Planetside 2 Performance guide (only settings that actually do something)

There are a ton of "guides" preaching for max performance, most of them are full of rubbish and unnecessary or even outdated settings.

This guide:
-Will guarantee that with a few changed you will see a significant improvement compared to the default settings
-Will explain why you are changing these settings (thus you can balance cpu and gpu limitations because you know what you are changing and why).

Example:
My 2007 e6750 (@3.0 Ghz) with a GTX260 increased fps from 20-30 to 65+ in the warpgate. It even shows 100+ fps jumping around on the waygate's defence towers.

Step1 Determining the issue
Your first action ingame should be to press alt+f

This will show your framerate and if you are CPU limited or GPU limited (bottem left corner).

GPU limited:
1-Use the low settings ingame
2-disable V-sync
(gives smoother frames, google it!)
3-Additional tweaks to UserOptions.ini
Ini can be found in the planetside 2 directory (Steam\steamapps\common\PlanetSide 2 )

[Rendering]
ShadowQuality=0

[Terrain]
RenderFlora=Off

Note:
I only provide those settings that actually impact your fps and cannot be set to these values by the ingame settings. All other variable mentioned in other guids are controlled through the ingame settings.

4-Reducing the area to be rendered
The more your gpu has to render, the harder it will be. The ammount rendered is controlled by 3 variables
4-1) level of detail
4-2) part that is visible on the screen
4-3) resolution at which this takes place

Improving 1:
We have already done that

Improving2:
The FOV controls how much you can see on your screen. The lower you set this value the less you "see". Effectively your game zooms thus lowering the area to be rendered and lowering gpu usage.

FOV can be controlled through the ingame menu. If you want you can use this setting in the ini:
[Rendering]
VerticalFOV=50

Improving3
At 1920x1080 your gpu has to render 2.073.600 pixels. At 1280x800 it only has to render 1024000. Thus lowering your resolution effectively halves (!) gpu load.

Note the ingame Render quality (ini: RenderQuality=...) setting effectively controls the internal resolution at which the game renders. However it is quite harsh so you are probably better off setting a resolution yourself to provent the game becomming very "squared".


CPU limited:
cpu limitations are hard to fix but do not worry we can help you out

A Minimize background cpu usage
B reduce planetside2 cpu usage
C improve the performance of your cpu

A: Minimize background cpu usage
A1 Lazy fix
After you have started your game press ctrl+alt+escape. Go to processes and find PlanetSide2.exe. Now with the rightmouse go to the priority submenu and set it to "High".

Problem solved, now planetside will come before all other processes.

A2 Manual fix
In order to check your background cpu usage press ctrl+alt+escape. If your cpu usage is above 3% when you are not moving your cursor then something is wrong.

Identify the offender by going to the process tab and herafter sorting on the processor column (with 2 digits). Google the .exe's name to figure out what it is. After that google how to fix the cpu usage of that software.

A3 Auto fix
Use razer gamebooster: http://www.razerzone.com/gamebooster
Razer bought iobit's gamebooster and it still works. It temporarily disables a lot of windows services. This clears up some RAM and reduces cpu load. Since up to 80 are running at any time this can go a long way in reducing background interferancy.

B reduce planetside2 cpu usage
Graphic effects usually have little impact when you are cpu limited. In fact the difference between low and high can even only differ with less than 5 fps.

So we must ini tweak;

B1 Renderdistance:
Change it to 1000 (or 2000 if you have an i3 or similar). This will primarily help you out in larger battles but not in very dense areas with everyone clustering like in the waygate.

[Rendering]
RenderDistance=1000

b2 Shadow quality
Shadows are very very cpu intensive. This setting increased the fps on my old e6750 from 35 to 67 in the waygate.
ShadowQuality=0

C: Improve the performance of your CPU

C1: Unparking
If you have an AMD or Intel with hyperthreading combined with vista/windows 7 it is possible that windows sets some of your cores in a state called parked. For gaming you do not want this to happen.

To determine if your machine has parked cores you must check resources:
ctrl+alt+delete>Performance>Resource Monitor
a

Note the cpu that says parked. If it does not it most likely will not work and any fps gain is a "placebo" effect caused by the heavy impact of playermodels on the fps.

