Low GPU usage. Low CPU usage. Low overall FPS. Massive FPS drops to the single digits while turning quickly. Massive FPS drops in any sort of fight no matter the size. Massive FPS dips and swings for no reason even with nothing on-screen (think running around in the middle of nowhere on an Indar desert). FPS cut in half when zooming in with a scope, when decreasing FOV from 70 to 45, when firing the weapon while facing the wall at an empty Warp Gate, when turning on the UI. I could go on and on. FWIW the game looked, ran and felt way better for me before the first "optimization" patch in November. As I said I have no idea. I'm the wrong person to ask. I know nothing about MMO's. If you're somehow implying that MMOFPSes are so few in number because they're technically hard to create, that's fine and understandable. Hire more talented programmers, artists, and engineers. Make smart decisions in design and code. Use the right tool for the right job. And don't stab yourself in the foot by going with an ancient D3D9 renderer with massive amounts of API overhead and draw calls limited to a single CPU core in a game with a massive number of objects where that's obviously gonna be a huge bottleneck.
Ok neither of these really means much. This sounds like a series of bugs. Because none of that should be happening. If one or both of the optimisation patches made performance worse, thats at least one bug in play. Because thats not the code working as intended. If these results are whats happening on your laptop, that does concur with a lot of other people I've heard form at the lower end of the specs who are having similar problems. I'd encourage you to submit at least one bug report on this, including data on the FPS and your specs (though If memory serves they'll ask you for the dxdiag print out. Very. Not really how it works, there is rarely a hypothetical dream team out there, even then given the particuarly personal (or rather outright esoteric) nature of coding you can't just throw engineers at it. I really can't emphasize enough though the problems PS2 has to deal with in virtue of its scale, really are some of the biggest in gaming. The performance for myself at least (and that not the same as saying, I'm fine ergo there are no problems) I find impressive. Kinda edging into meaningless business studies talk now. This is a fair point. But even then, I don't think we are talking night and day gains.
Tested on the laptop in sig, i5-2500K + Radeon 7950 Win7 desktop, Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and GeForce 7800 GT WinXP desktop, C2Q Q9300 + GeForce 8800 GT 512MB WinVista desktop, and C2D T7300 and GeForce 8700M GT Win7 laptop. Obviously running different video settings and UserOptions.ini files on every machine but same crap happens everywhere. Game probably runs most consistent on the Athlon system. I'm not gonna submit a bug report because I have no confidence in SOE technical support being able to help me with this. I'm not trying to sound like a know-it-all jerk but based on my perceived level of PC knowledge and experience, the amount of tweaking/OS reformats/game reinstalls I've done, and my horrible past experiences with customer support from other game companies, I think I'd be able to help myself better than they can help me so I'm not gonna give SOE the benefit of the doubt. If moving to DX11 gives the same gains as what WoW saw, then I'd be happy.
don't get hung up on DX11 it may help, the fact the PS4 cant use it , this might give you an indication that SoE might move PS2 to something better support their needs. I'd be happy for them to move away from Direct X api, Microsoft really don't care about direct X, since there focus is to get you to buy Xbox One. Enough shouting about moving to DX11, theres better stuff out there, who knows PS4 might help us move to better suited APi for Planetside2
Interesting to see how many people have no idea what they're talking about on these forums, just like BF4. If you think this game is not leveraging multi-threading and SLI well based on your systems performance, you should focus your attention on YOUR system. Sure, it's not as optimized as it will be, but the PU01 should've shown a massive improvement for you. If it didn't, then it's highly probable that your system is the root cause.
Sarethor, first off I'm really getting sick of comments like yours regarding someone having issues with their system. If I can run any game on my system on ultra at 2k resolutions and maintain consistent high FPS, but can't in planetside, is it really my system? I think any normal person would lean toward there being an issue with planetside. I'd be lying if I said the omfg and pu updates didn't increase my fps, but when and where I get the increase doesn't help in the slightest. Yeah it's great to get 150 fps at the warpgate or running between bases, but when I dip in the 40 something's in a fight in a base it's just as bad as it used to be. The overall fps I'm getting wouldn't even matter to me either as long as the game felt smooth. Even sitting around 80 fps it feels like it stutters at times and is just inconsistent, constant fps fluctuations. Now I know most of this is due to using SLI but we are more than a year into the game and this feature is really still broken? That's not acceptable to me, especially when in the past it has worked, even if for only a brief amount of time. People are just frustrated and like always most of this frustration could be remedied by more updates on when things will be fixed. SLI seems to be like a taboo subject or something that the devs just don't want to address. Further frustration comes from spending so much money in the game and on a nice system to run the game, only to have it jerked around constantly, one week being good, and the next it's crap. I have never had such a love hate relationship with any game before. Just wanna get back to enjoying ps2 more.
