would upgrade GPU have any positive effect on gameplay and performence

Well, the 285m has 1g DDR3 VRAM, and the 680m has 4g DDR5 VRAM, so there was a ram upgrade involved.

I'm running a 750ti; it handles the game at 150% scaling amazingly. thats running a Q8300 which isn't too bad but it's at 2.5ghz.

As a side note we've been doing a ton of optimizations on both the server and client. Some of these coming out in the next build. We are making far better use of client CPU resources now which has had a pretty big impact on perf.

I would argue you want plentiful ram (at least 12GB), a decent GPU and a great CPU.

I agree, i have 8GB of ram and it has been more than enough for any game i have played except this one.

I have peaked at a usage of around 6.8 GB (it was close to that) on this game only (excluding all other processes). Of course, i had thousands of units and there were probably more than 5 planets. So if you like to spam units i would suggest going to 12 or 16GB. I also had too many patrol areas.

What was the speed of the RAM? 1600?

Yeah, I think the CPU is very important. My brother uses a 460 too but the performance has been quite poor and he has put the game aside for now waiting for improved performance. The difference is he has one of the earliest quad core CPUs from quite a few years back (ddr2 RAM probably doesn't help either). He hasn't played for a number of builds now so after the new one is out I will get him to try again; with multi-threading I expect it to perform much better now.

My other brother has a AMD 5870 and with the same sort of CPU so his performance has been very similar with everything turned low. My mobile graphics card is of a similar speed but with an i7 CPU (and everything which goes with that) and it runs the game great on high and uber settings. So, I would say don't skimp on the CPU for this game.

One thing I have noticed is this game uses the same amount of ram as a Lighted Car in mudbox running 33.4million polygons edited and worked in realtime. :|

The game runs great on a 2.5ghz Core 2 Quad. i'm on medium with 150% scaling. runs at like 30fps with like 90-100% cpu usage. I'll upgrade to a G3258 Pentium and overclock that and see if I get a good framerate.

The one with the AMD GPU has a Core 2 Quad Q9450 2.66Ghz while the 460 owner's is a slightly older/slower one but i forget the model. Going from what you say then when we try it again after the new patch (this weekend fingers crossed) I will encourage them to put the settings up as apart from putting textures on medium everything else was on low or off I believe so it wasn't a pretty game. I want them to play more often so hopefully they can get similar performance ...hmm, though looking above you have a 750 ti which is faster than their graphics cards with more vram. Will test and see I guess .
(Actually my brother has 460 SLI but that is not enabled in the game yet. It will be interesting what kind of boost that will give as he will still be limited by vram and CPU. Should be good though)

I have four gigs of RAM, 98% of it is used by this game. XD

I'm planning on upgrading to a couple of Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz 8GB SODIMM modules for this. Not to mention a CPU upgrade in a few months.

I would be curious how it runs now. Believe it or not my work PC is 5 years old (but I have a new video card). It has gotten a ton faster with all the recent threading updates.

If you end up buying a new gpu consider buying AMD R7 265. It is in the same price range and provides better fps overall. Don't know in this game though because i think it is heavily optimized for nvidia cards.

Link for gpuboss comparision
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-R7-265-vs-GeForce-GTX-750-Ti

Stay away from AMD if possible for this game. PA only likes NVidia cards.

Since the multi thread client update (recent) the performance has jumped for older machines. I play on a 2.6ghz phenom ii x3 and its fine with gtx 560. Only setting I've notched down is textures to medium as my graphics card only has 1gb memory. With 2gb graphics ram high textures is fine.

The other thing to remember is ram. I'm only on 4gb so that limits me to about 4 planets. Going over that causes the game to page which makes it crawl.

It was true of the earlier builds due to the better support from nvidia, however game is running fine with amd now (on windows at least). My advice, get the best bang for buck. The 750ti isn't a good value option, however lots of other nvidia cards are, eg gtx 760 or the previous gen 650ti. Plenty of good value Radeon cards too so you can't go far wrong.

To clarify - We are OpenGL, and quite simply, Nvidia's OpenGL drivers are currently quite a bit superior to ATI's. If we were windows only and DirectX, I doubt anyone would see much difference between the two.

All that said, I'm an Nvidia guy for my home machine, because while their hardware is roughly equivalent, their driver quality has always been top notch.

Ah ok, although to be clear the game does work properly on recent amd graphics hardware? I mean there is a big difference between a 5 fps advantage on an otherwise equivalent nvidia card where both are playable, and a 30 fps difference where the nvidia card is smooth and the amd card is barely playable?

Tl:dr, what kind of difference are we talking? The only amd card I can test on is a firepro (which works fine btw) which isn't really representative of what anyone would have as it has different drivers...

I play at work on a 7870, so we have some recent, middle range ATI hardware to play on. I don't have any perf problems at 1080P on Uber.

Same reason I have an Nvidia card. Recently got a laptop via school with an ATI GPU and I really disliked the driver support.

Good The point is then you might get a bit more performance out of Nvidia card of the same level, but if there is a really good deal on an AMD card it should still work well.