Performace problems

[dread]

I am getting terrible performance with this game. It's stutters like crazy, constantly read/writing to the harddrive - which I figure is memory paging. Also when I quit to the desktop I get a warning message telling me that I'm running out of virtual memory.
But this does not make sense to me. I have a good PC, which runs other demaning games (such as UT2) on high settings without a glitch. The thing is that, while PS is pretty complex, its hardly has a 'next-gen' graphics engine. To be honest, one of the things about PS that impresses me the least is the graphics - they look a little dated to me and not a patch on the new Unreal engine etc. It's virtually un-playable at times. I have disabled all programs/services I can before playing but it still grinds to a halt when the action kicks off. Anyone got any tips/tweaks?

 

[envenom]

theres your problem right there 256 mb u need to have 512 ram and it runs the game perfect we had a guy in our outfit who had the same ram as you the game was nearly unplayable he went 512 and now he says its perfect.

 

[Summo]

Yeah, you need memory, buster!

 

[Gewny]

try defragmenting ure harddrive too, a hevily fragmented disk can easily slow ure hard drive effective output down by 200%

But they are right 512 Mb ram is prolly needed, I guess u can notice a diferance up to 1 Gb.

 

[[PS]Venom]

Increasing Virtual Memory may also help.

 

[cjc1664]

With an Athlon XP2100+, Radeon 9700 and 512 Meg RAM, the game was playable for me, but large battles slowed it down quite a bit.

Putting another 512 Meg in has smoothed it out amazingly. From what I remember, the minimum requirements for Beta (or recommended, I can't remember) were 512 and a gig of virtual memory, so I guess the more memory the better.

 

[Embattle]

Sadly games developers have become rather slack of late relying on cheaper memory prices

 

[old.pala hellraiser]

I have an XP2000+, 640mb RAM and a Radeon 8500, I can normally play lag free apart from the really large battles which can freeze the comp for around 3 secs (DAOC players know what I am talking about )

But yeah I know what you mean Dread, it does demand a lot to run smoothly, I think a lot of it is down to errors that can be solved via patches (they made it gradually better in the beta), for example when I go to the sliding doors my computer freezes EVERY time for around 2 secs, this is only a minor thing but it is annoying

:wall:

I will see how it runs when I get my 1024 DDR RAM

 

[SilverHood]

1 gig of ram here.... no slow down

how it's meant to be played

 

[dread]

Originally posted by Embattle
Sadly games developers have become rather slack of late relying on cheaper memory prices

Well said mate. Sloppy, lazy coding if you ask me. This game may have a massive scope as far as gameplay goes, but there is no reason it should have to run with 1Gig 'o' ram to be smooth ffs. Thats just a joke, christ the graphics engine is like 3 years behind - have you seen the state of those character models lol! Looks like a PS2 game (funny that). Don't get me wrong, its a great game and I don't mean to offened any of those Sony fan boys, but at £34.99 plus $12.99 per month we should be expecting tighter code.

 

[old.Trine Aquavit]

Aye, in any MMOG it's memory that's the killer. Get a Gig and be happy.

I have noticed what is probably a memory leak, though. After a few hours play the whole UI seems to get sluggish. A quick reboot usually fixes it.

 

[Uriron]

I had the same problem its due to your swap file size not being big enough, i recommend increasing it to a minimum of a gig. Quite a few people in my outfit have theirs set at 2 gig but that might be a bit too far, especially if you harddrive aint very big.

Wasn't a memory problem cause I have 768mb rambus. When I checked my pc said it needed a swapfile size of 1000ish mb but it was fixed at 380ish mb, change it to system managed or manually fix it in your ctrl panel - system - device manager (i think)

 

[Embattle]

Under XP:

Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance/Settings/Advanced/Virtual Memory/Change

BTW I think it is utterly stupid and unacceptable that any thing requires 1GB of VM.

 

[Gef]

Originally posted by Embattle
BTW I think it is utterly stupid and unacceptable that any thing requires 1GB of VM.

