ve started up, pick a server and get into the warp-gate spawn location of a low-population server (location isn’t important right now, since network lag won’t be part of this tweaking).

[Step 4]
Set the game to full-screen, native resolution (the “normal” resolution for a single monitor) – you folks running massive monitor setups, please start with just one for now and progress from there after you complete these steps. Now press ALT+F to display your frame-rate in the BOTTOM LEFT of the screen (just underneath the mini-map display). Pick a location and something to look at and then note your fps number.

[Step 5]
Go into graphics settings, set render quality to 50% (just for now, this is a test). Now make sure you’re looking at roughly the same thing from roughly the same location – note your NEW fps number. Now there will be two sections, pick based on what happened with your fps number.

[Scenario A: Your fps number went up noticably]
Your graphics card is controlling your frame rate more than your CPU. You should try the next series of changes, in this order (and one at a time, if you’re patient – no need to turn something off if it doesn’t affect frame rate here )
1.Decrease resolution
2.Use a Render Quality other than 100% (try 85%)
3.Turn down shadows
4.Turn off options with checkboxes (no order here, cards all vary in the costs of these)
5.Turn down lighting quality
6.Turn down flora quality
7.Turn down model quality
8.Turn down particle quality and effects quality together.
9.Turn down texture quality

[Scenario B: Your fps number DID NOT go up much]
1.Lower the audio quality
2.Lower the Terrain quality
3.Lower the particle and effects quality (yes both of these)
Your GPU isn’t limiting you it should be possible to get better looking graphics. Reset to HIGH, and then go back to step 4 with the HIGH settings on everything.

There are other settings in the UserOptions configuration file that can be changed, but if we didn't put up a UI section for it then some bad things might happen if you change them. You make these changes at your own risk for now - we do plan on adding some additional options as we stabilize these things and hope to put more information here. Also, as we make and publish new patches it's helpful to start over from scratch with your options again once in a while to see if we've made improvements that help your specific system.

Good luck, and see you in Indar!

P.S. If you're in Scenario B and nothing else works, there is one thing you can try inside the UserOptions config file (located in the games installation directory) - RenderDistance is set to -1 by default (which means the game data controls render distance) - you can try setting this to some specific values, say 1500, 1000, or 750 to see if it helps - you will need to completely exit the game before you edit the file. Setting this to too small a value can mean you will get shot by people you never saw.

 

Before I'd drop $100-200 on another 295, I'd consider dropping the $300 on a GeForce 660ti, which would be a more significant upgrade in the graphics department. It is more money, but might give you more longevity than going SLI with another 295. The other part with SLI is some games see a decent improvement with SLI, others not so much. It would be an across the board upgrade for any game with a single current generation card. It's a bummer you got Borderlands 2 already. You can get a free copy right now with GeForce cards, which could allow you to view the purchase of something like a 660ti as having $60 knocked off.

 

The CQB thing is worth keeping an eye on. Video card probably won't help that. I think there's something else going on there. I actually just upgraded to a 660ti and honestly it doesn't matter if I run on the lowest or highest settings. After a while I start seeing some problems with CQB fights and it feeling sluggish. I can watch process explorer and system monitors and my system isn't being taxed at all as far as resource usage.

I'm actually running the exact same setup you are with a C0/C1 stepping Core i7 920, an ASUS P6T Deluxe (v1) motherboard and 6GB RAM. Everything seems to run just great for a while until the system decides to start bogging down from extended playtime. CQB fights are really where I start to see this most. I can go run a game like Borderlands 2 with everything maxed and it runs perfect, so I wonder if there are some optimization issues with PS2. Others would have to speak to this further.

 

I'm surprised to hear this. My GF's system is running it with zero issues and it's an old core 2 duo with 4gb ram and a 6870 gpu.

Are you letting it autodetect settings, or cranking everything to max?

 

I would think you should be getting better performance than that. Anybody else running SLI know, does PS2 give good gains? Maybe it's treating your card like a single 200 series instead of 2? Have you checked to see that all the cores of your proc are working?

