PlanetSide 2 optimization

DO NOT set the Planetside 2 process to real time.

Like I said:

Then why even recommend it? Setting the process to realtime, if allowed by your system, will cause SERIOUS problems. Remove it from the OP. Everything else is alright though, except for the render quality comment for "pro gamers". They're more likely to look ofor the highest visibility possible whilst maintaining FPS. The game is already blurry enough as it is. Also, cry more about the guy making a similar thread to you. It's not in breech of any rules.

Id venture to say that Codeak may have been making a statement about how many times this same thread with all this same info has cropped up on these forums. I even made one myself a while back, with some things not even listed in this thread. Countless others have done the same. A Google search on Planetside 2 Performance nets 659,000 results right now. One of these threads pops up at least once per month; probably more.

You're missing some tips such as reducing the sound sample rate to 16k, using the command prompt to allow 32 bit systems to allocate more RAM, power plans in windows, turning down the max voice channels, offloading sound processing to your GPU when applicable, etc.

Not that any of those make a real difference....but most things just dont help people who get poor performance get better performance. Thats because its almost always the CPU and its architecture as the cause, and thats because the root cause is the game engine and what they have done with it. Im not going to get into how threading with this game (and many others) work, but suffice it to say that the game 'relies' on one thread and cannot process other threads until Thread A has finished.

Have you ever been in a battle where the entire continent's population was concentrated into two or three hexes? The engine chugs along and it cant even render everything, Hit detection goes out the window. Grenades are found floating midair for hours. They went too big. Most battles have a couple hundred guys at most. Id have been fine with 500 player max per [smaller] continent, not 2000 - because when you get those 2000 guys all in one place, the engine and/or their hardware just cant handle it. In a nutshell, our performance suffers for something that the game cant even do (effectively).

I get 25fps in hugely epic battles and thats as good as it gets. Ive done the useroptions tweaks, set power plans to high performance (created a Warp Speed custom power plan) tested this game for hours on end with various combinations of settings. I can crank the graphics up to ultra with everything maxed and still get 25fps, or turn everything to low and get the same if not worse results.

Basic Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 B55 @ 4.06ghz
GTX 560 SC @ 950mhz/2172mhz
8GB Crucial Ballistix RAM @ 1594mhz
W7 HP 64 bit

The overclock on that CPU is pretty extreme, especially given it is a dual core unlocked to a quad. (talk about getting your $$'s worth!) Ive overclocked the GPU (and it already came superclocked from the factory) and even am running the RAM at speeds the Phenom II CPU doesnt support. (max is supposed to be 1333mhz) 25fps sounds bad, but Im getting comparable performance to 6 and 8 core AMD CPUs so Im happy...enough. All this extreme overclocking was very tedious working out the proper voltages and speeds/multipliers. In the end it only got me about 10 more FPS; 15 in extreme cases.

Summary: dont expect drastic gains in performance, even if you do everything in the book

Hi! First of all, thank you very much for your reply!
About Codeak, I understand what you said, but copying a whole tutorial and posting it again in a new thread as if you were the author is something completely different from making a statement about the fact that there're gazillions of posts about PlanetSide 2 optimization. Nevertheless, as some of you already saw, I posted here about this issue, but this is against the forum rules, as it's considered to be blacklisting. I already contacted the forum administration and this post, specifically, has been removed from this thread.

I know there're many other modifications one can perform, but like I said in the beginning of the tutorial, what's here is what makes a significant difference AND, unnecessary to say, it's impossible for someone to know all the possible ways to improve the game performance. That said, anyone that knows something that can contribute to this thread, please, share your knowledge -like you just did, Sir.

About the technical info, the effectiveness of the tips will totally depend on what type of problem the player has. I've already talked about in one of my previous answers. One can, for example, have a computer that meets the minimum requirements to play the game and get extremely laggy because he/she is too far from the servers and/or the connection to the servers from where the player is isn't good enough -which is exactly why one of my suggestions is to use an IP tunneling program for cases like that.