Its all the 32bit textures, if you turn those to 16bit you can run it smooth as ice on 512Mb.. But if you want the eye candy then you gotta pay!

Fairs fair, its good that developers give you the choice but dont bitch when people are trying to ramp up specs needed to run good games. Its called progress!

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Gef

Fairs fair, its good that developers give you the choice but dont bitch when people are trying to ramp up specs needed to run good games. Its called progress!

Tosh, its know as bloat to float instead of slim to swim.

There are many games out there that require no way near 1GB of VM, VM is actually another hangover that should of been burnt at the cross a long time ago, even though there graphics are actually better looking and more complex. PS graphics are good and at times there are a lot of items onscreen but not enough for it to be nessary for 1GB+ of VM.

I also blame MS since even when you have lots of RAM left it wants to start filling up VM, this is most probably why so much VM memory is required.

Future updates will most probably resolve certain problems and improve performance.

 

[dread]

Originally posted by Gef
Its all the 32bit textures, if you turn those to 16bit you can run it smooth as ice on 512Mb.. But if you want the eye candy then you gotta pay!

Fairs fair, its good that developers give you the choice but dont bitch when people are trying to ramp up specs needed to run good games. Its called progress!

Rubish. I completely agree with embattle. This is not progress and if you think its is then you have a very funny concept of progress in you mind.

Anyway, take a look at the graphics in PS then look at UT2, UT2003, BF1942 etc... PS, while good, is still quite a bit behind. Even Quake 3 is better imo.

Most people are finding they need 1Gb of RAM (not VM) to get it running smooth. That is extremly lame imho.

 

[Xtro]

Originally posted by Embattle
Tosh, its know as bloat to float instead of slim to swim.

Emby is teh MARKET1NG GuRU!!11111

nice phrase

 

[dread]

£130 pounds a year for a game that does not even run on a system that it should do
I upgrade to 1gig of RAM that will then be £230 for a year of Planetside, but at least it will work eh?. Sweet Jesus.

 

[Xtro]

I had an "ok" system but have since upgraded after playing the PS beta. The main difference was the RAM, 512mb is enough, anymore is a bonus. You don't need 1gig by any means.

 

[Gef]

Originally posted by dread
Anyway, take a look at the graphics in PS then look at UT2, UT2003, BF1942 etc... PS, while good, is still quite a bit behind. Even Quake 3 is better imo.

Try putting 500 people into a UT2 match and see how it runs then. Also how big do you think the levels are in those games? Tiny in comparisson, try comparing the graphics with an MMORPG and I think you will find they are way ahead of their class.

Like I say, the performance settings are there for a reason, you dont have the recommended spec? Then turn them down!

DAoC is the same in many ways, that eats a tonne of memory. Purely because of the scale of the thing, in fact name one MMPOG that isnt a resource beast! (with comparible graphics)

Like I say whack the textures down to 16bit and it will fly, and to be honest its not that big a graphics hit. Its noticable but a worthwhile tradeoff!

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Gef
Try putting 500 people into a UT2 match and see how it runs then. Also how big do you think the levels are in those games? Tiny in comparisson, try comparing the graphics with an MMORPG and I think you will find they are way ahead of their class.

Like I say, the performance settings are there for a reason, you dont have the recommended spec? Then turn them down!

DAoC is the same in many ways, that eats a tonne of memory. Purely because of the scale of the thing, in fact name one MMPOG that isnt a resource beast! (with comparible graphics)

Like I say whack the textures down to 16bit and it will fly, and to be honest its not that big a graphics hit. Its noticable but a worthwhile tradeoff!

Ok I'll compare it with EVE, I have my VM set to 0 and apart from the odd problems that plague most new games I can't complain atm.

A game should ideally never draw what you can't actually see and recent graphics cards have approached this problem using a number of new techniques such as Z occlusion culling.

 

[Gef]

Occlusion Culling is to do with lowering the rendering load on the graphics card, nothing to do with memory. The complaint here was that it needs far to much memory to avoid that lag you get when you enter/exit a room through the doors or as you approach a base for the first time, caused by the computer loading the needed textures/resources into memory.

