I'm a sort of lapsed player who's trying to get back into the game just now. It's been about a year (I last played around the end of Closed Beta, not counting a brief login in the summer to buy me some fireworks), and I figure that since I haven't been playing much games lately, to give PS2 a spin again, as there's been quite a few changes under the hood. The problem is, some of those has made the game utterly unplayable. I have a very high-end machine - an overclocked i7-2600k, a GTX 690. This is a system that should be able to run the game quite high, no matter what I set its details to. And yet, the game right now will literally kill my whole PC, forcing a power cycle, even on its very lowest settings. Before anyone says the "usual sort of answers" - no, this is not an overheat problem. When I'm not gaming, my GPU runs Folding@Home. It will routinely push the GPU up to 80C and even beyond, but this is well within its limits, and it does not kill my system. If anything, protein folding via Folding@Home will be even more sensitive to GPU issues than games are, and if that routinely is folding stuff without a problem, it's definitely not a GPU hardware issue, nor an overheating issue. The CPU has a good quality, top-notch heatsink (a Zalman of some make), and it rarely goes above 65C even under load despite my overclocking. It is not laden with dust, and it too is well under its overheat threshold. If this were a CPU issue, my system would be a lot less stable than it is. It is not my RAM as my RAM is rock-stable and my usual system uptimes are measured in weeks on end. Sometimes it's well over a month. I can play plenty of other games perfectly fine with my system as-is. They don't crash very often at all, and if they do crash, they definitely do not take my whole system with it. Yet on Planetside 2, I can't set "Graphics Quality" any higher to Medium, or the game will instantly die - it will literally not even let me see my character before it just kills my entire PC (not even giving me a BSOD) before blanking out my monitor, forcing not just a reset, but a power cycle. Event Viewer logs tell me absolutely nothing. I've tried researching other topics similar to this one. Voice comms is off, graphics details are as low as humanly possible, you name it, I've done it. I know there's a huge optimization test patch in the works. I'm going to grab the PTR and hope that at least that is more stable, because if it's not, the only other options I really have is stuff like disabling one of my GPUs (the 690 is "SLI on a card") or rolling back my drivers in the hope that fixes SOMETHING. Otherwise, my reunion with Planetside 2 is bound to be short-lived indeed. In the meanwhile, if anyone's got any advice or suggestions to give out, feel free to do so.
Well, the Test Server did the same thing - killing my PC instantly, so I can presume it's trying to default to something higher than Medium Graphics quality. This doesn't bode very well for me as even if I copy my INI over, it means the root cause of the problem (whatever it is) isn't fixed.
