[Suggestion] PLAYERS: Disable your Particles

A suggestions from Reithan here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/...is-this-another-fix.88723/page-3#post-1172329

I did exactly that and gave it a quick test. No hitches or stutters in a few small fights. It definitely seems like this could be a work around for players with the FPS issues. I haven't tried it on larger battles yet.

Aren't particles bullets or explosions or anything vital to battlefield awareness ?

I think it's more like "sand" and "smoke".

Btw can't find particleQuality?

I went down to the LOWEST possible setting, would still stutter.

Works like a charm for me.
I adjusted it in the .ini, not from the in-game settings.
PS2 has never been so smooth.
God bless Reithan.

ParticleLOD does not exist and caused me to CTD when i added it in. Not tried with just ParticleQuality.

ParticleQuality=0
ParticleLOD=0

I copy-pasted from my .ini, they are definately there (they were already there before i changed them to zero tho).

geforce gtx550ti, i5@3.00, 8g ddr3 @ 1333

Didnt work for me, ParticleQuality doesnt even exist in my ini.

I had my particles off (set to 0 in .ini) both prior and post-patch and it stuttered anyway. Anything in the .ini file thats not textures, models or terrain is set to 0. Everything else is set to 5. Stutter was and is present.

Stutter seems to be at its worst when there are allies around and Im not looking at them. If I turn and look at my outfit, its fine. When I turn back around to continue, it stutters.

My assumption was that it has to do with the 'optimization' they added. It now checks to see if allies are in your FOV and renders them if they are, and does not render them if they are not. Those checks to see who is in your FOV bottleneck the rest of the threads the CPU must process, creating the stutter.

The way they did that is odd too; just because they arent rendering doesnt mean the CPU doesnt have to track them either. And since I get 70fps with a GTX 460, actually rendering things isnt the problem - its all the stuff the CPU has to do. Adding more stuff for it to do is not how you fix the problem :/

ParticleQuality doesn't exist on mine either, ParticleLOD does. I set LOD to 0 and render distance to 1000 which seemed to help the stuttering. But after 10 min or so it went jerky low fps and crashed anyway.

Will check this out after I get back from work.

Didn't work.

Tried it, didn't work, still stutter.

Why should I have to... I'm sure an 8-core AMD machine with all the fixings should be able to handle it.
The problem is on SOE's end, not mine.

No joy. Still getting a crash to desktop turning my ParticleQuality to 0.

anything that has smoke in view was causing significant slow downs for me yesterday. iirc smoke = particles so this makes sense as a fix.

why do some have this option in the UserOtions.ini and some dont? I dont have it either added it but it didnt work..

Didn't help. What's more, it actually made some effects needed for gameplay not display.

But if I turn off my particles, how will I remember which side lift pads go down?

Allready have this and still getting FPS Drops like mad...