ugh...well its a HP laptop...uh Ultrabook? with a i5 processor and for a graphics card which id rather not say what it is, too embarrassing.
If your graphics card is junk I don't see that you can do much. But have you switched off shadows and flora? Settings to low across the board? Got latest graphics update?
yeah yeah ive done all that...ive also done the task manager 0 core trick but nothing, the animations are as slow as ever.
ah yes, the days of running this game on a laptop........ did you max out your RAM slots??? lower everything to low in options. no shadows no flora no lighting. cap the FPS to 75. open the card options tab and set it to "let program decide". if the laptop has a mesh over any of the cooling vents cut that s___ out so the it can breath better. (make sure to vacuum the vents once a week to get the dust out) good luck.
http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/planetside-2-tweak-guide#1 The above guide has been around forever but the advice on all the in-game settings is still valid. The most important settings to reduce/ turn off are: Shadows - OFF Graphics Quality - LOW or MEDIUM Ambient Occlusion - OFF Render Quality - 75% is a decent fps improvement. 50% is better tho at that point you might want to just lower your in-game resolution instead Flora (who has that enabled anyway?) - OFF Motion Blur - OFF Fog Shadows - OFF Lighting - LOW Particles - LOW Model Quality - LOW That should give you a nice performance boost.
Since the latest patch the PS4 version is buttery smooth with very nice particles plus. shadows and foliage and smoke you can hide in because you can't turn it off! With the ps4 pro coming out you can probably get your hands on a used ps4 for cheap, like $150-200.
not sure if the name changed for new installations but try: "C:\Users\Public\Sony Online Entertainment\Installed Games\PlanetSide 2" Then open the useroptions.ini Here you ll find all the graphics options you can easily change (numbers for quality tend to go from 1-4 with one beeing the lowest) and set overall quality to -1 (for cutom i think) It's been a while, so my file is probably outdated but most of it is pretty self explanatory.
http://iridar.net/planetside2/performance-guide/ THIS, is the best performance guide for Planetside 2 out there. Cover everything you need to know. Props to Iridar!! Juding by your hardware, i would suggest going full potato mode! You can see the required .ini settings in the section "suggested setting for a weak PC".... It isn't going to look any good at all: But running on a laptop you have to take what you can get.
I would rather not play the game than to play with horrible graphics and still low FPS. This game is not for loptop with IGPU
If I'm spoiled by shadows and always want to see them, which one would be less taxing for the CPU - low detail shadows or ambient occlusion?
Try to Unpark cores . If you decide to try, here's a link http://thehowtoman.com/how-to-unpark-cpu-for-battlefield-4/
Ah never mind, guide claims that ambient occlusion adds shadows even when having shadows=off but it doesn't seem to be the case for me at least so I guess I continue with shadows=low.