This might not look like a thread for Technical support, but it does focus around technical things if you read on. It also really helped me blow of some steam and kill some time at work.. hehe May 2003 I had just turned 16 and a friend of mine recommended me to try Planetside. I did take a look at the game, but since it was a subscription game and my father would not let me use his credit card I had to stop playing after the first month included. However the month I did get to play was simply mind blowing. At the time my pc spec was: ATI Radeon 9500 PRO - 128mb AMD Athlon XP 2100+ 1,733Ghz Corsair DDR 256MB PC2700 Abit NF7-S socket A with S-ATA (first gen with) It wasn't top end at the time and I got it in January 2003, but it was way better than anything my friends had. Planetside pretty much killed it instantly if I tried to play at anything above 800x600 or 1024x768, but with lower options I did get a pretty decent experience, in fact it was pretty ******* awesome! Planetside hosted up to 133 players per faction on each continent, that made up to 399 playes in a battle. Pretty mind blowing comparing it to the main stream Counter-Strike which rarely hosted more than 8vs8 or 16vs16. Planetside was an achievement dwarfing every other game at the time. Later in 2003 I upgraded my CPU to an Athlon XP3000 2,167Ghz in hope of increasing the FPS, it did get better, but nothing compared to my hopes. In 2004 I also got a ATI 9800Pro card and 512mb ram which made my pc pretty fast compared to what could be obtained when the game was new. Still it wasn't enough to play the game at high resolution with high fps. In 2007 I bought a laptop, a so called "gaming laptop", the Asus G1S. It featured the Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 / 2.2 GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT - 256 MB GDDR3 and I also stuck 2x2Gb memory module into it.This was a laptop, but it was much faster than the specs available at the time of Planetsides release. And it was a Core 2 Duo! Finally I thought to my self I can play with decent fps, but even then 4 years after the release it was just barely enough to get decent frame rates at 1680x1050. I must say it surprised me how a 4 year old game could really be that heavy to run. The laptop even managed games like Age of Conan which was very early out with Dx10 support, but planetside was still a tough nut. In 2009, 6 years after the release of Planetside I bought this computer; AMD Phenom II X2 550 (unlocked 2 cores and ran it at 3.6ghz making it a X4 955) ATI Radeon HD 4870 - 512mb OCZ Platinum AMD Ed DDR3 4Gb Finally for heavens sake I hoped for perfect frame rate at 1920x1080! Shockingly even then the fights could become so intense that it would lag. Massive plasma spam down the hallways could easily drop the fps into sub 40's. It made me think back, that the first time I played the game I had a single core 1.7ghz cpu, now I had a quad core at 3.6Ghz with much better performance pr hz/core. And freaking still it could make the fps drop! 6 years after release the hardware could just barely keep up with what was considered the standard resolution 1920x1080. When I bought it I thought it would blow Planetside out of the waters, but it was actually the first PC where I felt that I had a decent stable framerate, still plenty room for improvements though. Summing up Planetsdie (typo on purpose if you wondered) The result of all this was of course that the game became fairly unknown to most as everyone who tried it the first couple of years or so had so poor fps that it became unplayable and they never recommended the game to anyone else. It looked astonishing, but it would simply not play well/at all so people didn't care for it. A shame really, because the game is really fun. Today in 2013 I have a FX-8320 and a HD7950 + 8gb ram capable of playing just about any other game out there at the highest graphical option available. Or at least I thought so, then Planetside 2 came along. Even at 4.53Ghz on the CPU and 1050/1300 on the GPU the hardware struggle in heavy fights. I'm usually just above 35fps at the heaviest fights and normally it lingers at 40-60fps, although I have not tried the game since the latest patch where people complain about really worse fps. I'm not even certain if I can be bothered trying it until a couple of years from now. Planetside 2 was released in November 2012 after a beta where everyone complained about poor fps Did you learn nothing since the hardware requirement "failure" of planetside in 2003? It really makes me think back at the original Planetside, it feels like the same thing happening all over again. You release a game dwarfing any other available, but do you expect people to wait another 6 years for Planetside 2 to become really playable this time as well? All that good publicity you got about how mind-blowing the game was will just dwindle away like in