I dunno... I'm kinda out of ideas. :\

 

I don't know if you are running windows 7 but this helped increase my performance while playing.

http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-C/Disable-CPU-Core-Parking-Utility

 

I actually had a good night last night regarding performance, so I'm hoping through the process of elimination that I can start zeroing in on what changes that I made had what sort of impact on my experience. I'll try to keep you posted on what changes might be having an impact. Some things I did before the op last night:

1. Disabled Hyperthreading in the BIOS. I would hope this didn't actually account for anything, but I've seen games in the past not handle hyperthreading well until further optimizations were made. I didn't actually do this through any suggestions someone made specific to Planetside 2 and hyperthreading--I'm just doing it from past experience with some games not liking HT much. Again, it may have done nothing for my experince last night.
2. Overclocked my processor. I've been wanting to do this for a few years now and I finally got in a new heatsink and fan yesterday. I bumped up my i7 920 from 2.66Ghz to 3.8Ghz and it's running rock solid through some various torture tests (prime95 and IntelBurnTest) and temperatures are staying where they should be. This could have had an impact just with having faster CPU cycles, but who knows. I never saw my overall CPU usage before overclocking go above 30% or so, so can't say what impact this might have had.
3. I put all settings back to medium and disabled some various performance affecting options. I don't know how much theses have really impacted me given it didn't seem to matter on previous days if I had all the bells and whistles on or off and settings high or low--I would see the same pattern of things going bad after a while of playing.

I'm going to continue to change various settings around to see what might lead me to figure out what affects performance most and what really isn't. I'll let you know my findings.

 

Frothy, please go to start > run > type "dxdiag.exe" hit enter. Save the dxdiag report to a text file, and attach it to the thread. This will give us the full details of your system. If you're comfortable with that. Feel free to look over it if it has information you'd like to keep secret.

Based off the information so far, the only thing holding you back is your GPU. The 295 is 4 generations old. If budget is your problem, consider switching to AMD. Their cards are usually cheaper, though I haven't kept up-to-date on the hardware battle.

 

I over clocked my I7 920 newhelm to 3.6ghz and have installed my new geforce 660 gti and wow is it doing nice. I feel like I can hit people now in close range combat it is amazing.

I hope we can get your computer figured out Frothy you do really well the way it is can't wait to see how you do when it's running right.

 

not to sidetrack the thread, but what server you guys on and dammit dane, nice to see ya

 

We're currently on Himalia, Scrub.

 

scrub: Himalia - http://www.dragonwolves.com/forums/showthread.php?t=26058

FrothyMug: Overclocking, while still something to be careful with, is something that's not too difficult to do these days with the right precautions. Depending on what revision you have for the 920 (CPU-Z will state this), what motherboard (yours was meant to be used for pushing a system with overclocking) and RAM (some good 1600Mhz or better to get some decent overclocking head room) will all play into how much you can get out of an overclock. Also, a good after market heatsink and fan would be needed for greater overclocking / better cooling. You can overclock with stock cooling, but you'll probably be running hotter than you need to. You can get a good HS / Fan from Newegg.com for about $35 that will do the job just fine. Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo can be had for this and is actually a good performing HS / Fan--if you have the room for it.

All that said, I don't know that overclocking is going to yield the most improvement. I know it's the toughest point to approach because of cost, but the 4 generation old video card might be the biggest bottleneck. It's kindof hard to say at this point, though. I would still see issues after upgrading my card, but I don't think they were due to my graphics card at all, so I'm not willing to commit where a bottleneck is. That and being a beta, it might have a lot to do with just an overall lack of the right optimizations with the game code. Time will tell I guess as they smooth it all out.

EDIT: I meant to throw this in here in case you were considering overclocking. It's an article for beginners and to top it off--it covers overclocking with the 920 and the Asus P6T motherboard. Click HERE. I just did this a couple days ago finally (been meaning to for years). So far it's been working great at 3.8Ghz and it may be contributing to better overall performance for the game. All I did was purchase a $35 HS / fan to give it a go.