How do you get this game running well?

Literally - I've tried ******* everything. Bought a new graphics card, put in 4gb more RAM - it's well within the recommended specs and yet it freezes, jitters, hangs like I've done nothing at all - in fact at times I get worse performance now than with my old 5 year old rig.

CPU - AMD FX 4100 Quad-core (3.60ghz)
GPU - GTX 750 Ti
RAM - 8gb

I know I'm not going to get ultra settings with my rig - not after that...don't even want it to run at 60fps - I just want it to run CONSISTENTLY. At the moment I'm getting about 50-60fps in small fights and 20-30 in large, which is fine. But it's freezing and hitching all the time - it's not just me is it? I mean, this has been happening for me since before the patch that made it commonplace, and it's only gotten worse despite most people saying it's now better for them.

It's almost unplayable in that every 2-3 times I try to do anything more than stare my frames drop to 1-2fps for a few seconds, which usually happens during aiming at an enemy...so you can imagine how ******* frustrated I am right now. I estimate that about 40-50% of my deaths of late have been due to not being able to do anything as the game is hanging.

So...what do I have to do to get this game running consistently at 30fps+?

Personally I went with

The only thing you can really do is wait. Wait for SOE to fix it. Some people have these problems, some don't. Game is not in a good state currently, lot of performance issues.
It kind of seems, the battles got such an epic scale, the game can't handle it.

I get that this is an issue SOE are working on - I was more wondering if anyone had any tips for optimisation I might have missed ^^

on my older rig i run the game in windowed mode at 1230X770 70% render quality bloom off Occlusion off, fog shadows off, smoothing off, low shadow quality low lighting quality, low flora and everything else high and it seems to run well.

I don't.

I built a new computer and bought additional equipment.
i7-3770K @ 4.3GHZ
Corsair 16GB @ 1600 (maybe 1800, I don't remember. but I think 1600)
GTX 780 TI
OS/Steam on solid state drives

Haven't had any performance issues since doing this build. Runs at 60-70fps constant. There is definitely a memory leak with the game, but reloading Planetside 2 solves that issue after 6hrs or so. I use max settings with everything enabled and vsync

update your PC
PS2 is very demanding of the processor
you need a more powerful processor
go for the FX 6100 or higher

spend $300 on a new i5 + mobo

well if you like to spend to much money for something your local PC dealer can put together for half the price

You get to my age and convenience becomes more important than details.

Overall Quality: Custom
Graphic Quality: Low
Lighting: Medium
Textures: High
Shadows: Off
Effects: Low
Models: High
Flora: Off
Terrain: High
Particles: Low

No Smoothing, No Vsync, No Fog Shadows, No Bloom.

The best thing you can do to improve your performance is to get a strong CPU.

Nothing. PS2 dev team seem to have no interest and/or capacity to optimize the game engine. So while achieving decent FPS *is* possible, getting rid of hitching and other game engine stability issues is unfortunately not.

Overclock to 4.2 Gigahertz. It's pretty much the only thing that really matters as long as your GPU isn't shigby

Just be aware that b/c you're on an AMD, that it might not clock Stable that high even if someone else with the exact same chip managed to get their's to 4.2. Each Chip can have unique capacities b/c of the manufacturing process. Also; having PS installed on an SSD helps somewhat with the hitching.

Your CPU is what is holding you back. A lot.

My four year old system runs this pretty well at 1080p on high. I can run it in 4800x900 in triple screen fairly well too but the game really cannot handle triple screen sadly

I've got an i7 but its only 2.8Ghz. I use a Radeon HD7770 and have 6GB RAM. I also run it off an external drive

I am running on an AMDx6 1090t @3.6Ghz with 8Gb of DDR1600 and a GTX570 (So, not at all a top of the line rig).
Running the settings I listed above I can maintain 30+FPS even when recording w/FRAPS in a decent battle..

Undoubtedly your CPU is the bottleneck there. That CPU is outperformed by an Intel i3, which only has 2 cores. Meaning you've got very slow per-core performance. My i7-4770k gets overloaded in large battles. PS2 is very demanding in that respect.

My i3 3,4Ghz runs game just fine with 1080p everything off/low + textures ultra and render quality 100.

Always 40-70fps, and most of the time, capped by gpu (gt-640). Planning on upgrading to gtx-760, but i3 seems to perform perfectly fine, as it's easier to play with low settings anyway.