Seeing as the initial recommended build post on the Tech Support forums was made back in 2012, I'm curious to see what players currently expect in terms of "ideal hardware" to play Planetside 2 today. The post-Valkyrie patch has finally reduced my own in-game performance to a steady single-digit FPS (5-10 in any fight, 15-20 FPS in an empty warpgate), making any sort of gun-play impossible. What builds are people running that deliver a consistent 60 FPS in fights? What about 80 FPS or higher? Cost is not an issue, I'm mainly curious what hardware is actually capable of running PS2 at peak performance.
Planetside 2 doesn't take much to run well. Any i5 desktop with a mid-range graphics card (GTX 760 or R9 270) will run it without any problems whatsoever. That's probably a better system than many players have, but it's really pretty middle-of-the-road in a general sense, and not very expensive as gaming rigs go.
8gb RAM is pretty much mandatory. Just look at all the complaint threads from people with 4gb RAM... And as Buttwasp said, i5 + midrange nividia gpu work well enough for high/ultra.
I dunno... This is what I'm currently running: MSI 990FXA-GD80V2 ATX AM3+ Motherboard AMD FX-8350 4.0GHz 8-Core Processor Corsair Dominator Platinum 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory MSI R7970 TF 3GD5/OC BE Radeon HD 7970 3GB Twin Frozr OC Boost Edition 384-bit GDDR5 Corsair 860W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply Back in September I could run ultra settings @ 60fps, dipping down to ~45fps in massive (400+) battles. Now? I have medium settings with everything else on low or off and I struggle to maintain 50 fps, massive battles are sub 30 and there are periodic dips to sub 10. The game has been brutal lately. From what I've heard from discussions with other players, it seems the Intel/nVidia platform does perform better overall, but it still takes semi-beefy hardware to even approach the higher visual settings at any respectable frame rate.
Another important item is to install it on an SSD. I accidentally moved it to my old-style hard drive somehow, and was wondering why it took 3x longer to load, and whenever I flew by a massive zerg it would hitch for 20 seconds.
I am still often CPU limited with my i7 3770. So a good CPU is a high priority. The GPU seems to be less important as long as you aim for midrange or higher. It runs pretty well on my Radeon 7870 with some of the fancier effects like shadows, ocular occlusion and flora turned off. I can hold an even 60 pretty well until the fights get very heavy, then I drop to between 30 or 40. That's when the fights are so large that people are popping in 20 meters ahead of you. Those Intel 4790K or 4670K seems rather nice. I really wouldn't mind the 4790K. As others have said, 16 GB RAM is a good idea. I did some checking a couple of days ago and the game can by itself eat 4 GB of RAM. So with Windows and some other stuff running in the back, I was at a total of 8.5 GB or RAM used. I could have killed some programs to free a bit but only have a total of 8 GB is cutting it a bit close it seems.
Clearly something has worsened performance for some players since the last major update, but as the original poster asked about hardware configurations that run Planetside 2 well, it may be that he intends to purchase a new gaming system. If that's the case, I think it should be made quite clear that he should avoid an AMD CPU. Though I wish it were otherwise, because meaningful brand competition is beneficial to consumers, Intel's CPU architectures have absolutely trounced AMD's for quite a long time now. I perfectly well understand the appeal of an AMD solution for a very low end system without a discrete graphics card, but assuming that one wants to build even a 'mediocre' gaming rig, there's nothing AMD makes that should be considered as a CPU. I run an Ivy Bridge i5 clocked at 4 GHz on all cores, with a GTX 680 clocked at 770 speeds and 16 GB of DDR3-1600. In the largest battles found on Emerald, my FPS can dip to around 50 when a lot is happening in my immediate area, but will generally float around 75. In large but not humongous battles it's normally up around 100. These are post-patch figures.
if you have the ram, consider creating a ram drive for the game. Runs faster than even an SSD, for loading and stuff.
While I disagree I have to agree with the "very low" AMD stuff, I do agree that, if cost isn't prohibitive, Intel/nVidia is the go-to for performance -- especially for gaming. Though, in my experience over the last 15 or so years, the cost/performance ratio goes to AMD platforms. I think, in my particular setup, I end up CPU bound often with 4+ cores going completely unused. Regarding SSD/Ramdrive stuff, does this game pull from the disk enough for that to make a difference?
"The last fifteen or so years" haven't really much to do with any of it. If your intent is to indicate that you've been building systems for a while, I don't see that it much matters. I ran Athlon rigs for the span of years when they outperformed Intel's offerings. Had one of their 486DX4-100s long before that, too. I wish AMD were producing a performance competitive product today, but they aren't. Pro-AMD arguments can be made, as to bang for buck, with regard to computing tasks not related to gaming, but not otherwise. The Ivy Bridge i5 I'm running at 4 GHz is a non-K model whose maximum turbo frequency is 3.5 GHz. It's running at 108 MHz x 37 using the stock cooler. Speedstep is disabled, and all cores run at that speed at all times. It's completely stable running Prime95's "blend" mode torture test and Furmark's burn-in test simultaneously for ten hours. Though the GTX 680 was the fastest card available when I built this system two years ago, I lucked out in finding one for $400 on sale. My motherboard is an Asus P8Z77V-LK, which I purchased bundled with the CPU for $360. The RAM is Kingston Hyper-Blu, and cost me $80 for two 8 GB modules. I'm using a Seasonic X-660 PSU, and I should mention that I consider that to contribute in no small manner to the system's stability; I bought it for $140. So, for under a thousand dollars (CAD - I live in Toronto), I put together a quite nicely performing Intel/Nvidia rig. There's really far less sense than you imagine to this 'AMD for good value and decent performance, Intel and Nvidia for price-no-object performance' argument. Certainly, a very high end Intel CPU is quite a bit more expensive than AMD's top offerings, but you can have your cake and eat it too with some careful choosing. Oh, the drives in the system are a 240 GB Vertex 3 SSD I'd bought a few months before the build and a 2 GB Seagate from the previous system.
Thanks for the feedback everyone, that was exactly what I was looking for. I find that performance complaints are on and off the #1 issue for many people on Forumside. My own machine was built in 2012 as a mid-ranged work machine, so it was not gaming oriented though it handled turn-based strategy games perfectly fine. I like to keep my expectations realistic about how much performance I can get out of the game - it obviously wasn't meant to handle Planetside 2 and definitely can't now - but I do get cheesed occasionally when a new update just tanks my performance into the ground. I was actually pushing a decent 20-25 FPS after O:MFG1, but it's been a steady decline with every update since.
