5 Question Unofficial Planetside 2 Hardware Poll

Sirisian · 2013-09-02, 07:39 PM

Hardware Survey

There's been some speculation when people talk about the Planetside 2 optimizations with regard to what hardware everyone is using. Speculating that a percentage for instance are using DirectX 9/10 cards or some might be using 32-bit operating systems with Windows XP.

I kept the survey extremely simple since some people might not know how much RAM they have or the amount of video memory their GPU has.

(Also it's understood there will be a heavy bias in this poll toward better hardware due to the people more inclined to visit forums and fill out forms).

GreyFrog · 2013-09-02, 07:57 PM

Done

wasdie · 2013-09-02, 08:10 PM

Done. So far nothing but DX11 cards.

camycamera · 2013-09-02, 10:43 PM

looking at the results so far, most people who play PS2 have actual gaming pc's lol

ShadoViper · 2013-09-02, 11:30 PM

Done, interesting results.

Taramafor · 2013-09-03, 12:19 AM

Done. And PS2 on XP? Come on, it would lag like hell. *Remembers playing oblivion on min settings back in the day* <_>

DirtyBird · 2013-09-03, 01:32 AM

I have better hardware and like filling out forms.

SolLeks · 2013-09-03, 10:56 AM

Done!

Canaris · 2013-09-03, 11:41 AM

I did my part

Tatwi · 2013-09-03, 12:21 PM

Originally Posted by Taramafor

Done. And PS2 on XP? Come on, it would lag like hell. *Remembers playing oblivion on min settings back in the day* <_>

I tested it in XP during beta and it played pretty much the same as Win7 64Bit on the same machine. The extra RAM above 3.5GB in Win7 didn't seem to make a difference in the case of my system.

I have to say that I am a little disappointed by the depth of this survey. My answers *seem* to put me into the "gaming PC" category, but in reality my specs are pretty much the realistic minimum to play the game.

Core 2 Quad Q8200 (2.33GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB)
8GB DDR2 800MHz
GTS450 1GB GDDR5

From all the performance related tech support threads I have read on the official forum over the last year, it's quite clear that computers with slower memory interfaces and lower instructions per clock (IPC) are at a disadvantage in PS2. Core2 and AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver based CPUs are hindered the most. Core2 due to the front side bus, lack of L3, and the slower DDR2 RAM that most of them use. AMD BD/PD, while sporting fast DDR3 RAM (2133MHz in some cases) has significantly lower IPC than AMD Phenom II and Intel Core2/iSeries CPUs which drags down its performance down to Core2 levels despite the speediness of the rest of the system. I've read posts from 6 Core Phenom II users that indicate their performance in PS2 is acceptable, which makes sense because the Phenom II IPC sits between that of Intel's Core2 and i3/i5/i7 CPUs and Phenom IIs can take advantage of socket AM3+ features, such as faster Hypertransit and DDR3 (and even SATA 6GBs for solid state drives).

While Tom's Hardware did prove a few months back that an overclocked Core2 Quad Q9550 on a motherboard with DDR3 1600 RAM and a $200 video card is pretty much on par with a Sandybridge i5 at its default clock speed (using the same video card), that system was essentially the prefect Core2 based computer - something that virtually no one actually owns. Put that same Q9950 and video card into my DDR2 800MHz based system and it would likely lose 20% of it's performance at the same clock speed, which could easily mean the difference between a playable 30 average FPS and a choppy 24 average FPS.

Realistically, for PS2 optimization SOE needs to look at how the game plays on:

- AMD Phenom II x2/x4, FX, Athlon II x2/x4, A-8/10 Series APUs
- Intel Core2 Duo/Quad, Core i3, Core i5 (not overclocked K series), Sandy/Ivybridge Pentiums.

when these are accompanied by a DX10 or better video card that is actually capable of playing games properly (Nvidia 8800GT / AMD 5670 performance level). I'd also suggest that SOE take some time to see what they can do with laptops that use Geforce M series GPUs, as they seem to be quite popular.

As far as suggestions I could make for how SOE could improve performance...

Core2 Systems:
- Offer the option to not use differed lighting, as it's very memory intensive.

Even with only 2 main threads, the lack of a shared L3 cache and the fact that each core has to communicate through with each other through the northbridge (especially quads, because they are simply two dual cores on the same die) means that PS2's lighting is subject to significant latency. Every time core0 or core1 have information in their L2 cache that core 3 or core 4 need, it's got to get there by way of the system RAM, which is an order of magnitude slower than what a Phenom II or Core iSeries CPU can accomplish.

AMD Systems:
- Better threading support.
- DO NOT USE x87 INSTRUCTIONS!
- Lack of differed lighting might help here as well.