This is an Nvidia-sponsored game and the devs can't be bothered to have working SLI? Is Nvidia not paying the devs enough or something? OK end snark. I've got no problem admitting that SLI or multi-GPU in general has issues in this game and causes more sudden FPS dips than single-GPU configurations. But out of five systems I've tried this game on, only one has multi-GPU, and the yo-yo frame rates happen more or less on all of them. Out of my entire library of games, only PlanetSide 2 has these kinds of issues and of this severity and consistency, and game updates seem to affect performance more than anything else (and not in a positive way)? My only logical conclusion is to blame the game.
and 1. AMD Mantle is not a High Shader Language API like D3D (DirectX) and OpenGL. It's more like a CPU-GPU optimization API at most. AMD Mantle is not a full fledge HSL API. It's a supplemental API. It supplements OpenGL and D3D. When people say that "oh we need a new API, and AMD Mantle is going to replace D3D and OpenGL," they are totally wrong. AMD Mantle, in simple terms, will help to push higher frame rates while you are experiencing a CPU Bottleneck, but it doesn't completely replace OpenGL and D3D. If you look at Star Citizens, yes, it will run AMD Mantle, but it's still using a D3D API. While D3D covers all the graphic, textures, lighting, and effects used in the game, AMD Mantle will redirect commands from the GPU to other cores of the CPU. This will reduce the bottleneck at the 1st Core, and basically, it re-routes GPU Commands to other cores. By doing this, commands will be sent back to the GPU faster, and this equates to getting frames out of the video card to the display faster. If the same commands were sent to the first core in the CPU, while experiencing a bottleneck at the CPU, the CPU will send its commands back to the GPU at a slower pace. So latency will go up between the CPU and GPU. Thus, this equates to lower FPS performance. 2. Part of the reason why PS2 isn't D3D 11.0 is the fact that you're going to be crunching in more codes and commands into the single core. If D3D9.0 is providing this much problems with everyones' rig, on an FPS-performance level, D3D11.0 will cause your CPU to have a heart-attack the minute you push the "start" icon on the PS2-client. You can come out with the argument that D3D11.0 is more optimized then D3D9.0. Truth is, D3D11.0 is D3D9.0 plus the extra features provided in D3D11.0. So ya, their might be some shortcuts in 11.0, but it's only shortcuts for the features in the 11.0 portion, and not in 9.0. So you're not really going to reduce latency because at the heart, 9.0 isn't optimized. D3D9.0 is the train-wreck in the API, and D3D11.0 is just an add-on to that train-wreck. 3. Part of the reason why BF4 is on a D3D11.1 API is because their multi-player sandbox isn't huge, and it doesn't house 100 to 500 players interacting with the same virtual environment in real time. As you can see, this kind of setup requires a lot of code-crunching power by the CPU which is at the heart of the performance issues. If Dice produced a game similar to PS2, it would suffer the same limitations, and it wouldn't be on a D3D11.1 or .2 API. The only way you can get PS2 or a game similar to it on a D3D11.0 API, is if the hardware could handle the requirements. Right now, current gaming rigs can't handle it. The only way D3D API is ever going to be improved, is if MS get off it's rear, and does the work. It's not going to happen anytime soon. They would rather push more features then to add short-cuts and optimize the software-hardware juggle. @ Vulcan, as a memeber of DPSO, and you're a member of Forty-Deuce, it pains me to see you're not getting the FPS-gaming experience you desire. It's not up to your standards. Really it's nobodies fault. I agree that the PS2 Devs should make it a priority, but I don't think the PS2-Devs are punishing people. I don't agree that they are punishing NVidia Users, etc... The best thing to do, imo, is to just wait. Wait and see what will happen down the line, in this New Year. It's going to take time, but eventually, the PS2-Devs will get it working to the point where everybody will be able to enjoy it, or the up-coming Haswell-E and beyond that, will fix the performance issues. I still feel it's sad that this is an NVidia Optimized Game, and the Green-Camp can't enjoy the game on a multi-GPU level. I'm still using CrossfireX when I play, and my mode of render is AFR-friendly. I experience very little to no problems in the game. As for me, I am not experiencing any of the problems everyone else is having. I'm still getting some screen-tears at the 50 to 60 FPS range, but that's only because I am CPU Bound on the heaviest of fights. 53 FPS is probably my lowest, it is still really play-able, and my highest is above 200 FPS. When I am not CPU Bound, I am not getting any graphics-fluidity issues. As for the smoke and explosions problem that some members are experiencing (they have a server drop in FPS), I don't get that either... Since it's an issue on both sides, it's probably a driver issue or a coding issue on PS2's end. People can tell me I am getting memory leaks, or multi-gpu doesn't work, or Tri-FireX isn't worth it, or Intel HT doesn't work completely, as long as the game meets my expectations, and it does (I don't crash every 5 minutes like some people do), I'm content with the state of the game on my end... When I play, I rarely crash unless there's a issue with the PS2 Client.
