Hi guys, MY RIG: I run a MacBook Pro Retina in boot camp (full legal copy of Windows 7). It has a 2.7GHz i7 processor, 16GB of 1600MHz memory, a 512GB flash hard drive, and a GeForce GT 650m graphics card with 1GB of GDDR5 memory. The hardware specs are far beyond minimum system requirements. I should be able to at least play with all settings set to minimum, right? I though so, and more importantly I used to be able to play on the HIGHEST settings! But now (within the past week) even in basic fights (20 v 20), graphics performance is a meager 10-15 fps when even on the LOWEST graphics settings. I have no idea what happened! This doesn't seem to have coincided with any update that I saw when logging in. THE STORY: I first downloaded the game in early January of 2013 and it ran VERY slowly (just like it does now). I thought this was because it was in early release, and sure enough a few weeks later after a few patches the graphics were suddenly and remarkably playable. For the past month, I have been playing on all settings HIGH with great (30-60) fps even in large battles. Then, all of a sudden, about three days ago things slowed down again to horrendously slow graphics performance again (10-15fps) even on the lowest settings. I have no idea what is going on. I had not changed anything. WHAT I HAVE DONE SO FAR TO FIX: I have updated all drivers (system and video), deleted unnecessary data off my hard drive partition (50GB free), tweaked the userconfig.ini as others have done (although tweaks seem like they will be unlikely to fix this dramatic drop in performance), and I have even done a FULL REINSTALL of PlanetSide 2. Nothing has even slightly affected the graphics performance in the positive. It is still not even remotely playable on the LOWEST performance settings. I no longer know what to do! I'm at my wits end. I do not understand because games like DeadSpace 2 and Amnesia run fine on maximum settings.It is only PlanetSide 2 that I am having problems with, and like I said, it worked fine a week ago on HIGH SETTINGS. Only within the last week has it dropped down to unplayable performance with no system changes that I am aware of. Can anyone help me? Or am I doomed to finding another way to enjoy my leisurely gaming time?
The Planetside 2 engine is doing farm more then the other games engines you listed on a much larger scale. You can expect worse performance on planetside 2 even if you can play other games on full. It could simply be put down to a heat problem. Laptops generally suffer from Heat issues due to the cramped spaces and lack of air flow... When the Components get to hot they slow themselves down to prevent over heating, This could be the sole cause of the drop in FPS. Consider lowering the graphics. Whilst it may not look as pretty lowering the graphics will have a big effect on the work the components do and could potentially reduce the heat and need to slow down. Render Quality is a great place to start, Consider dropping it to 80%, See how that goes drop it another 10 but avoid going below 70% if you can. Shadows, you can definitely consider tuning these down to low... You do not need super fancy shadows and the shadows are constantly being changed by the small movement. Render distance is another great one to reduce, it does not reduce the distance at which targets render but the distance at which terrain is rendered, You can drop these down to 2000m and still see every vehicle on the field. you just need to experiment with each thing 1 at a time to see what affect it has. Over time unfortunately the laptop will simply get slower and hotter due to the difficulty involved with maintaining them and keeping them dust free.
First of all, thanks for the quick reply. I appreciate your energy in your response.Please review my post carefully. All video settings at LOWEST give me 10-15 FPS. This sluggish performance does not come on gradually, it is continuous / immediate. Also, please consider the historical reference that this did not always happen. Two weeks ago I was playing at 30-60 FPS. I do not believe this is a hardware / heat issue. There have been no changes to my software either (other than changes I have made after the problem began.) Again, I have tried everything you mentioned in your solutions to no effect. Do you have any other ideas? Thank you for trying to help!!! EDIT1: added "(other than changes I have made after the problem began.)
Only other advice i could suggest is try Medium or High settings My system runs better on High then it does on medium and taking certain parts to ultra give an fps increase strangely. Run a full scan make sure nothing malicous has wormed its way in. Validate the game files. Uninstall the game remove any left over files and do a fresh install. Sorry i cant be of more help
You have said that everything is at LOW - I would recommend "starting over" with the settings as follows: 1) make sure the laptop is plugged into the wall (see #2 - on battery some settings are different) 2) check your cooling/power-saving policy - if this is not set to "maximum performance" or something similar, then the processor and/or GPU can dynamically clock up and down, resulting in inconsistent results. 3) set overall quality to MEDIUM, Render Quality to 75%, and Shadows to LOW 4) set render distance to 2500 see what FPS you get after these steps and I'd be curious to hear the results. My laptop uses a 540m and I run that with similar settings to what I've posted here at generally much better FPS.
