I think I would be better off with a Pentium 4

My old desktop had a P4 with hyper-threading and it was clocked at 3.5 ghz. Now the Pentium 4 was inefficient, and favored raw clock speed over good use of the cycles it has. Still, as I sit here with a quadcore i7 at 2.9 ghz and see Planetside 2 running at 15 frames in the middle of a zerg while my CPU sits at 20% usage I can't help but wonder where all that "Forgelight was built for the future!" went.

Doesn't matter what name it has, 2.9ghz just doesn't cut it. I play on a dual core at 2.7ghz lol

I have a vintage i7 supposed to run at 2.66, but I have run it at 3.78ghz (199x19) for 3 years and counting. I keep waiting for it to start becoming unstable but it hasn't happened.. I feel pretty lucky.

I dip to maybe 30-40 range in the truly huge prime time battles, around 45-55 in a normal big battle, and 60-90 everything else. 560ti gpu with most graphics options low or off so I can see better. That and shadows were actually annoying as hell while flying, constantly fading in.

Yeah, there's a limit to how low your clock speed can go before the game starts to suffer. There might be exceptions for very customized rigs, but you probably shouldn't settle for running at less than 3.0Ghz, no matter how many cores the thing has. Like I said, exceptions will exist, but that may as well be a rule of thumb.

And that said but if someone else does have great performance with a <3.0Ghz processor while running it at that speed, please post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

The problem isn't low clock rates. The problem is Planetside 2 is written in a way that it doesn't utilize the distributed nature of multi-core processing, its written linearly. That's why my CPU usage, despite the game saying I'm CPU capped, does exceed 30% ever.

Yeah, like every game ever made. If you figure out a good way around it I think you'll be up for the nobel prize of programming or something.

Funny, I considered putting my P4 HT rig back together just to test this game on it. Its factory clock is 3.2ghz.

My Intel C2D 7400 rated at 2.8ghz is running at 3.8ghz with no errors in it. If you're having trouble with your I7 quadcore then that is pretty sad. I'd start investing in some kind of after market cooler. Find what stable clocks you can get on forums and the voltage also required to run at those speeds.
Tomshardware.com has great help. You could prob ask there or you can just google it pretty much. That's how I did it anyway.

Your I7 running at those low speeds make me kinda cringe. It could also be your ridiculously low FSB making your CPU/RAM relationship pretty bad. So just by raising the FSB a litle bit on your BIOS could help. Just check the intel website for information on your CPU of what the "maxiumum" voltage they specify your CPU to run at.

You've got a weak laptop CPU there, its pure marketing BS with the i7 moniker stuck on it... and your laptop GPU is likely ultra-bad so those frame rates are not unexpected at all.

Unless your current computer is a Pentium D why would you even bother? IPC has greatly improved in the past few generations. I see the OP linking the megahertz myth, but not understanding it?

This is because I like to test things and experiment. Ive already tested on 3 different AMD PCs and found to get comparable performance out of a Athlon II x2 and a Phenom II x4. Athlon PCs had half the RAM and half the GPU. Since i have two Intel PCs all boxed up (in parts) I thought it would be nice to put them back together and see what kind of frames I get on a P4 HT vs a C2D, both at 3.2ghz.

Its just something I enjoy doing. Asking why I bother to do that is like me asking you why you bother to play games at all: because its fun.

Sounds like your pc is messed up.

yea it isnt just clock speeds, it is the game.

They should spend less resources on breaking stuff every patch, less resources on FNO, command center, "Community events" where the losers actually "win", and give a DX11 revamp with multi core utilization.

I run a FX8350 8 core OC to 4.8 on liquid cooling
8gb 1866 8-9-8-24
and Crossfire 2gb HD6970s
Even with all the tweaks and drivers in the world
I get framrate cap (59 vsync on) in warpgate and small battles. dips to 39-50 in medium to very large battles
everything in game set to high

It's not as easy as that. Not everything can be threaded efficiently. In fact, most general tasks that we use computers for are very hard or impossible to thread. That is why we have stalled at four cores and all those cores are mostly used for multitasking. In pretty much every instance, a higher IPC is better than more cores. If you check benchmarks where they compare the same generation CPU with different number of cores. For example the Intel 3960X and the 2500K, you'll find that there difference is marginal at best and the most of that improvement is related to the size of the cache and not really related to number of cores.

