How To Improve Performance (All Video Cards) + (Driver links)

Is there any indication as to what brand video card PA runs best on? I am about to buy a new video card and wondering if I should go for a Nvidia GTX 770 or a ATI R 280X.

At this point in time PA runs best on nVidia based chipsets as they have the best OpenGL support..

cool Thanks

One thing to note is that if i have Dxtory running in the background, PA crashes at start since it does not approve Dxtory hooking into it.
Pretty good to know since the FAQ just says "update your driver" like its the only villain.

Was dxtory causing bad framerates or crashing PA.exe?

you need a super computer to play this game! I know they are still in Beta and that optimisation is the last thing to do but how much optimisation is needed when currently you get 10 frames per second. I have a core i5-2400, GTX660, and 8GB RAM.

780ti i7-4770K 16gb ram sdd and in the end game with massive unit swarms the game comes to a crawl at 5-10fps. so right now it doesn't really matter all to much what u run pa on except u need at least 16gb or ram to play on the really big systems/planets

With the above settings listed here i get these FPS..









FPS drop with 100+units on screen zoomed in close. (As soon as "Batch Instancing is used with units this will improve, at the moment your CPU/GPU needs to render each unit, when optimizations are done units will be rendered in batches and wont drop the FPS so badly)



Zoomed back out game ran fine, only FPS drop is with lots and lots of units up zoomed up real close.


Even the ending BOOM of me smashing a moon into the planet was @ 22+ FPS



MY EPIC system spec's ...
i5 3317u 1.7ghz Dual Core (2.5ghz max), Intel HD 4000 (128mb dedicated Vram), 4gb system Ram, Realtek Dolby HomeTheater v4 Audio Codec.

I'm playing on an ACER tablet PC (Iconia W700), same specs as the surface pro minus the Wacom stylus.

I don't want to be negative, but I thought this game was supposed to be released December 2013. At the current rate of development I don't see how this game will be released any earlier than December 2014. This worries me, because people (programmers) need to get paid and when you do not meet deadlines, then your costs blow out and projects get shut down. This game will be epic if it get's finished, but I can't help but wonder did they bite off more than they can chew?

I think people think too much!!!
The release date was changed. The release date is now "When it's done!"
There is a thread on it somewhere in the general discussion from jon mavor (Neutrino) stating that they have enough funding from kickstarter and alpha/beta sales to continue development long enough to get the game ready for release,,

But anyway ,, Please, If you don't have an understanding of how the game engine/rendering system works don't guess on when you think it will be completed or if it can or can't be optimized to better run on other systems like your own, The only people with that kind of knowledge are uber employees.

Sidenote..
I do agree that to the "average gamer/playtester" it may look like the game is in dire need of optimizations, but there is more important things to come before optimizing takes place...


Examples..
Unit pathing needs to be better before uber can start using things like "Batch Rendering/ Instancing" on unit's..
(No point in enabling this feature if units will constantly get stuck/broken or move incorrectly)

Unit roster needs filling and more pathing will need to be done again..

Water on earth biomes needs fixing so waterless earth planets don't eat up ram like they have been.

Trees will be replacable with Imposter trees (Fake ones that are very low geometry "6 polygons, i think bgolus stated somewhere in one of my threads")


Really optimizations need to be LAST THING or optimizing something to early may restrict the content you can add to your game, or cause bugs that can be difficult to squash without re-writing large chunks of game engine/code.

So once again. please have trust in uber and the community that is assisting in development, we will work together to get the game into a worthy playable state...

Thanks for the heads up about Batch Rendering/Instancing, Imposter Trees, and Jon Mavor saying "enough funding from kickstarter and alpha/beta sales to continue development". That calms some of my nerves! I guess it's a good sign that I am concerned, because it just shows how much potential I believe the game has! Finish it already!!!

I hope they can optimise Planetary Annihilation so that it run's just as smooth as Star Swarm (http://www.oxidegames.com/2014/01/31/star-swarm-faq/)

One day I decided to update my video card driver for my ATI HD7750 to see if I could get better performance based on the suggestions here.
Well, for the last 2 months, I have been getting blue screens of death (error about ati). I tried to figure out the problem. I went to an older driver for my video card, updated everything, reinstalled windows, checked for memory errors, etc all to no avail.

Finally I realized that the problem had to be the drivers from ati. So I figured out that actually I needed to go back 1 year to get drivers to work properly on my video card. ATI Version 9.12. Now it works fine and no blue screens!

Very frustrating, but I want to share this with anyone that has had a similar issue. Drivers can be a pain sometimes!

Are you using ATI mobility drivers?, i have this issue with my ATI based lg express s1 laptop.
If i use newer drivers the laptop works fine but i get BSOD during shutdown or when resuming from sleep.

No

@warrenkc
My bad i didn't see your DxDiag.txt attached to your first post here..

That's unusual behavior from a dedicated HD7750 series card, it should work fine under windows 7 64bit with latest drivers.

One question, is it a "Sapphire" branded card?

Nope. Gigabyte

What driver did you update too last time?
some people had issues with the 13.11beta drivers.

there is a 13.12 stable release now,
and if your game , there is a 14.1beta released on feb the 1st
http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop?os=Windows 7 - 64

If your computer savvy and game enough to try again,
1, completely remove the current version of catalyst,
2, go into device manager and uninstall the device there too, (this should remove all of the driver from the pc)
3, install either the 13.12 or 14.1beta driver and see if you get the BSOD issue.

Alright so it seems the big killers for me are effects. I will literally shed half my FPS when those things are in view. Which is particularly nasty with construction and big fights. It really would be nice with a decimator option for the amount of particles. Though I'm sure it will be much better with the new effects system coming. Even so, hardware acceleration isn't a panacea.

Also it seems that the loading of textures by the virtual texturing system absolutely trashes my perf as well. This seems to be why the oxymoron of higher settings resulting in better FPS is true, as it can allocate more VRAM and not have to fetch textures all the time. Of course only works if enough VRAM is available.
The "high" option seems to be suitable for 1GB cards, which is good for me as I only have 1GB. But I know there are folks with 2GB and even 3GB cards nowadays. A higher option suited for these cases might help improve performance for these people.

Additionally, restricting the highest detail level that can be streamed in might help reduce trashing on lower amounts VRAM. I still get some trashing even on the highest option but because I can't reduce the detail even by one I can't fix it.
The ideal fix of course is to not have the loading of textures trash anything.

I also seem to be getting some form of resolution related slowdown which is affected by the presence of units. Which is nonsense. I presume this is the virtual texturing somehow being more demanding at higher resolutions. Again this might be something that restricted details might fix? I can only guess.