FPS Plummets In Battles

[mitchewr]

So I just started playing and have been having trouble with my FPS. I've been scouring the web for help on fixing the issue and made lots of adjustments but my FPS still drops to unplayable in battles.

Here are my PC specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2Ghz
4 GB DDR3 RAM
Windows 7 64-bit
NVidia 650Ti Boost 2GB RAM driver version 340.52 (just updated last night)

I went through and unparked all of my cpu cores and turned down/off all of the following settings in the display options:

Particles, Effects, Flora, Ambient Occlusion, Shadows, Fog Shadows, & Terrain. I also set the render distance to 1000 instead of the 4000 it was set to. I tried going into the video card settings and changing the "Frame Render Ahead" as suggested in a "how to fix it" thread for this issue on Steam forums but that just made things worse.

When I am playing, and I'm facing a direction with no friendly or enemy units on screen, I am getting 60+ FPS, but as soon as I turn and face a battle or get close to some action, FPS plummets down to 10, 6, etc.

Occasionally it will throw the [GPU] tag next to the FPS, but most of the time it throws the [CPU] flag.

Any ideas on something else that I could try to get the game to run? Does the game literally require 4 GB of RAM, all to itself? I do have it set so that all 4 CPU cores are capable of handling the game. I've tried bumping the priority of the PlanetSide process but that didn't resolve the issue either.

[Sarloh]

Well, first of all don't worry, we are all in this. Planetside 2 is a huge game that is referred to as a 'power hog'.
Simply put, big battles take away your FPS as your processor must know for every move, every shot fired and taken, every vehicle, revive, granade then all the character models, names, health... It's a lot.

Now this game is more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. Sadly I don't know a lot about AMD processors so I hope that it's enough. The GPU should be fine, but as always I recommend setting the shadows to LOW as I've tested the difference and it's really not that much. Now with the RAM I was too at 4GB at the start but I've upgraded so I can't say that going for at least 8 or more is a bad idea.

[Ailos]

The CPU intensive part of PS2 comes from its need for fast memory - CPUs with lots of cache and access to fast RAM do better than older models with more athsmatic memory controllers. AMD's Phenom II is one of those CPUs with an athsmatic memory controller (because it's 6-8 years old now).

My crossfire rig was originally a Phenom II X4 955 that I'd overclocked, too, and I was beginning to have this issue, too. One day, I tried to bump it up another couple hundred MHz to eek out at least some playable performance, but it was too much. I bought an FX-4130 - on paper, it's actually worse than the 955 (because some of its resources are shared), but it DOES have a faster memory controller with a little more bandwidth that was able to use more of my DDR3-2133 kit's speed. Even before I overclocked it, that extra memory bandwidth made a huge difference in terms of how smooth everything became in heavier fights. FPS would still go low at first (from 60 down to 25-30), but at least it'd be consistent and didn't twitch much.

So point is, look at your RAM and see that it's used at its max rated speed. Phenom's controller tops out at only -1333, though, so to go faster you'll have to start messing with BCLK settings.

[XilentJustice]

Upgrade to Intel

[Ghost Runner]

The CPU intensive part of PS2 comes from its need for fast memory - CPUs with lots of cache and access to fast RAM do better than older models with more athsmatic memory controllers. AMD's Phenom II is one of those CPUs with an athsmatic memory controller (because it's 6-8 years old now).

My crossfire rig was originally a Phenom II X4 955 that I'd overclocked, too, and I was beginning to have this issue, too. One day, I tried to bump it up another couple hundred MHz to eek out at least some playable performance, but it was too much. I bought an FX-4130 - on paper, it's actually worse than the 955 (because some of its resources are shared), but it DOES have a faster memory controller with a little more bandwidth that was able to use more of my DDR3-2133 kit's speed. Even before I overclocked it, that extra memory bandwidth made a huge difference in terms of how smooth everything became in heavier fights. FPS would still go low at first (from 60 down to 25-30), but at least it'd be consistent and didn't twitch much.

So point is, look at your RAM and see that it's used at its max rated speed. Phenom's controller tops out at only -1333, though, so to go faster you'll have to start messing with BCLK settings.

This guy is correct if you have an Overclocking board make sure your ram is running at its peak speed I had this problem with my I7 950 bumped up the BCLK 200 mhz and set my ram to its proper setting and dont have problems like this no more. And on that note be sure your RAM timings are correct in the bios for your board, as some boards will down clock your ram and require you to munually enter the proper timings to achive there rated speed.