So, about the overclocking, I must confess I'm thunderstruck . It seems that what everybody says is true: PlanetSide 2 really IS poorly optimized. Thank you very much for pointing that out, it'll prevent other players from experiencing all the trouble that comes with the overclocking just to play PlanetSide 2.

From my experience, before performing the modifications presented here, the game was simply impossible to play, and I know about a lot of people who had the same experience -just check the comments in the links to the original sub tutorials.

Well, thank you very much again, man (or girl... here in the forums, we never know ).

There're things that I'd change in the OP, but I simply can't (I can only change something until 30 mins after posting). I now realize that some parts can actually be confusing and not clear enough to some readers. Thanks for pointing that out .

Yeah, many of the tips here are going to brutally decrease the graphics quality. I separated what reduces the graphics quality and what doesn't in one of my previous answers.

About the guy who copied my whole tutorial and posted in a new thread as if he was the one who created it, I've already contacted the forum administration, they already locked his thread, though they didn't delete it because it wasn't considered necessary. Blacklisting is against the forum rules.

Thanks! If you note anything else in the tutorial, or know about other tips, please let us know, as the sole purpose here is exactly to help the PlanetSide 2 community.

Oh, sorry, I didn't answer the first question. The only reason I recommended it is because many players do not experience issues when setting priority to real-time and it improves their performance, and, like I said, if setting priority to real-time really is something that can cause problems to the system, it's extremely unlikely that the player doesn't receive a warning stating that priority can't be set to real-time, so it'll be set to high.

I'd like to have the game run better without looking like ****.
I have everything on ultra. Physx off since it randomly crashes my game.
Run smooth most of the time. Except of course when there's a big battle going on. FPS drops below 30.

For players with high-quality systems, please check one of my previous answers:

ATTENTION: I'VE POSTED THE WRONG LINK TO DIRECT IP. THE ORIGINAL SITE IS IN PORTUGUESE, ALL YOU HAVE TO DO TO SEE IT IN ENGLISH IS CLICK THE USA FLAG AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE. THE CORRECT LINK: http://www.directip.com.br/.
DON'T FORGET TO ADD PLANETSIDE 2 TO THE LIST OF GAMES OF YOUR DIRECT IP, AS THE GAME ISN'T INCLUDED IN THE NATIVE LIST. ABOUT USING LATENCY OPTIMIZER AND DIRECT IP AT THE SAME TIME, YOU'LL HAVE TO TEST BOTH AND SEE WHAT IMPROVES YOUR PERFORMANCE THE MOST, AS DIRECT IP DOESN'T WORK PROPERLY WITH ANY LATENCY OPTIMIZER SOFTWARE.

Just bumping this up for newer players who may not have seen this. This is the most comprehensive list of improvements I've seen thus far. Also not sure if the OP mentions this but AMD users should set: frame flip que = 0 this can be done with Radeon pro Nvidia users change prerendered frames to 0 as well.

These changes help even if you're getting good fps, they improve responsiveness!

Thank you very much, man! Though some folks complained about the fact that I didn't separate the tutorials regarding CPU and GPU, I already explained why I didn't do so; besides, for this tutorial, it's actually very easy to figure out what relates to CPU and what relates to GPU.

I didn't know about this feature for AMD users, thanks for pointing that out.

Though this post appears as number 1 when someone searches for "planetside 2 optimization" at Google, this doesn't happen when a user performs the same search here through the forums, as the search results are presented in order of date (newest > oldest), instead of number of accesses or something like that . Obviously, this sends to the Limbo posts that receive a lot of accesses but don't receive much comments, and this is exactly what tends to happen with tutorials.

All you have to do (works really well, added 30 FPS for me) is turn off vertical sync, then press ctrl+alt+del, open task manager, go to details, find planetside2.exe or something like that, right click and set priority to high. This simply makes your computer force more cpu and ram to be used on the game. Trust me it works very well. I had 2-20 framerates approximately (which sucks), when I did that just to try it it gave me 30-55 FPS (which I have now).