I have been able to play on all of the highest settings up until (I think, as I haven't played in a week or so) my latest video card driver update which was just on the 23rd. I have not tried re-installing the previous version, but I have uninstalled all of my mods and the problem still persists. I noticed that the update reset all of my control panel settings to default so I went back and redid them. Every other game I have runs just as well as before except for PA. Another thing I noticed with it is if I lower all the settings the game runs fine, but if I zoom out to view the solar system, my game drops to about 8 fps. I don't know if some of this would be because of my internet connection (I'm out of town at my grandparent's place) but it does this even in offline mode. Any help would be appreciated.
According to your Dxdiag, the currently enabled video card is the integrated Intel hd4000... Now an alienware laptop obviously has a dedicated card though it isn't enabled according to dx... I'm fairly sure that's the problem as hd4000 will only cope with minimum settings. As for why that would occur I'm not sure, I'm guessing you have an nvidia card, maybe look at power / application settings to ensure the dedicated card is being used. You should also be able to manually select it by right clicking on pa.exe and selecting 'run with graphics processor - high performance'...
Thank you for your help but unfortunately my Nvidia Control Center Settings say that it is running on the high performance processor and the problem still persists. I have attempted reinstalling the game to see if it fixed it but that didn't either. If it helps at all, my OSD displays everything perfectly fine (FPS, CPU and GPU temp) but when playing PA the GPU temp just stays at zero.
Oh I just remembered I tried to edit the landing zones on one of my planets in the system editor. When it switched over to advanced editing mode after giving me that warning message, it got laggy just as it does ingame. I backed out without saving though so maybe it has something to do with that. I'll try a different system later and let you know.
Nope. Even on a one planet system with the lowest settings I get a max of less than 30 FPS. I also tried turning my server settings to on and off to no avail. I'll try reinstalling the previous video card driver tomorrow.
It's not the video card driver. Any ideas? Edit: I noticed that if I change any settings and restart the game, the settings stay the same but the actual visuals don't. So if I turn everything to the lowest setting and turn HDR off and restart it, it looks like everything is still on high with HDR on. Could this be something like the game trying to figure out the real settings?
Hi, i'm really unsure what's going on here. The performance your describing (30 fps on one planet) is basically as if your running on the HD4000 rather than the Geforce. If the OSD is stating no temp on the geforce that would back up that theory- the question is why? I gather other games are using the GPU ok? As an experiment you could try running 3D Mark (get the 'demo' version for free on steam and run it). There are lots of benchmarks available to compare to- if a similar machine gets a much higher score it's probably that the dedicated card isn't kicking in for some reason.
