Hi folks. First of all, great game you have here, might become my new addiction. ;D I just have a little problem. When I start a game, it likes to freeze everything or I play with like 1/3Frame/Second. It's possible to play with 2 planets and 1 or 2 opponent, but as soon as there is more of either thing, it becomes immediatly unplayable.. :S When it's extremely choppy, I have around 32% cpu & 65% ram utilization. Don't know about the graca yet though... My pc is a little bit older, but has decent hardware. But you'll see that in the dxdiag. Maybe a source of trouble could also be my HDD. The OS runs on a 4-5 year old notebook-hd and the game is install on a 1TB 7200U/min HD. But I don't think that should influence that issue too much. Screen resolution is 1608 x 1050 on my screen where I play the game and not 1280 x 1024 like it's stated in dxdiag. No idea why it chooses the other one?! Any help is appreciated. Greetings redmo edit: aaaand posted it in the wrong section... maybe someone can move it.. my apologies
Advice: when it's happen press Ctrl+P twice and check video memory usage. When video memory limit exceeded performance will drop in 6-8 times. Also what settings you using? Everything low? You might also check these links for workarounds to improve FPS: http://steamcommunity.com/app/233250/discussions/2/864980734977925162/ https://forums.uberent.com/threads/how-to-improve-frame-rates-all-video-cards-driver-links.53165/ Obviously it's not save you from FPS drops, but will improve overall performance.
Will report as soon as steam works again, seems to be down (500).. I had my settings somewhere around medium, as far as i remember. Thought my pc can handle this with ease.^^ Thanks for the fast reply on a sunday!
If you want to generate many planets you should set "virtual texture" to low. Everything else affect FPS too, but video memory limitations it's the most frequent reason for such FPS drops.
Thanks a lot for the great hints! Will try it later and post the results. Might help someone else aswell.
I think I start to narrow it down. What I found out this far: My specs: 6GB RAM (tripple channel) GTX 470 1.2GB GDDR5 RAM (or how it is called..) i7 930 @ 2.8GHz Old Notebook HD on C: "Test-" System: 6 Planets, all earth/tropical like. 4 Players. Settings on medium (to low), no AA, no HDR (changed it, not the same as in the first post). Usage: Video Memroy Usage: 1.1GB CPU: 20 - 30% RAM: around 80% Around 15fps at the beginning of the game. While zooming out to planetary overview, game freezes (but came luckily back! ) 100% Disk usage on C: even though it is installed on E:. Disk where PA is installed was nowhere near 100%, couldn't see it correctly though.. Findings: My settings for the textures were too high and I didn't know about the ctrl+p to see what was happening^^ As I see it, my graca run out of memory and the game started to lag/freeze. I am not sure how Windows handles swap, but I think it will write data to the C: drive, which as we saw is horrible. That might have caused the crashes or permanent freezes.. Conclusion: Thanks a lot to SXX! I can finally play most of the online games! I will buy a new graca with at least 3-4GB memory and replace my HDD. Still open: Why do I have 100% disk usage on my OS disk while the game is installed on another one? Swapping...?
what size are the planets ?? try less planets or smaller sized ones if you have 6 planets try keeping them all below 400 in size
and yes about swapping making your HDD go crazy, when the game runs out of ram it offloads data to the swapfile thus game runs very slow then CRASH keep planet's to less than 5 i.e. 2 planet (size 350 -480) 2 moons (size under 350) it will keep RAM low and when you have lots of units less HDD swapping will occur
I've choosen this many planets to test what happens near the maximum capacity of my pc. Now that I know what "exactly" is going on, I can find the best settings for my pc. The planets were default, can't tell anymore how big. :S Ohh, and dammit! I've just recently bought my RAM modules and thought: "Oh well, 6GB is more than enough. When will I ever use this much?" Well.. lol. Thanks for your answers maxpowerz!
Please notice that you shouldn't just buy graphics card with more memory. Both memory and GPU performance are important for PA. E.g cheap low-end graphics card with 4GB of memory won't work better than one you have with 1.2GB, keep it in mind. According to your DxDiag you have about 200GB of free space on C: Code: Drive: C: Free Space: 206.7 GB Total Space: 238.1 GB File System: NTFS Model: ST9250827AS ATA Device So if Windows says there is no free space it's looks like some problem with your system. It's not likely related to PA anyway.
alls good glad i could help clear things up i'm sure when the games optimized (closer to release date after features finish going in) it will be more likely you may be able to up the amount of planets in a system with less ram. if you can go as big as possible for your machine ram wise for an epic game like this 16gb if u can jam it in there
Sorry, my fault for not being clear enough. I'm most likely going something like Nvidia GTX 770 (higher end). I meant disk utilization. :S My disk is not capable of writing/reading fast. That's certainly worth a thought. Most likely, I will buy a new graca and hd for now and next year a new mobo, cpu and more than enough ram.^^ 16GB sounds very reasonable. Thank you both a lot for the help!
This might be only related to PA if you out of RAM as maxpowerz said. In normal situation when you have enough RAM this game won't use HDD at all.
True, but my system is super slow, so I need a new one anyway.^^ It was thought to be more like a spare and I want to install W7 again.. And for now, playing on up to 4-5 medium sized planets shall be sufficient. I just played a "bigger" and it was running beautifully. Thanks a lot guys, the fun in gaming just made a big step forward.
i have a system with 1 tiny planet (400) and 2 moons (300) and its awesome battles are fast and end epicly. my fave is a planet (800) planet with a planet (400) as second bases setup and 1 moon (300) for boom tastic fun. people have fun with 2 moons and "planet jousting" you both go to separate moon and then build halleys and try to planet smash each other, its awesome ,, https://forums.uberent.com/threads/planet-jousting.52910/
