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

there's not really anything called ram caching... that would be for people who need extra storage or something. The RAM should clear itself after every game (and obviously dynamically during the game with textures and models but that's more complicated).

Can you post your DxDiag?

So basically make the game look like crap to make it run better? Lowering resolution on LCDs to lower than native is not a good idea. Turning off shadows and antialiasing is what made the biggest difference for me.

This is true for all games, if your hardware isn't capable of max settings.

Why?
I have been running my laptop @ 1366x768 instead of 1920x1080 for years and it looks fine..
I also run the game @ 1280x720 with the game resolution set to 75% and it's still playable and looks ok.

Kinda stating the obvious..
Is this the first game you have ever had to turn the graphics down on?
I can assure you that you cant make a game look better and have it run better magically somehow!!

Max, you noob! *All the kool kidz* know if your game don't run fast enough, you simply download more ram!

Simplez!

Do I really have to explain in 2016 why running anything at lower than native LCD resolution is suboptimal for the image quality??? But, if it looks "fine" to you, who am I to tell you otherwise. To me, anything at resolution below native looks like utter garbage.

Lowering resolution below the LCD's native resolution is always the absolutely last resort if all other tweaks fail to make the game playable. There are many things to try first such as shadows settings, antialiasing, bloom, HDR. And actually, yeah, there used to be tweaks for games in the past that made them look better and run faster This is not unheard of.

Although, clearly, how the game looks is highly subjective.

Lowering your resolution will also have a large impact - more than antialiasing at lower resolutions because the impact of AA is based on the draw call itself, which is obviously continent upon resolution.

Lowering any graphical option is "suboptimal for image quality". Shadows, antialiasing, resolution, you name it. That's literally the definition of "turning down graphical quality for performance".

I'm wondering why you're trying so hard to be this obtuse, really

No, there is a huge difference between changing the various rendering settings (graphical options) while running at native resolution and lowering the LCD resolution (this is not in a "graphical option" category: you're forcing the hardware to output worse quality image).

I'm not being obtuse. For me and many people lowering the resolution on an LCD makes the image look awful. I'd rather lower all other rendering settings but I never lower the resolution. The blurriness, lack of crispness of sub-native LCD resolution is unacceptable to me. I may as well not play the game. Turning off AA, lowering the shadow and texture quality doesn't ruin the image as badly as running below native resolution on an LCD.

Even though hardware is much better at scaling these days, I can't stand anything running at lower than native LCD resolution. Seriously, I wouldn't play the game at all if that was the only option. I know people who run their LCDs at lower resolution at all the time and never care for the difference. Drives me nuts.

Anyway...

So after some messing around I think what makes the biggest impact for me in PA was to completely turn off the shadows. Huge difference! I don't really miss them much and the game is much smoother. I played on 5 planets with 5 AIs and it was very playable with very few glitches. The second one is antialiasing. Not sure about the headlights. Everything else was still on the highest setting.

@ZakTheEvil,
Odd question, How old is your LCD?? is it from the 90's....(joke),,
I am guessing your LCD monitor predates 2010 tho..
In 2016 most people own LCD's that can RESAMLPE the image and that somewhat Anti-Aliases the image automatically at no cost to the hardware running it.
Yes it's not the most sharpest image ever BUT it's more than acceptable for most.

AND do you realize that there are 100's of different hardware setups that are different from yours.
What works for you might be different from what works for someone with a different CPU GPU combo.
For me the best option to play the game is to lower the NATIVE DESKTOP RESOLUTION!!
Why you might ask?? I have an IntelHD 4000 embedded GPU , I can turn shadows on and off and it has minimal impact for me, hell i can turn HDR on and off and the impact is minimal, most performance gained for me is through my advice posted in the first post of this topic and setting my desktop to a lower resolution.

My advice is designed to be BROAD enough to cover almost all hardware config's..
It's just advice if you don't like dont heed it, BUT if you don't like it then don't complain about it either, no-one really gives a sh.... hmm better stop myself there

If you don't like playing a game at sub optimal resolution then go buy a better PC or graphics card and stop complaining on here about my advice on how to improve your game settings..