Maybe old news but I recall reading from some game tweak guide that disabling HyperThreading would help with games as they don't utilize that many cores and as HT creates virtual cores/threads = processing power wasted. Can't test this because my antique core2quad PC doesn't have such setting

Ok guys.

1) Clock means, relatively very little. Yes, more is better. however other factors like IPC or how many instructions it can execute per clock cycle are far more important. reason modern intels have relatively low megahertz, is they need ot cycle their cores less to get more instructions processed. If you think megahertz= performance. You need to actually start from scratch on your understand of computer architecture. The obvious point here is a Piledriver core can have as much as a whole gigahertz on a intel core, yet under-performs them normally by 10-15% (largely because fo the type of transistors used, but that's probably beyond the scope of the conversation)
2) Why Laptop chips are worsethan 'tower chips'. Is not because there are fundamentally different architectures sooped up by marketing departments. Its because they are the same chips, with toned down to avoid issues like heat production which laptops are **** at dissipating and power consumption, which batteries simply could not keep up with otherwise.
3) There is an issue with GU03 something has gone quite badly wrong with the optimizations for a certain percentage of people, my quest to find out how and why here: http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...ormance-noticably-worse-in-major-bases.96548/
4) As per 3 - im getting nearly 70% total utilization of 8 cores at the moment, and garbage performance.

They need to test these patches on a test server frankly. I appreciate every computer is different, but massive problems are sneaking through nearly every patch and my system is not that unique, hell as much as 10% of the player base are experience some serious performance degradation or game breaking bug atm.

And 10% is me plucking a figure from the sky by and large. It is quite likely more.

I hit around 50-60 fps with Max settings at the warp gate. It hovers around 30-40 in big battles(CPU limited), and dips as low as 25 fps. I have an i73630QM clocked at 2.4(cannot overclock), and a ati 7970m card. I thought it would take a IBM Watson and an array of GPUs to run this game, but it turns out, I had my laptop set to Energy Saver which was limiting my performance lol. I would just recommend playing supporting classes, if you are concerned with the twitch FPS aspect of it. I actually enjoy playing the engineer class, and medic, so it suits me. I can still fight adequately and nothing slows down too much that I can't feel competitive.

What is the specs on your Graphics card? Pretty much anyone that has performance issues has reported CPU bound being the limiting factor. Hopefully, they will continue to optimize the code and things will get better. This game has only been out of beta for a few months. It will take more game play and users to iron out the bugs and optimize the code.

It's a Geforce 555m, a generation old, but not exactly anemic. My point of this thread was that current processor technology isn't being utilized by this game. I can play Crysis on high/ultra (a mix) and even Battlefield 3 at 60 plus frames per second on the recommended settings (a mix of ultra/high/medium) yet when I get over here to planetside 2, its saying my processor is limiting me while only utilizing one core and 20% of its cycles to any meaningful degree. Faster clock speed doesn't mean much when all your cycles aren't being used in the first place.

Unless I'm hitting the 60+ frames mark I am almost always CPU bounded.

An I7 core does a ton more work per clock cycle than a P4 core. There's way more transistors and the architecture is way more efficient. You can't just compare clock speeds.

For instance a P4 had 42 Million transistors, whereas a 1st gen I7 has 731 Million and a 3rd gen I7 is over 1.1 Billion. So you're talking about 4-6 times as many transistors per core.

Of course I realize you're not being serious about running the game on a P4, you're just disappointed it doesn't utilize a quad more effectively, which it totally reasonable. All you can do while you wait for them to optimize the game better is overclock your I7.

I have an i7920 overclocked to 4ghz and I've contemplated turning off all the cores but one and seeing how PS2 runs. My guess it would still be playable, maybe slightly worse performance. 2 cores would probably run just fine though.