To unpark I recommend creating a NEW power profile for planetside2 and then apply the new setting only to this profile by using the following tool (set it to 100)
http://bitsum.com/about_cpu_core_parking.php

C2 Overclocking.
Some cpu's can be overclocked quite a bit. Especially if you have a custom build pc.

Overclocking is too specific to cover in general and should only be tried with some assistance on a hardware forum.

Intel cpu that can be overclocked easily:
c2d series (q6600, e6750, e8400 etc)
First i series (i7 920, etc)
Unlocked cpu;s (i7 875k, i5 2500k, i7 2600k, i5 3570k, etc)

For example my e6750 can run on 3.0 ghz instead of 2.66 ghz without any effort or overclockign experience.
My girlfriend's e8400 can run on 3.6 Ghz using the stock Intel cooler (!).

Maybe someone can add some amd cpu?

Bonus: Prevent crashes on 32bit OS
It is possible your planetside2 will crash on a 32bit OS becomes the game uses more ram than allowed by a 32bit OS.

Very nice guide and it covers simple to change, but impact heavy settings.

Regarding the parking core, this is done to save power and when a program needs the power win7 should unpark the cores automatically. If cores remain parked your guide is very nice. There is one exception though, the FX-8000's should be allowed to park cores sometimes. Since it uses 2 cores / 1 module it can be an advantage to park every 2nd core so that you get a 4core / 4module CPU. This is better if the application does not utilize many cores / threads or if one core is heavily loaded you avoid the risk of bottlenecking it by the module resources. The reduced temperature and watt use can be turned into a higher stable overclock. Either way PS2 barely mange to utilize 4 cores at more than 60% efficiency so the parked cores will not impact the performance unless you have background programs requiring it.

There is also many who are not aware that the turbo settings are enabled on a given nr of cores. The highest turbo stepping is limited by default to 4 cores, this can be adjusted through AMD overdrive. It increases the advantage of having 4 cores disabled so that the remaining turbo core gets its own module resources.

Thanks and yes.

Planetside 2 does not communicate with the OS to unpark cores. Therefore I recommend creating that new power profile and only use the tool (link provided) on that profile. The tool that is usually linked just applies to all profiles. With my way you can just select the tweaked power profile when you want to play ps2 and preserve the power saving feature on regular usage.

AMD overdrive nice tip. Too bad I can no longer edit my message ....

AMD overdrive is a surprisingly nice program for overclocking, it allows you to change the turbo steps (there are 2), how many cores it shall clock, what voltage to use and what speed to run. In addition you can change about every other voltage setting, tune your HT link, sett your FSB speed and more.

I think the only limit I've found is setting the memory timings / speed.

Oh and I edited my original post after u replied - sry ^^

Sticky please .

Its been a while since this was posted but it deserves to be stickied or something like this stickied from the devs.

I approve of this guide!

I disapprove of this guide - it spends too much time explaining WHAT to do and not nearly enough time why (and the risks of doing these things).

Vsync is generally BETTER for fluid FPS, except in this case where MaximumFPS is the optimal choice to use since it doesn't have the sideffect of waiting.

I did your manual fix, pressed ctr/al/esc, it says the CPU usage is 20% with the game running and 0% when it's not running.

With my system and using high settings I get 60fps, but it's I look at areas where there are teleporters (places which are using shaders?) it will drop to about 40fps.

It's not obvious to me unless I switch on the FPS readout function.

Ya, try reduce the ParticleLOD=1.

Vsync is not better for fluid FPS. Vsync only helps on the "tearing part" where the two halves of the image becomes unsynchronized. Thus half the upper picture and half the bottom picture is not actually of the same picture. Hence the name vertical synchronization.

Vertical sync will fix the tearing part, but will for those without adaptive vsync require you to have at least 60fps at all times. If it drops below 60, like to 59, it will automatically halve the fps to 30 in order to maintain vertical sync.

(I could be wrong on the adaptive vsync as I do not have it)

In this case if you can not maintain 60fps then you will experience heavy fps drop from 60 to 30 and up to 60 again when it recovers.

