Upgraded to 290x Crossfire... framerates STILL garbage?!

Drop steam and use uber launcher. I just went back to steam to see if it was causing the lag and sure enough it was..I still can't believe so many people are using steam..uber launcher makes a night and day difference

Yeah just to confirm as others have said- your setup is more than enough for this game. The issue is the game isn't optimised very well for high end AMD / ATI graphics at this point. The other thing to check- make sure you have the latest drivers installed (although as its a 290X they must be pretty new).

In terms of specs to run this well, I can say that:
1: You need 8gb of ram
2: A reasonable dual core cpu is fine
3: Currently AMD / ATI graphics cards are a bit hit and miss (working fine on some lower cards and falling flat on the 280 / 290 cards?!)- An Nvidia card is probably a safer bet at the moment (if I recall uber were using mainly i5 machines with GTX 660 cards for development, from one of the early live streams*).

I run this game on my laptop which compared to your machine is pantz: Intel mobile i5 (dual core with HT), 8gb ram and a GT 420m card (equivalent to an old Radon 4670 performance wise), and I get comfortable frame rates (circa 30 fps) until late game where it can lag a bit. And I run with HDR turned on, everything else medium no problem (just love the HDR lighting!).

* It was from ages ago so can't remember which stream its in- anyone remember where it was?*

Its cheaper to buy two graphic cards than one for achieving the same performance, so please dont post **** if you have no clue. You know that there are people who even want to play at higher resolutions and therefore have two highend cards.

So you tell me that you want to buy two medium cards instead of one high end, then claim you need two highend cards to play? Seriously....

I'm used SLI/CF for pretty long time and dual GPU always cause more issues in any games. In games with high dynamics there as well input lag which hurt experience badly. Also multi-GPU always require more powerful cooling system and make more noise anyway.

I'm personally have to use multi-GPU because I need OpenCL, but for gaming it's always better to have one graphics card.

Hmm. I run a similar box but my card is a 270X, which is less powerful than the OP's. It runs smoothly with UBER settings at 1080p. I am using the UBER launcher though, not Steam.

Yes uber launcher is the key to better performance...my pc is not very fast and it made a massive difference going steam to uber launcher.

We've been investigating performance problems with the Steam overlay and our game with Valve for a little while now, but we don't have a solution yet apart from running the game from our launcher or with the Steam overlay disabled.

BTW we know the game is unoptimized. We have someone working full time on massive changes to make stuff faster.

GPU performance just isn't the bottleneck at the moment. We've verified that over and over we simply aren't using the GPU effectively. So we are doing tons of work to remedy that. It's going to be a case of slow improvement, not a magic fix that suddenly makes the game 10x faster.

Sometime I like to post the occasional checkin email here and I think one from today is pretty appropriate. Keep in mind this is a lot of inside baseball that won't make sense to most people but I want you guys to know this stuff is being worked on... bigtime! This checkin lays the groundwork for moving forward on a bunch of optimization.

-------------------------------------
Change 58268 by ssmith@ssmith-main on 2013/12/11 11:36:09

Graphics update

Integrating from proto/graphics to main.

This merge includes the following changes:
1. There is now a new state block system. This replaces the old gl_effects.cpp and statecache code. Basically, it works as follows:
Device state, such as depth state, blend mode and rasterization state are now wrapped in immutable state objects. These objects are designed to be low-level wrappers on top of the API used - right now, just openGL but it would be easy to create wrappers for D3D, Mantle, etc. When a state is required, a state block is created. The engine will hash the state struct data and return an existing object should there be one. When state is applied only changed state is effected.
2. There are now state block items describing shader parameters and textures (ParameterBlocks and TextureBlocks). These are currently not immutable, but work in a similar fashion to the above.
3. Shader program/vertex buffer binding is now handled through a layout object. This object pre-generates the API call data required to bind the shader program to a stream, which greatly reduces the amount of logic required to perform the binding, and also reduces the API overhead for rendering by an order of magnitude.
4. Shaders now support #include semantics, so we can #include common code. This makes shader iteration faster and less bug-prone.
5. The "effects" system (aka similar to .fx in d3d9) has been rewritten. This is now a high-level construct that uses the new state block objects and has no APU-specific implementation. The code is now significantly simpler, and will (soon) allow for more direct control of how we apply and use state. This will allow us to fast-path a lot of our rendering code.
6. We now support "Texture Buffers". This reduces the draw-call count in the feature rendering by a factor of 3 or more. It is also a baseline feature for an update particle system and batching of units.
7. There's a new effect editing tool that generates the json files used by the engine to build effects.
8. Feature rendering now renders all features at fulls size in one pass, and then all impostors. This greatly reduces state-switching overhead and reduces the cost of this part of rendering significantly.

I recently updated my graphics drivers at the same time I installed uber launcher. I was shocked at how much better the game ran under uber launcher. I thought it might be from getting the latest nividia drivers. Then last night I played on steam and it was an utter lag fest....get uber launcher!

I said that before to garat, I don't think problem related to Overlay. Something else going here what hurt performance badly when game running though Steam.

Want to believe you'll share it with us one day.
Spend quite a lot time playing with effects system and it's will be nice if there will be some tool for this.

CURSE YOU BESTBUY STAFFFFFFF!!!

Get Uber launcher & report back!!

This is bad advice.

Not all games support or benefit from dual graphics cards. I believe Planetary Annihilation is one of those games. Every site out there will tell you it's better to buy 1 good card than 2 medium ones, even though the 2 medium ones may be less money and seem to add up to higher performance -- the performance won't be consistent across all games.

The only case where I think it's acceptable to use 2 graphics cards is if money is no object and you want to run two of the very top-of-the-line cards.

I'm sure we can release it. It's not exactly a polished amazing tool but it does the job. Windows only as it's written in C#.

BTW we've been getting the checkin I posted running a few different machines and seeing some good perf improvement across the board.

Still plenty of things to fix though as we have some GPU sync points we haven't gotten rid of yet. There is still a TON of headroom here to make stuff faster.

Im amazed still at how well it runs on low end systems.
I'm still getting close to 25fps @ 1366x768 , intel hd 4000, i5 1.7ghz 3317u

Any tool is better than no tool.

May be you can share it on modding forum like you did with Coherent debugger? Then everybody can play with it without waiting too long.

+10