All AMD processor suffer from lower IPC than Intel CPUs, meaning they get less done per clock cycle. However, they aren't awful and AMD offers 4 or more threads/integer cores at very affordable prices, so it would be best to use them. Phenom II x4 / Athlon II x4 systems, with their full x86 cores, fair pretty well considering their age, besting most Core2 quad core CPUs, so their biggest weakness compared to current Intel i5s that perform well in PS2 is lower IPC. The only real way to over come that is to overclock the CPU and better utilize multiple cores.

Bulldozer/Piledriver based CPUs on the other hand have some important limitations. They have to use both their 64bit SSE decoders of their FPU (floating point unit) to complete a single 128bit x87 instruction, effectively cutting the CPU's performance in half compared to using a newer instruction set (such as SSE4). Given that "4 Core" Bulldozer/Piledriver based CPUs only have 2 Floating Point Units (FPUs), failing to take advantage of parallel 64bit floating point instructions really hurts these CPUs. Using x87 instructions literally cuts the CPU's power in half. Don't use'em!

Core i3/Pentium Systems (and in general):
- Better determination of what projectiles will actually effect the client.
- Reduce animation frequency.

Lower clock speeds, lack of overclocking, and in the case of the Pentiums, only 2 threads, really hurt these CPUs. However, when paired with a decent video card, they should be able to play PS2 at around 30 FPS in good sized fights. Given their strong IPC, fast memory interface, and L3 cache, these CPUs can handle the extra pressure that deferred lighting puts on the system and they don't suffer huge performance penalties for "cache misses" like Core2 systems. As a result, the best way SOE could improve performance on these systems is to give them less to do. Track fewer projectiles, reduce the frequency of animation on objects/players, basically cut things that CPU needs to calculate to bare minimum required. This, I would imagine, is probably very hard to do, because people will use it to exploit (like they do for shields that fail to render).

In any event, it would be nice to see what hardware people are actually using, because there are some serious differences in hardware architecture CPU/Motherboard/RAM as well as GPU) that matter far more than the OS bit version and the version of DirectX one's hardware can support.

SolLeks · 2013-09-03, 12:30 PM

I think just getting multi core support will be a huge increase as most PCs have multiple cores, and often low clock rates per core.

I have a i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz (was at 4.8ghz but I can't figure out the settings again, also tried 5ghz for a wile but could never make it stable sadly) and with that CPU and a 680GPU I get anywhere from 40 - 120fps depending on where I am and how many explosions are going off around me(I also have a 570 card in my machine, currently set to Physx. Had the 570 first but it was not good enough for 3D and good frames, so I got a 680.) I bet with just the multi core support, we will see a huge boost as this game is very CPU heavy.

Sirisian · 2013-09-03, 12:56 PM

Originally Posted by Tatwi

I have to say that I am a little disappointed by the depth of this survey. My answers *seem* to put me into the "gaming PC" category, but in reality my specs are pretty much the realistic minimum to play the game.

Core 2 Quad Q8200 (2.33GHz, 4MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB)
8GB DDR2 800MHz
GTS450 1GB GDDR5

Your specs are more in line of what I'd consider to be the expected minimum system requirements. A 64-bit OS and CPU and DX11 card with 1 GB VRAM and over 4 GBs of system RAM. Your CPU would be cutting it close, but ideally that would still allow SOE to later optimize for SSE2 and SSE3. They could drop PhysX completely and use a better optimized physics engine. (PhysX has horrible (none at all?) threading support and doesn't use vector instructions, from when I last checked it out, making it one of the slower physics engines). They can also use compute shaders (DirectX 11) and geometry shaders (DirectX 10) for all particles and projectiles which would help a lot. Lot of simple techniques that would lower CPU and GPU communication also have been around for years now that they could take advantage of. (Constant buffers among other things).

Essentially aiming for a modern PC would allow them to really optimize for the future and finally implement sane smoke and volumetric clouds, something that DirectX 9 really has no fast implementations for. It would also begin to normalize the quality of the game between low and ultra quality so it's a more clean degradation of features with no inherent advantages. Mentioned it a few times that their shadow algorithm is just making most people turn it off since it's just a CPU/GPU hit. (Take rectilinear shadow mapping as an example that would allow the developers to keep it on all the time and just tweak the quality for different quality levels).

Regarding 64-bit though that would help people with a lot of RAM that are still using HDDs rather than SSDs for the game. The game hits the HDD a lot I've heard since the game tries to fit into a very small memory footprint which is highly unnecessary for most of us with 8 GBs or more of system RAM.

Originally Posted by Tatwi

In any event, it would be nice to see what hardware people are actually using, because there are some serious differences in hardware architecture CPU/Motherboard/RAM as well as GPU) that matter far more than the OS bit version and the version of DirectX one's hardware can support.

Kind of hoping this will spur SOE to do an official DXDiag poll (if they aren't already collecting that information).