Planetside 1 when everyone who tries the game get so poor fps that it becomes unplayable. Fact is that except for the number of players in this game, it brings nothing shockingly new things in terms of graphical demands. The game looks outdated compared to Battlefield 3 or Crysis 3, but hey we can play that at decent frame rate! People won't stick around in this game simply because of the massive amount players outside our render distance that you will never see anyway! And now you say that your focus is currently on making the game playable for the minimum requirements. What on earth kind of priority is that? How about fixing the game for the people who are currently just below a decent playable game experience? They are the ones who might spend money on the game and keep the game alive. It doesn't matter if some guy goes from 10 to 15 fps with minimum specs, which btw is a 50% increase and would still be utterly unplayable. What matters is getting the majority of players who now has 25-30fps up to a 35fps + or maybe even 40 fps+. They are the ones who has money to buy/spend in your cash shop. Not the ones with a budget laptop almost managing 10 fps! They are the ones who will give you free publicity and recommend the game to all their friends! What is this about optimizing lower end GPU's when the game is so insanely CPU bound that even I5 3570K's struggle. Where on earth are your priorities? Tell you what, I'm not spending a cent in this game until it works. I'll try again in 2 years or so given Soe's history with Planetside titles.
It works for me, not saying I get so high FPS, but it's way playable for me on my laptop... Also smooth to my likings. Although, they are not 100% max ultra graphics, only some like texture and graphics> I still put the shadow down.. Lets see what they do with the big patch at the end of the month. I also had the cards you had, lol. 9800 PRO to the x800xtPE was a huge $660 waste back in the day. (video cards are much cheaper now) It made me hate ATI.. But nVida's bad prices made me go back.
Not played PS1, i was into UT 2003 at the time, PS1 did not appeal to me, felt too slow-paced, so can't judge performance wise. But reading what you and others say it does seem like they just don't know/want to optimize the client whatsoever nor they've learned from the past mistakes. Take ArmA2 for example - it's a far heavier game, it's much more beautiful/realistic/bigger map/better gfx, when it came out you literally had to have 2x SLI GTX 295's to run it somewhat close to max settings and had 70+ FPS, but it ran SMOOTH and STABLE, even tho on my system i did have around 40 FPS, but it stayed that way for good - indoors/outdoors/firefights or being idle. It did feel sluggish cuz it was supposed to imitate real-life movement and stuff like equipment wearing u down, making u move/run slower, aim more inaccurate etc, but that's not performance related (as many people thought). This game needs some serious optimization magic being done on it and needs it fast...
I must apologize to everyone for typos and I see I did make some editing mistakes here and there, English is not my native language and I've always worked at a "scramble things down then sort in order" kind of way. @Doctore Thank you for enjoying the read, it was quite fun writing it as well and I was really happy I found all my old computer parts in chronological order at my retailer otherwise I would have had a harder time @The King I also have playable fps, but it is worse than what one would expect in a time where every tech site writes articles about how the hardware today is so overpowered and how games today does not push the requirements in the same manner as they used to. When Crysis came out a common phrase was "but can it play crysis?" when you discussed hardware. I guess PS2 is like that now, but it's not because it has super graphics, rather it is the opposite because it has poor utilization of your hardware. @Egonieser I'm afraid SOE doesn't fully understand just how fast the optimization is needed. Today it appears that consumers will try out a game the first couple of months after its release and then either continue play or never touch it again. Since games are available online it has become so easy to switch games, back in 2003 many would buy the game at a store and downloading things could take for ever so you really wanted to stick with the game you bought. Not only that, but a f2p model even lets you play multiple games at the same time and not feel "guilty" for paying and not playing. Today we are all game-sluts I also hope that the patch will bring some optimization even though they just said that they are focusing on lower end GPU performance and kind of tried to ease down expectations of any major magical patch.
Ya, and I think the last hope is depend on the big patch that coming at the end of the month. Just at least increase 5-10FPS for me.