@ZakTheEvil
Don't think i'm going against you for any reason, it's just what your complaining about is really a trivial thing.
It's not that important. you might find that HARDCORE RTS gamers will happily sacrifice graphics and graphic fidelity for FPS in any situation simply for the fact of having a better FPS improves your APM.

If you don't like playing a game at sub optimal resolution then go buy a better PC or graphics card and stop complaining on here about my advice on how to improve your game settings..[/QUOTE]

I was commenting, not complaining, that suggesting to play at non-native resolution is a bad advice. I have 6700K, GTX980Ti and the new Asus ROG Swift IPS GSYNC monitor, so I'm good. Except that GSYNC doesn't work with PA, but that whole other story.

"In 2016 most people own LCD's that can RESAMLPE the image and that somewhat Anti-Aliases the image automatically at no cost to the hardware running it." - First time ever I see anyone call blurry scaled image "antialiasing". I rest my case. You can play at 640x480 for all I care. Just please quit giving that advice to people. Cheers.

If i could play at 640x480 i would
And how about NO i won't change my advice, like i said before if you don't like it don't heed it.

@ZakTheEvil
Most LCD's use nearest-neigbour interpolation when scaling, that IS a form of Anti-Aliasing... sooo .. yeah...


Edit..
anyways we should leave this argument/discussion at that..
Or if you want we can argue the point for another 100 odd post's,
Either way i'm not going to change the advice i have written up here that has been here for over 2 years..

For you, lowering the resolution is bad. Sure. But that's on you, and not anyone else.

Less false equivalences, more recognition that opinion isn't an actual fact. You're right in that antialiasing isn't the same as downsizing resolution in strict terms because AA is a pass on the rendered frame as supposed to something that goes in at compute time.

Sadly, you're completely wrong with shadows because obviously shadows have to be mapped in order for the frame to be rendered. That's why older games did a shadow pass with / around lighting, sometimes it was even pre-baked so you didn't actually have to do any render passes in the draw call. However these days we generally have real-time shadows (though someone will probably correct me in PA's case given the optimisations necessary to make this scale of RTS playable) which means they're calculated on the fly from actual light sources present at any given point in time.

You can't stand lowering the resolution. Absolutely fine. You can stand removing shadows. Absolutely fine.

Telling people they're wrong in equating the two? Nuh uh. You don't understand the graphics pipeline well enough to make those claims, sorry.

Hey all, Ive been getting really low fps in a game my pc should be able to handle. I get max 20-30 fps in early game when there is little going on. Later on id be lucky to see 10. This happens at high or low settings. My specs are as follows: Radeon R9 290, Intel i7 970, 16gb ram, Windows 10 x64. My drivers are all up to date. Ive attahced the log files requested. Please help!

That should perform much better than that... dxdiag looks OK. Are you playing steam version? Might be worth trying to launch the PA.exe file directly (use x64 version). Could also be some other software causing issues, @DeathByDenim can give details...

Could you please go into the in game settings and try lowering some of the graphics settings, one at a time and test to see which setting is causing the performance drop.
It will help me find out if there is a shader causing an issue.

Example,
Set all in game graphics settings to High or Uber.
Then turn one setting down and test the game to see how it performs.

I'm sure with that setup you should be able to run everything at Uber settings with "Resolution scaling at 100%" and "Anti-aliasing or FXAA" turned OFF for best performance.

@cdrkf
The PA log file will tell you if it's the steam version, just check the mount location,
if it's a "~~/steam/steamapps/common/~~" dir then it's usually the steam version.

Also the third line in the log says:

Code:

[18:46:37.078] INFO Looks like we are running via Steam

which is maybe easier.

Anyway, @unproventheorem , also try going through the list of incompatible software. Some programs are known to cause trouble. https://wiki.palobby.com/wiki/Windows_Incompatible_Software
Also try with the clean boot option at the end of the list if you don't have anything.

@DeathByDenim Thanks so much for this! I disabled the on screen display for my fps monitor and that seems to have fixed it. When I turn it back on, it briefly shows the fps as 59 then immediately drops to 29.

If you want to check fps in PA, the shortcut is ctrl + p. Keep pressing that combo to cycle through screens and turn it off again.

Something in the PA engine doesn't like overlays.