Get you facts straight, dude. Mantle runs in place of D3D in supported games, not alongside it. I believe Johan Andersson (@repi) addressed this several times on Twitter. Straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
Actually I was specifically thinking of the game UI and the questionable decision to use Scaleform AKA slow, bloated Adobe Flash for it. Scaleform has a well-documented history of performance issues within other games and engines in addition to this one. I know they've already gone over the entire UI with the first optimization pass in November, but it remains the biggest source of performance issues for me personally. Turning off UI nets me anywhere from 30-100% FPS gain, and bringing up the ESC menu or entering a terminal instantly cuts FPS in half. UI is also the primary source of performance spikes as turning it off results in not only higher but much more consistent FPS. To be honest I really don't care for a fancy interface with animated textures and snazzy graphical overlay elements as long as it does the job. I would easily give that up for the much better performance I experience with UI turned off. I'm sure many others would concur.
it sounds like you could use someone giving you the blunt truth 1. gaming laptops are ****, no exceptions 2. SLI is broken garbage by default, you should be surprised when it works smoothly 3. planetside is intrinsically demanding, it is not just another game
I'll bite. 1. People who think "gaming laptops are ****, no exceptions" are misinformed and perhaps idiots, no exceptions. There's nothing wrong with gaming laptops except when people insist on expecting gaming desktop performance from them. They're not supposed to give that. For what they are supposed to do, they are fine and serve a purpose. 2. SLI works relatively well most of the time when properly configured, but not in some games like PS2 where it's a hilariously broken mess. 3. It is by definition a game, so this is silly. All games are intrinsically demanding as they all as a base characteristic of being an executed program do demand some amount of ability from the host system. It's like saying a Corvette is intrinsically a car. They all are. It happens to be a fast car, which is not implied whatsoever in it being a car.
in other words, they're **** in other words, broken garbage by default what are you arguing, semantics? a machine that hits 200fps in every other shooter out can't be expected to even break 100 in a planetside battle, and that is not the fault of any poor optimization. it's the nature of planetside 2. it is intrinsically demanding.
So that means that masters degree is totally worthless to everyone just because a doctorate is better. Efficient small cars are totally worthless because a Corvette is faster. Let's ignore that they serve a clearly defined market segment and are very good at what they do. They are crap because they are worse in one aspect that isn't the prime focus of their class. If you rate something that works most of the time when set up properly as garbage, I'd hate to see your list of things that are decent. It's probably near-empty. If you don't like SLI, don't waste money on it. No, I'm arguing porcupines. Of course I'm arguing semantics. I thought that was pretty obvious. Again, being demanding means nothing. It's the level of how demanding something is related against the output of said thing that matters. Planetside 2 has a disproportionately high resource demand compared to other games, absolutely. Semantics are fun. The simple realization that performance has over time improved quite significantly for most users nullifies your point about poor optimization. The game has improved. It hasn't mystically been made less demanding in a basic sense, but it has been made more efficient and optimized.
you got me wrong, i'm only here to complain that the op is complaining the game runs well for what it is, PU02 was amazing
Yeah all was great for me until PU2. That patch did something weird that my system just doesn't seem to like much. Its not really all that bad, I can still play, it just gets jittery and not smooth at times. More of an annoyance than anything.
Can I complain that you complain that the OP is complaining? Good for you, but it in no way invalidates people whose performance stayed the same or got worse after the PU's.
