Best performance upgrade for the dollar?

Hi mredge73, the CPU almost certainly *is* the bottleneck at the moment because the render engine can only use a single core. Windows has a habit of bouncing the PA.exe thread around between cores so it often *appears* that you're using multi cores when you're not. A good way to tell is to open task manager and order processes on cpu usage. You'll notice that once the game really gets going your CPU usage for the PA.exe will sit at 25% and wont budge- this is your single core maxed out. Having said all that they have confirmed that multi core is coming to the render engine at some point so I'm sure your 955 will be fine once that happens (at the moment you can max out pretty much anything). All CPU cores are used for planet generation so you're good there (means your loading times should be fairly short with a decent quad core).

The amount of ram PA uses depends almost entirely on what planets you use. Large radius planets eat memory- build a large system with several 1200 radius planets in the system editor and you'll fill your 16gb of ram easily. If you prefer to play smaller games though 8gb is fine and 16gb should be ample for almost any game. GPU memory usage is shown in game by cycling through 'Cntrl P' (there are 4 pages). The GPU memory needed is also related to the planets, again a large system with multiple or very large planets can use up lots of GPU memory. If you're on a smaller system 1gb is fine and you should get good frame rates. If you load up a very large planet or system that uses more than 1gb you'll probably notice the frame rate is allot slower all game as the GPU is having to fetch data out of the much slower system ram. Lowering the virtual texture level in settings will reduce the GPU memory usage (at the cost of some quality).

Looking at your system I'd suggest a GPU with more graphics ram might be an idea if you want to play on very large maps. By most accounts 2gb of Vram is usually enough, 3gb if you have the money / want to be extra sure (although that's only available on higher end cards usually). Looking at your build I think your an AMD fan- a R9 270 2gb card would be a good bet and obviously anything higher up the stack than that is worth it. As this game is open GL based, I've heard allot of people mention is generally a bit faster on Nvidia hardware (they tend to have better OpenGL support) however any half decent modern card with 2gb or more Vram should be fine.

GPU-Z it's like CPU-Z but for the GPU

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Hi mredge73, the CPU almost certainly *is* the bottleneck at the moment because the render engine can only use a single core. [/quote]

I will check this out tonight.
I can OC the CPU to about to 3.8GHZ stable but from what you are saying this may still not be enough.
Unfortunately AMD has focused on adding cores to increase performance instead of increasing speed and efficiently of the primary cores; so my upgrade options are limited on the CPU. Sounds like the best thing to do is to wait until multi-core support.

3.8 sounds sufficient to me.

I do see this happening on my machine when playing PA. I keep a terminal window open with htop running and I will see 1 core pegged at 100% during late game play. When my 660 arrives and I install it along with the 16GB memory kit I'll do a little testing and post an update on game play improvements. Then when I upgrade the CPU I'll do some more testing and post some updates on that if anyone is interested.

I have gts 450 with windows 7 64bit and 8gb ram. the game runs good. i only have a duo core 3.4ghz processor.

I think your CPU is good enough (or will be once some more updates come through). The issue is that the game is still very much in development so the client render engine is currently single threaded. Varrak has confirmed it is going to be multi threaded, expect a big improvement in late game when that happens (it probably won't make a difference early game though so your max FPS will stay the same- you'll just maintain them for a lot longer).

Let me know how your testing goes. Also the next patch (not sure if it's out yet haven't been able to check) changes the way lights are dealt with and should also improve FPS quite a bit and particularly late game / when spectating. In the recent live stream Garat noticed a large jump in fps on his ATI card so a quick before / after comparison would be good.

I made a few observations last night but nothing in depth. I got to watch a pretty intense battle after I was nuked to oblivion. CPU never exceeds 35% outside the initial planet generation in the lobby.
The main thread moves around cores for whatever reason, but one is always close to 75% as you have mentioned. At medium settings my GPU rarely exceeded 85% and visual memory was at about 800Mb.
On earth + moon system, Ram sat about 4-6Gb. I disabled the pagefile for this run to see what would happen; initial observation is appears that this has improved performance and the FPS do not drop until there is a nuke fest.