I guarantee if you had 500+ ships on the screen at one time in EVE it would curl up in a little ball and die ..

 

[dread]

Whatever the technology is called, I'm convinced that PS should not really need so much resourses. Name one other game that needs so much RAM just to make it PLAYABLE.
It's not even when I'm in a battle, It happens all the time - even in training or inside a base that has no-one else there but me. Turning settings down does not really help that much.

Anyway, I'm going to such up now

 

[Jupitus]

Read somewhere that reducing the agp aperture size (in BIOS, usually) to 64k fixed someone's similar sounding issues... might be worth a try for you...

 

[Gef]

Originally posted by dread
Name one other game that needs so much RAM just to make it PLAYABLE.

Name one other game that does what Planetside does..

Originally posted by Jupitus
Read somewhere that reducing the agp aperture size (in BIOS, usually) to 64k fixed someone's similar sounding issues... might be worth a try for you...

AGP Apperture is the amount of memory reserved for textures etc by the graphics card. Setting it too low or high can really screw things up, set it to high and the actual program has no memory, set it too low and the GFX card has no memory. You need a nice medium, which is why they reccomend you set it to half your system memory..

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Gef
Occlusion Culling is to do with lowering the rendering load on the graphics card, nothing to do with memory. The complaint here was that it needs far to much memory to avoid that lag you get when you enter/exit a room through the doors or as you approach a base for the first time, caused by the computer loading the needed textures/resources into memory.

I guarantee if you had 500+ ships on the screen at one time in EVE it would curl up in a little ball and die ..

I know what it does, it basically stops the card from rendering what it thinks you can't see....IRC, you were the one who mentioned graphics earlier on any way. You've still failed to come up with any valid reason why a well written game would need so much RAM and VM, and don't compare it to DAoC.....its a poor example.

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Jupitus
Read somewhere that reducing the agp aperture size (in BIOS, usually) to 64k fixed someone's similar sounding issues... might be worth a try for you...

No harm in having a little fiddle, just don't over do it

 

[Embattle]

Originally posted by Gef

I guarantee if you had 500+ ships on the screen at one time in EVE it would curl up in a little ball and die ..

Here I am outside one of the main bases with loads of ships in sight with no VM and it is only using 88megs of ram, even if it did go into mass fights I don't see it getting near the PS figures for requirements.

 

[dread]

Originally posted by Gef
Name one other game that does what Planetside does..

Sorry, I'm not saying your wrong or right here. Maybe my understanding is not quite up with yours in this field. Although I gained a degree in computing at uni I have not coded anything near as hardcore a modem PC game (mainly Java) - so could you please clarify exactly what it is that makes PS so resource hungry and why it needs nearly 3-4 times as much memory just to make it playable compared the next closest game in terms of scope and complexity (whatever that may be is another debate)?

Sure, it can hande many more clients than other FPS's - but surely that's a matter of quality of the netcode.
Graphically its behind most other new FPS's, so it can't be that(?).
And when they say there is thusands of players online - they actually mean in the whole game - but what really counts, as far as how it affects each clients performance, is how many players are on one continent on one server at any one time. How many players can PS handle per continent? is there a limit? I have played on a Tribes 2 Uber server with 256 players on a very low end system (2 years ago) and it was virually flawless (yes I know, its quite different). I don't know any figures for PS and how many players can play per continent (which is what really counts in terms of player figures because changing continents is quite like changing servers in other games and continents are mapped over different servers I'm told).
PS is a massive game, but surely thats more a measure of concept, design and gameplay - am I wrong?

But what really boils my swede is - Sony should have been far more realistic when quoting system requirements for a game that is non-refundable . You can't argue with that.

Thankfully, after a phone call to their head office, the manager in Game was very understanding and said they were having many people complaining of the same problems and that they were in negotiation with the publishers for refunds.

 

[Progenie]

Just installed my new stick of nice fast Corsair ram to take me to 1gb from 512mb.

Now she flys like a dream ! Now slow down or stuttering, and now with all the settings on. Though effectivly the game has now cost me £150 which is a slight downside