go in your user options file and put shadow quality to 0 and txture quality to 0, gave me huge boost in fps and game still looks great
The thing that is surprising me is this weird idea "this game sometimes runs better on high". It's like for PlanetSide2 everything is upside down. After tweaking all the settings for a week with my particular system, I think it's not really true. I am guessing that often this is simply a placebo effect, because in the game there are many different locations, situations, numbers of players on the server, and FPS are very different between them. I can only attest that there's not a lot of difference between ultra low and medium low for me, except for how game looks (because the weak link is the CPU), and how the game looks may affect how it's perceived. I won't state that it's the truth for every system, but what I will say is that it make any sense at all if it IS true. Devs should provide more information about it then, considering all the complaints that are in the forum including this topic. They should say which particular settings on medium, for exaple, loads CPU less than on LOW. This doesn't make much sense at all outside of PlanetSide2 universe. Low settings usually mean better performance period. I think you shouldn't assume that the problem is with your system. Not everything that looks great is great inside, although it is what the most would assume and want to believe.
I have made a fun observation today. Turns out that all the time since I have installed this game (about 2 weeks ago) I was completely ignoring the fact that every single time I logged in I have seen players flickering at warp gate, standing 10 meters above the ground, climbing walls and many other things. I completely ignored all that because that was the least of my problems, and of course because I really wanted this game to work. Isn't it funny and almost crazy? I think this simple observation could be multiplied by 10 and this is pretty much how this game is and how it works. Maybe I am ********, it's possible, but my logic tells me that if the game was doing so great and it worked so well for other people with better system than mine, better cooling, better config tweaks and so on, maybe there wouldn't be any need to merge servers like it's happening now, because there would be too many players for just a few servers. Just maybe.
Nah, we needed server merges before the net code got so jacked up. This is an MMO, and pretty much all MMO's need to reduce the number of servers 3-6 months after launch. When they launch, everybody that wants to check out the bright, new shiny cries about login queues, so they add more servers. When the tourists move on, everybody cries about low server pops. It's a no-win situation for MMO operators.
Have bad this issue a couple of times. Quick question: do you tend to leave your MBPr in sleep mode while disconnected from power? If you do, then like many others you're encountering a problem with apples firmware that gets 'stuck' in the low settings of sleep mode. Notice that when you play with low fps, you can't hear your fan at all. The firmware just doesn't let the GPU kick in. Luckily, the solution is simple, SMC reset and you're all done. Look online for it, it's a common problem for WoW players (since there are so many...) and there are plenty of guides how to do an SMC reset. Don't worry though, it's quick and simple. After that you'll notice the normal fps back and your fan show signs of cooling some steam-hot GPU Hope this helps
I finally got tired of the CQC twitching and massive battle fps drops. Decided to run the game at 800x600 Now I almost never dip below 30fps with all settings on high. I never understood how pretty this game was until now (some may argue that I still don't). Only problem is that the UI is now really oversized... Cycles, could you make an in-game setting for lower resolution on your lunch break tomorrow? Thanks, and keep up the good work.
It's not just you, i also have the same problem within the past week on Woodman. Instead of getting 30-40fps in large battles, i'm now getting 15-25fps making the game totally unplayable. I have the lowest possible settings in Useroptions.ini. Raising or lowering settings doesn't increase framerate. Processor AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB 7.5 Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5770 Gaming graphics 2815 MB Total available graphics memory Primary hard disk 784GB Free (931GB Total) Windows 7 Home Premium
You should be able to go UP to 1024x768 and reduce the Render Quality by 20% (you didn't say what RQ you're using) or so for roughly the same effect with a better UI size.
I used the tweaking guide a while back, and had some good results with it, I ended up with medium settings and 95 render quality to get the CPU/GPU effect. While this made my game run smoother, I was still lacking the frame rates I have now with the lower resolution, high settings and 100 RQ. Now the game runs smooth, and it doesn't slow down to 15-20 frames like it used to in large fights (usually hangs around 40-50fps GPU in smaller fights and 30-40fps CPU in really large vehicle zergs for example). And as I said the game looks great compared to earlier, so I'm quite happy with the (re)solution. I can live with the UI scaling, but it would just be nice to get that fixed as well. I have no idea what kind of work hours it would require from the development team (or if there's a simple fix that I could do), but it would probably help some people to enjoy the game more, like it has done for me. In any case, the game has come a long way from day 1 of beta, when I got 5 frames when rolling my tank into Zurvan with lowest possible settings Thanks and keep it up. Edit: 1000th post, awww yeah!