So I've read or heard somewhere that Steam lowers the FPS of Planetside 2 by a good 10 or so FPS. Ive disabled the Steam overlay to no avail. Is this true? Or are people just trolling on Steam?
The fact that Steam is running at all is why it would lower fps not just the overlay. The issue with Steam is that it's a process running all the time and using processing power. Steam will in inherently lower fps for all games as long as it's running because of that fact. That is one reason some people avoid Steam like the plague, but people tend to exaggerate that downside of Steam rather badly.
Sounds like an over exaggeration IMO....10 FPS?....SRSLY One thing I have learned about the internet is that everything has a grain of truth but is exaggerated 10x except for my threads of course. Allthough I will say that I ran this game pretty damn good in BETA but now Im having trouble running it on LOW settings but I think that is SOE fault....But who knows. Also I got it for steam because I thought that perhaps STEAM will out a sale for Planetside station cash or something....Will this ever happen?
The downside of Steam is pretty exaggerated pretty much all the time. The overlay doesn't cost any fps unless it is being rendered (shift+tab or one of your friends opening a game etc.). You may see 1-2 fps gain by disabling it. Second, steam itself takes a very small amount of processing power when it is idling in the background and a not so small amount of memory. In the days of multicore processors an active application (the game) need not wait for a background application (steam) since they can run on separate cores.
1. This has to do with PS2 and SOE not Steam, there are threads here on the forums with tricks to up fps. 2. Unlikely but not improbable.
I doubt its as much as 10fps but having to open and use steam has caused me a lot of headaches in the past. Games would simply not work for one reason or another and when I could cut steam out of the loop all of those started functioning properly. The ones I couldnt I found I had less problems if I went to options and changed the program to run as administrator. In the end I am just really glad I was able to get this game and not HAVE to have steam to do so . Good job soe, the rest of you that force me to use steam for your game.. Well, thats probably why I didnt buy it.
You could always download the standalone client (installing NOT over the Steam one of course) and check any difference yourself.
There is no difference between the Steam and standalone client. When you DL the game through steam, you download the same client. You can even launch the game from its Steam installation folder without ever logging into steam. If you launch through steam, you get the steam overlay, and that is the only difference. The executables are the same.
I've done this. My current system is severely CPU bound when it comes to PS2, but I saw no improvement when running the standalone install versus the Steam install. I'm sure there may be some very rare cases where the improvement the OP heard about is true, but I wouldn't be passing it around as A Universal Truth™.
Ah, I'm used to steam-installed games force-running steam if you try to bypass it by running their .exe directly.
