here is a planet.

this took about 20 minutes to load/render. i used all 16 gigs of ram for a solid 10 minutes of that. and was at 100% CPU for about 5 minutes at 3.4GHz

i don't know about the correlation of how long it takes you to render a planet compared to loading them in lobbies and rendering them but most people dont want to max CPU's and have 16 gig of ram to max out for 10 minutes and make your comp unusable during it. so im gonna say keep the limits on planet sizes to 2000- . only took me like 30 seconds to do a 2000 ice planet

OMG I BOUGHT 8 ME SO NOOB!

Yeah I know how you feel. I have 8GB of RAM and it's never enough for PA . I have never played another game that needs more than 8GB so I can't justify the purchase for one game.

Filthy casual

Yeah lol, when i was buying this pc i didn't know PA excisted. So i bought the best I5, the best GPU i could afford (wich happened to be a MSI 660 TI PE that had some good revieuws) and 8 GB of ramm because a friend who is almost finished in uni for informatica told me 8 would always be enough for the next few years for gaming.

Now i don't want to send it back to the assembler (still got guarantee i think) but eventually i am likely to upgrade my ramm to how far my motherboard and/or wallet allows.

Your PC is definitely above average. I'm betting that by the time 1.0 comes around you'll be able to run the game just fine. I've got the standard GTX 660 and an FX-6300. I didn't have too much money to spend when I got my computer as I was coming over from my Xbox 360 and wanted something in a similar price range to a console.

Yeah, but in TA i also always wanted to play on that one 64 mb map when my parents pc had only 32 mb, so this time its my pc so i will trow more money in it because finally i can

i have 4 gigs so.....

I'm thinking about trashing this laptop and going for a laptop with integrated graphics and 16gb. Since it would be free, its a tough call. I'm not running pa above low anyway, but does anyone have any idea how well the integrated graphics on i7s?

With 16 gigs and an i7 you could definitely play on probably medium at least... I'd imagine.

(And if it's HD 4000, not 3000, then it'll be smooth sailing for sure.)

W/out a graphics card tho???

But.. doesn't integrated come with HD 3000 or 4000, I thought that's what it meant. Disregard if not.

It does. Wasn't sure if the integrated stuff could handle it

I use HD3000, 4 gigs of RAM and an i3 quad core, 2.3 GHz.... You'll do much better than fine.

I'm totally upgrading. Time to drop my PC off the side of a cliff.....

Whats your current PC then? It must be bad if HD4000 is an upgrade...

Pfft, what a cute CPU speed

Anyway, I made a 4500r planet about 8 months back, and it didn't use up more than 12GB of system memory, so did they change it that much?

Edit: when I'm gone for 3 hours tonight, I'll try it again. Even at 4.8GHz and HT, it took like 15 minutes to render, although I now have better RAM and a 780 so it might be faster.

Ok I just tried the 3260 radius and it took me just under 10 minutes to render, my CPU fluctuated between normal use (36-40%) to the 100% usage never constant and temps never hit above 40 degrees for me. Used 12GB of my 16, then when I wasn't happy with the particular seed ect, wanted to change some things, the 2nd pass over used all 16GB. When I was done the first pass over it seemed like it didn't clear out the RAM after I was done rendering it. Amount of VRAM used was about 1.5GB out of my 4. Frame rate was complete dogsh!t though absolutely un-playable which I'm surprised that a 2000 Radius planet should run that much better, there isn't a huge difference in size to the point it makes it unplayable so even if we have these massive planets, its actually not playable anyway...

This was for an Earth planet not ice planet, so there might be a lot more stuff to render also

Specs:
AMD-FX 8320 @ 4.0ghz
16GB DDR3 1866 Gskill Ripjaws
ASRock Extreme 3 mobo
GTX 760 4GB VRAM
128GB SSD
Windows 7 X64 Ultimate

There is a huge difference in size. The surface area does not increase linearly to the radius, which is why a 2000r is acceptably laggy, and a 3250r is unplayable.