I wanted every planet type so in the PTE build I did that and though my system is an SLI monster I got atrocious performance. I dropped it to 5 planets and it will still really bad. I then tried 1 planet with 4 moons and still very bad. For skirmish, what is high end of a custom solar system you all play with?
The biggest issue for PA with lots of planets is RAM. That really limits your map size. How much ram does your system have? I have a nice custom '222' system (2 main planets, each with a single smashable moon and both spawnable). That plays fine with 4gb of system ram. Planet sizes are: 2 x 600 radius (main planets) and 2 x 200 radius moons.
You'll need to make sure SLI is disabled for PA because it's not supported at moment and if accidentally used SLI can cause serious performance drop.
Disclaimer: this is from memory for a game I played maybe a month ago? I played a game vs AI with 5 planets of ~1250 radius. It was fine for the first .. 45mins? I started to notice slowdown sometime around then, and things were pretty slow around the 1hr mark. The game didn't last much longer and at the end, we had something like 3000 units each. Also played a game vs a mate on a custom system where we had 12 planets of radius 3-500, which we played for about 45mins. I don't remember any problems with that one at all. That's with 16gb RAM on OSX 10.9.4.
Planets themselves aren't so bad for performance, at least before you get page swapping. It's the unit count that's murder.
At the moment, you dont... On the other hand, back in beta I think it was they unlocked the loby limit and had some quite successful large games (albeit on modest systems). The 40 player, 1,000,000 unit support is a future 'technical' goal rather than something we can make use of now. A bit like how the original TA engine had support for 50,000 units total (10 players, 5,000 units each max). Thing is that functionality got unlocked much later and I remember have a few *massive* games Don't think we ever pushed 50k units but 10k was definitely feasible on modern systems. Just think, PA still being played in 10 years time on machines with 8tb ram rather than 8gb and with 1tb+ internet connections. Then we'll be able to push that 1,000,000 unit goal properly
Can you all take a look at this screenshot and tell me if it's normal? There are like 25 of the same odd processes running when I run the game. CoherentUI_host.exe taking up a lot of RAM. It won't let me link because I'm a new poster so please put the "h" in front of the rest of the link address: h ttp://imgur.com/gallery/w8JTTeE
I'll try and upload an image here as a file (not sure if it will embed the image s you don't have t open it manually)
Hi, I just loaded up a game for comparison and when *in a game* this is what I get as well They 'coherent' stuff are all UI threads- basically coherent is essentially a web browser and each section of the UI is treated like a separate 'tab'. It allows for much better use of multi core processors and has some inherent redundancy that if one 'tab' fails the rest of the UI doesn't (hopefully). It does use a bit more ram probably though as a result.