The Quest to Lower CPU Usage.

[wave]

I think by now most people realize that in big fights the real culprit of poor performance (other than the game being unoptimized) is the fact that our CPUs are not able to cope with the scope of this game. My computer specs are [email protected], 8Gb ram, and 2 GTX 580s SLi. My bottleneck is the CPU as is the case for most people with decent GPUs.

I felt there should be a dedicated thread to talk about how to lower the work load on the CPU to increase the FPS in large battles. I was hoping that people in the know, could evaluate every single option in the .ini file to determine which options were affecting CPU performance and which options affect just texture and GPU performance.

Personally, I have found that setting PARTICLES to low and turning off FOG SHADOWS, MOTION BLUR, and AMBIENT OCCLUSION, has increased my FPS in large battles where my CPU is the bottleneck. Honestly I am not entirely sure if these particular settings really do affect CPU performance but it feels like they do. Maybe someone here can analyse these settings and see if it works for other people. Maybe there are other settings that would work even better.

For any contributors to this thread I thank you now and hope we can finally figure out how to get to the elusive 60 FPS in large battles with decent CPUs that we all want.

[camycamera]

we just have to wait for the devs to do their magic work then ;D

[SGTHACK]

I shut down shadows in the user option file all together. SOE's shadow engine is a big culprit of frame loss. My machine is a [email protected] ghz. 16gig of Corsair and a gtx 670. I run the game on ultra and get 125 fps around the warp gate and around 58fps in big battles.

[Assist]

I'm trying to figure out what settings effect my FPS the most in large battles, takes forever to test though having to restart the client each time ><
Also it really does seem like the lower my settings go the worse the performance gets

[ShadowAquilaX]

There was another thread that answered just that. If I can find it, I'll post a link. It's helped alot in getting good fps while maintaining quality

[ShadowAquilaX]

Ok I could not find the thread, but I found a great google.docs that has help me alot in understanding how to adjust my settings.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhEqOKDInCUEdE5aNDMzWm5UdTBZaFlSalJTeXNmM kE#gid=0
I hope it helps.

[Snipefrag]

I love it when people describe the game as 'unoptimised', its come a hell of a long way since beta. As someone who has spent months 'optimising' a very complicated code base I can tell you it isn't as simple as you all make out.

Give the devs a bit of credit, you have no idea how complicated this game is compared to say something like Battlefield. That's why its so easy for things to get messed up. Be happy that SOE stuck their neck out to give planetside 2 a shot.

[Belhade]

I know that during GU2 the trick was enabling PhysX (but not turning it on), for nVidia users at least that seemed to help put more processing onto the GPU vs CPU. Along with Default settings (which seemed rather high for my system) the quality and framerates skyrocketed for me. I think that cranking the visuals up also force the GPU to carry more of the load as well, which is why lowering visuals also lowers framerate.

[Sturmhardt]

One thing I really wonder about: they say the reason for the high CPU load is all the calculations that need to be done because of the high number of players. Why was this no problem in ps1? Of course we have more players on a whole continent now, but we get huge fps drops even in mediocre battles. Somehow this was no problem in ps1 with the hardware of 7 years ago.

.sent via phone.

[coconut]

I can only speculate, but from my experience of amateur game developer, I know that rendering thousands of identical models is fast, but rendering thousands of models with different geometry and texture is slower.
When everybody has their own camo, weapon model, weapon camo, helmet and other decorations, maybe you end up having very little opportunity to batch draw calls from the CPU to the GPU, forcing more interaction between them than would otherwise be needed.
Then there is also the large number of projectiles travelling through the air at all times. I don't know if PS1 had projectiles or rays. I guess projectile trajectories are broken into multiple rays, which obviously requires more work than a single ray.
But as a said, this is just speculation, it's hard to say without profiling the game.