Techniques for Improving Framerate

Currently, PA is in beta. As such, the game is not fully optimized for speed. Here are some techniques for improving your game's framerate. (the old thread hadn't been updated in almost a month, so I decided to create, expand, and maintain a new one)

Update your Graphics Cards
ATI GPUs (Windows): http://support.amd.com/en-us/download
Nvidia GPUs (Windows) http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
Integrated Intel GPUs (Windows): https://downloadcenter.intel.com/default.aspx

Lower The Graphics Settings
This one is a no brainer. Lowering the graphics settings will improve the framerate without effecting gameplay.

Play on Smaller Planets
Playing matches on smaller planets improves the framerate. You don't need to go all the way down to a size 300 planet, but playing on a 600 planet will improve your framerate when compared to a size 1,200 planet.

Play with Fewer Planets
Introducing even a second planet to the system can greatly lower the framerate, especially on older machines, let alone 4 or 5 planets.

If you do play on multiple planets, try and make the total planet size less than 600 or so. This helps out a lot for computers with 4GB of RAM.

Fewer Players
The more players there are in the game, the more units there are, the larger the game is, the more lag there is. Playing 1v1s have significantly better framerate than a 3v3v3.

Use the Uber Launcher Rather than Steam
For some undiagnosed reason, playing through the Uber Launcher has a better framerate than when playing through Steam.

On Steam, turn off the Steam Community Overlay
If you play through Steam, turn off the Community Overlay.
How to:
1) Click on Steam and click on the "Settings" button. Click on the "In-Game Settings" tab.
2) Uncheck the box next to "Enable Steam Community In-Game" and click OK.
3) Disable the Steam Overlay on specific games only by right-clicking on the game title, click on "Properties" and uncheck "Enable Steam Community In-Game" in the "General" tab.

If your using an nVidia or ATI chipset
Go to your Video Card's "Control Center" and in the Advanced 3D settings set these options:
Vsync : Always off,
Anisotropic filtering : Application Controlled,
Anti-Aliasing : Application Controlled,
Texture Filtering : Performance, <-- using "High performance" makes game textures "Very Low Quality", I recommend using the "Perfomance" setting
Threaded Optimazation : ON (Try both ON and OFF).

Set Windows to High Performance
Setting Windows' "Power Scheme" to "High Performance" can increase the juice you get out of your computer. To change this, click the battery icon and choose "High Performance."

OSX Users – Update to Mavericks
The latest version of OS X ("Mavericks") has been released for free. Go update!

Get Faster Internet
Because PA currently is handled a lot on the server side, a slow internet connection can cause a choppy game. These normally come through pauses in the game, rather than a choppy framerate. Using a wired connection rather than wifi can also help.

Still doesn't help?

Don't worry. The PA Community is awesome. Head on over to the Beta and Bugs forum and we'll help you out.
Just post A copy of your DxDiag.txt.


Hope this helps your performance!

Enjoy playing Planetary Annihilation!

From my "How to improve Framerates" Thread in the beta bug's and issues section of the forum..

The game runs at the native desktop resolution. (Even when using the "Fullscreen" Setting!)!!!

The "Best Way to Improve Game Performance" is to "Lower your Desktop resolution" to 1280x720 or something lower than your current resolution.


Set your in game settings like this:
Virtual Texturing : MEDIUM, <- going to Low had minimal impact on my system medium was the best result
Headlights : MEDIUM, <- Low might help older Video card users
Shadows : LOW,
HDR : off,
Anti-Aliasing : off,
Resolution : Very Low or Low, <- This only affects the 3D game engine, The UI uses desktop resoultion.

How to minimize RAM useage!
This will be most helpful on systems with 4Gb of ram!

Try keeping the size of planets for battling on below 600 in size.
A custom made system should contain no more than 3 or 4 planets, here are some examples of what i use to play.
4 Planet system : 2 Small Planets (400 size) and 2 Moons (200 size)
3 Planet system A : 1 Medium Planet (600 size) and 2 Moons (300 size)
3 Planet system B : 1 Medium Planet (600 size) 1 Small Planet (400 size) and 1 Moon (200 size)
2 Planet system : 1 MASSIVE Planet (800-1000 size) and 1 Moon (350 size)

I hope this helps people with 4Gb of ram with performance issues!!

My favorite system is a tiny planet (360 size) and a small moon (300 size).
It great for fast furious battles.

Just in the system editor, a stand alone planet of size 800 uses about 510MB of system memory for the PA.exe client.
Just increasing that single planet to 1200 ups the memory to 1200MB. And keep in mind, the amount of surface area for an 800 vs a 1200 is pretty radically different. 8042 sq. km vs 18,095 sq. km. (Assuming I didn't mess up the math there).. Point being, 1200 is over twice the size of the 800 in terms of surface area.

If I take that same planet, and drop the water level down to 0, memory usage shoots from 1200MB to 4172MB. In other words, don't do that.

---Warning---
If your custom system is too big for your RAM your SWAP/Page File is used to help add extra Virtual Memory to assist in the loading/running of the game.
This is very slow and often leads to crashes and bad performance.
If you have this issue try reducing the size of your custom system or stick to playing the random generated Beta system

Yeah, I took some stuff from yours as well.

Decided to create a new one since yours seemed dated and included old information that wasn't needed anymore.

Ive found the uber launcher made the biggest difference. Pa runs amazing now and I have textures set on high, resolution set 1920x1080

playing with everything turned on and everything on max on 1080p

im only heaving issues on 2000 sized planets

even tough I only have an i3 and the game is in beta and the large scale of the game it runs very nice

What info is out-dated??
I edit the post weekly...

When I created my post, it hadn't been updated in almost a month.

The black screen bug is what I remember off the top of my head. That bug isn't encountered anymore.

Maybe not for you but i still get the blackscreen bug on my Intel HD chipset unless i use SXX's shader fix!
so it is relevant even now.. The FXAA shader fails my end causing blackscreen issues.

I'm also working on a "Performance boost v3".. i'll poke you when it's done so you can list it here too if you want.
I'm just waiting on seeing how the new build with the new camera and graphics stack performs with my mod before releasing it, pointless me releasing a mod that will break in a few days if the new update is soon.

Additional Tip for Faster Internet:

This should be pretty obvious, but it's one of those things that's easy to overlook, depending on how you use your computer; turn off file-sharing software (or game clients with downloads, i.e. Steam) when playing multi-player.

People also need to do this on desktop's too,
You wont believe how many people don't realize even desktop pc's with windows have this option and it's usually set to balanced by default..
Windows is an "Energy star compliant" operating system so by default it's set to balanced to save power!

thank you for the information, many will benefit from this

What happened to the game lately? Its running like crap, very laggy, and stuttering...I know its not a PC issue but something with Ubers server or something else... The game was running smooth with zero lag last week...

There hasn't been any patches since last week.

Maybe your internet was just crapping out? :-/

what's your graphic card?

internet speed is my problem, i think

If you pull up the framerate stats you can find out.

They have different framerates – one for the computer and one for the internet.

So if your internet framerate is lower than your computer side framerate, then yeah, it's your internet.

ok, thank you, but will the game support slow internet speeds

once the offline feature gets implanted, i would be playing daily

Fast internet is always ideal for online gaming.

The game will be optimized to have less bandwidth usage.

Am I the only one experixing
poor performance after the last patch? Yeah I know its beta but I should be improving, not the other way around

I think the performance decrease is also caused by the area patrol commands. Stop patrolling with mass amounts of air units will improve frame rates