So for fluid fps in PS2 where most people rarely see 60 fps in large battles, then no, do not use Vsync as it will force you to run at 30fps.

Here maximum fps is better, although Max fps only limits the max amount of work being pushed into your GPU. Considering again that the GPU's today are at 60-70% load in this game, resulting in 30-40% extra spare power, I doubt that it will matter much.

Another thing about Vsync is that it can make the character turn "slower" or feel "sluggish" if you are used to not having it on. Personally I hate playing with Vsync and prefer a good portion of multisampling.

What do you mean explain the risks? For the most of it he is just tweaking his ini.file which comes with the highest risk of having to reset file, either by overwriting it with a backup or reinstalling the game.

The only other risky thing here is unparking cores and overclocking, then again this is only a risk if for some reason you are overheating.

Vsync is not better for fluid FPS. Vsync only helps on the "tearing part" where the two halves of the image becomes unsynchronized. Thus half the upper picture and half the bottom picture is not actually of the same picture. Hence the name vertical synchronization.

Vertical sync will fix the tearing part, but will for those without adaptive vsync require you to have at least 60fps at all times. If it drops below 60, like to 59, it will automatically halve the fps to 30 in order to maintain vertical sync.

(I could be wrong on the adaptive vsync as I do not have it)

In this case if you can not maintain 60fps then you will experience heavy fps drop from 60 to 30 and up to 60 again when it recovers.

So for fluid fps in PS2 where most people rarely see 60 fps in large battles, then no, do not use Vsync as it will force you to run at 30fps.

Here maximum fps is better, although Max fps only limits the max amount of work being pushed into your GPU. Considering again that the GPU's today are at 60-70% load in this game, resulting in 30-40% extra spare power, I doubt that it will matter much.

Another thing about Vsync is that it can make the character turn "slower" or feel "sluggish" if you are used to not having it on. Personally I hate playing with Vsync and prefer a good portion of multisampling.

Core unparking is just disable the windows need more time to put the thread into other core/fake-core, which save power/prevent HT thread reduce the performance on other HT thread as it is using the shared resource.
But it has been design too conserve, so it increase the wait time for the thread to process while in the newest processor of Intel, it has reduced the affect of HT on other thread.

So it can be disable without big affect on hardware.

Core parking / unparking will not be a risk of any sort considering it only brings the CPU up to the normal usage.

If the core is parked when it is needed it does something it is not supposed to do, unparking it will only make it function the way it was supposed to in the first place. It does not stop the computer from throttling down if it overheats. It just makes certain that all cores are used if needed if there was a fault in the software.

Most people however will probably not notice any difference as they function normal. Tbh to me it seems to be the i3's that benefit the most, especially the mobile. The i3 has 2 cores, but 4 strings making it appear to be 2 true + 2 virtual cores in task manager. I suspect that some applications like PS2 for some reason only use the two true cores, then it might actually give them a real performance boost if they can utilize the extra 2 threads. It is what i suspect anyway, I'm not certain yet, but it appears to be an overweight i3 users who see a benefit.

Overclocking is always a risk of course, I don't think this thread was very OC focused though and I guess it made me wonder why you came on so strong in your first post. "i disaprove --- explain the risks!" well if OC was your main focus and you failed to notice that OC was the smallest focus in the original post.. Tbh OC is barely mentioned.

Anyway for the most of it i like your posts

Also - da **** happened to my post further up? it goes 2x? oh well..

What are the minimum and maximum "RenderDistance=" values? Some configs have it set to 1.00000, others 1000. Explain what the different is between 1000 and 2000 and why i3's should have it set differently.

I don't recall what the maximum distance is - but the -1 setting it comes with as standard means "as far as it'll go" if memory serves. To be honest though I'd personally advise anyone to use 1500 (1000 if you're having really bad FPS) regardless, and I have a high end machine myself.

As far as the difference in distance - I can only assume it is in meters. 1500 lets you see just far enough while flying to get around - 1000 is a bit too little for me.

Yes, flying is better choose as 1500, and because the model become low quality, and it don't display many player, it will not become a problem.

The Catalyst 13.1 made High Settings playable for me now