I've had this game since alpha, I knew it had such great potential. The problem was I could never run it. Even though people said I'd be able to I never could. I re-tried every few months but to no avail. Recently I heard of the optimization patch so I decided to try it again, AND IT DOESN"T WORK. I've gotten it to run before (RARELY) and its not the actual game FPS thats the problem, its LOADING it. The game always crashes while its loading. I tried everything, multiplayer, multiplayer but offline with bots, even singleplayer! It always crashes while loading! To the point where I almost have to restart my computer since Ctrl Alt Delete stops working. I've tried nearly everything in the line of fixing it. Updating graphics cards, verifying game files, even using the non-steam launcher because of some "works better with AMD" myth. I'm just so sad at this point that I spent 90 dollars on a game that when nearly complete I can barely play it still. Please, please help me. I've uploaded the dxdiag as requested on the steam forums to this post. Thanks in advanced.
4 GB of RAM is barely enough for this game; I have 6 and I could still use some more. Really for optimal experience you need 8 GB+. Get more ram and you should be good to go.
I'm pretty sure your GPU (Radeon 7420G) is the cause of your troubles. According to a quick check on a benchmarking site, it only scores 40% of the performance of an HD 4850, which is one of the cards recommended as the game's minimum (!) system requirement.
Enough RAM or not, GPU good enough or not, the game needs to tell you these things if they're true. Certainly it can't just go and crash because of it. Uber should be aware of the specific requirements (minimum), and I'm sure they are. If these are truly not met, this result is inelegant to say the least. And if they are, then the problem is something else that Uber needs to look into. Not that it helps the situation here.
I was thinking this too but I didn't want to look like a ****..because back during pre alpha I don't remember them even ballparking the specs you'd need. I knew that they had said during alpha it was very poorly optimized but they never said how optimized it would become. No offense Uber you're still awesome and all.
You really can't know how optimized something will become. You optimize something as much as you can, but you really can't know how optimized that is until you do it.
Yeah, but now they're being loud about 1.0, so this really needs to be in place for that. So this might well be an issue they've overlooked, unless they're still a bit fuzzy on exact requirements. Which would surprise me. Still no excuse to just go and crash.
I just read that you're running the game on a laptop; in that case, the GPU probably isn't as big an issue. The game is known to run fine on Intel HD 3000 cards which are even less powerful than your GPU. @stuart98 is probably right that the 3 GB RAM are the prime suspect; the weak GPU doesn't help, sure, but isn't the sole cause.
Im not so good with the actual INSIDES of computers, so just checking, you can't add more RAM onto a laptop correct?
If you can open it up then you can add more ram. The only difference between a laptop and a desktop is the built in monitor really. There's a decent likely-hood that it's already got all of its ram slots filled, in which case you'll have to get larger sticks rather than more sticks.
No. You'd just be upgrading a component with no data lost. Your machine's hard drive - the HDD - is storing your data; the RAM is there for the everyday computing / workload it has to do.
alright so assuming I can open my laptop no problem, how much would this cost me (about)? To get PA working?
~$40-50 for a single four gb stick of ram. Make sure that you get the right kind of ram, as some motherboards are compatible with ddr2 while others are with ddr3. Get the wrong type of ram and it won't work. A quick google search should help you find the tools to find out which kind you have.
Thanks so much, I suppose I'll be hittin up best buy sometime soon EDIT: just to check so lets say I had 8 gigs of RAM, would my GPU still be a big enough issue that it'd prevent it from running smoothly?
You could try posting the log file as well. It's located here: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log which amounts to C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Uber Entertainment\Planetary Annihilation\log Keep in mind it will have folder paths with your username in it, so you might want to edit that out.
