Any tips for optimizing PA performance? I'm experiencing severe lag :(

I gladly put some money towards this game a whole year ago, which is a big thing since my currency sucks in comparison to the dollar and I've been waiting impatiently for my chance to play it. Now thankfully I can play the beta! It's so exciting to see this game coming together, it's just awesome.

The game looks fantastic and I love so much about it, unfortunately I'm struggling to play due to performance problems. I get huge amounts of lag and eventually giving any instructions to units becomes impossible. What can I do to try make the experience more tolerable. Here's my set up and what I have done so far.

PC:
Windows 7 x64
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
16gb RAM
Nvidia Geforce GTX 660TI

What I've tried:
I've set all the graphics options to the lowest possible. The game still looks great even at low settings
I've updated my graphics drivers to the latest drivers - 327.23.
I've cycled through the various servers to try see if it's my connection. I'm in Cape Town at the Southern Tip of Africa, so I'm assuming this has something to do with performance? Even if I play against the AI it becomes unbearable quickly

Thanks so much for this awesome game guys, I got so excited by it I even funded enough to get my friend a copy, unfortunately for him, he'll only get to play at launch.

It's daft I know, but you could try raising the graphics options slightly.
Some people report this as improving things.

When you downloaded the latest drivers, did you also install the PhsyX stuff?
If so, do you actually need it?
This game doesn't require it.

Of course, do all the regular stuff to your PC (defrag, stop useless
stuff running in the background etc).

Playing against the AI won't make any difference atm, as you are
still using Uber's servers whilst doing so.

Do you mean I should uninstall that?

If I'm connected to the uber servers even when playing against AI, then that's almost definitely the problem I think as I'm down here in Africa, we have notoriously slow internet, even though I have a 4mb line, that's still likely to be the problem.

For your in game settings -
Virtual Texturing: High
Headlights: Uber
Shadows: Off

You will get the best performance out of these settings.

Also try setting your Graphics Card to "Performance" instead of "Quality" in your Nvidia Control Panel.

Edit: Can you also run DxDiag.exe and post the text output?

If you don't need it for anything else, you'll be fine to uninstall it.

When the game is released fully, you'll be able to play versus the ai
without linking to Uber's servers, and also be able to play against
people in your area (which may be faster for you).

Bought the beta yesterday.

Sadly the game is unplayable at the moment. Started 5 games which took a very very long time to start and experienced severe lag. My pc and internet connection both are excellent.

Really looking forward to play the game but it is unplayable at this point.

It's the same for me. I was really looking forward to the beta but right now I can't even get into a game. It just hogs all my ram and then crashes.

It'll get better. Now the Beta deadline has been passed, more time will be spent refining what's already there, as
well as adding new content, and the million and three other things required before launch day.

maybe try every few days, or every weekend to see if your setup likes the latest patches?

Hmm, "Launch Day". Better copyright that, right quick.

Yeah. i have not given up hope. Lag should be the first they to focus on. New content wont do much if you cant play play the game.

No point fixing too much yet, as not all the game is actually there. There have been many many
tweaks and improvements over the alpha, and the same will be true of beta, except they'll likely
have more time than previously, to tweak.

A lot of what people call lag cannot be controlled by Uber, as ISPs etc don't provide the quality
they advertise (at least, they don't here!). My broadband speed is supposed to be "up to" 24Mb. My
first ever broadband connection was .5Mb. Does my online world move 48 times faster? Pfft. More
like 48 times SLOWER.

A little bit strange : I nearly have your same configuration (same graphic car) and i'm not having that much performance issue even with lots of units. Now the question is : Are you really sure you're suffering from low FPS or rather from the game sluttering just because the network is not enough responsive ? PA does requires a lot of download network bandwidth until Uber optimizes this. Another thing : Since there are much more people in Beta than in alpha i have noticed that the backend which is provided by Uber may not deliver enough bandwidth to all players. 2 days ago, myself and my co-players experienced huge lag on a regular basis ; nothing related to our hardware.

Note that even if you're playing with AI, it does not help working around the network bandwidth/latency limitation, since all the simulation is run on a remote host. So you may have to wait for
1) Uber doing further optimizations on the network code and on the core engine
2) Uber delivering PA server to test all this locally.

What's your network bandwidth ?

Laggish could very be contributed to the server connections, if from cape town, the ping is probably very high which im sure is causing some of your lag issues. Other then that, just try and use the UBER launcher to play the game if you are using steam, mine runs quite a bit better using that instead of steam

I definitely think it's my connection down here in Africa. I'm sure it will get better with time I'm just so happy to already be playing the game.

Awesome. I'll try all those things. But I'm not sure what text output I'm looking for? Have attached DxDiag.

Check my signature, he mean you need to upload your DxDiag.txt

Thank you

I can't see what's wrong. Your drivers are current, my card is about 3/4 as powerful as yours; I get about 20 FPS in a "normal" game, but hardly any games are normal right now.

There seems to be performance issues connected to Nvidia cards, nobody is sure why though. It's kinda ironic because Nvidia has better OpenGL drivers compared to AMD, but AMD is still performing better in PA, an OpenGL game.

Almost certainly a latency issue. Check your ping to uberent.com and see what you get.

Actually you're need to ping game servers in certain region and not uberent.com. You can find game servers IP in logs:
C:\Users\ YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME \AppData\Local\UberEntertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\

This folder doesn't exist for me: \UberEntertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log\ . Although I do have this folder: \AppData\Local\PALauncher .

Pinging uberent.com: Minimum = 372ms, Maximum = 384ms, Average = 378ms

I'm pretty sure it's latency and as the game develops, it's definitely going to get better. Right now I'm really enjoying playing the game and excited for more.