How to boost your FPS in Planetside 2

Managed to boost my FPS from 60 to 100 with this

• Delete or rename your UserOptions file and start from scratch with your settings in the game. During this part of Beta, you should probably do this each time we announce a significant patch. Once you do this, launch the game. (Boosted my fps by ~10)
• Set everything to medium, well everything except Render Quality – leave this at 100% for the moment. Once all settings are at medium, logout and EXIT, then restart the client. There are a couple of settings that might not get reset properly unless you exit, so please remember to actually EXIT, not just log out.
• Now that you’ve started up, pick a server and get into the warp-gate spawn location of a low-population server (location isn’t important right now, since network lag won’t be part of this tweaking).
• Set the game to full-screen, native resolution (the “normal” resolution for a single monitor) – you folks running massive monitor setups, please start with just one for now and progress from there after you complete these steps. Now press ALT+F to display your frame-rate in the BOTTOM LEFT of the screen (just underneath the mini-map display). Pick a location and something to look at and then note your fps number.
• Go into graphics settings, set render quality to 50% (just for now, this is a test). Now make sure you’re looking at roughly the same thing from roughly the same location – note your NEW fps number. Now there will be two sections, pick based on what happened with your fps number.
  
  Scenario A: Your fps number went up noticably
  Your graphics card is controlling your frame rate more than your CPU. You should try the next series of changes, in this order (and one at a time, if you’re patient – no need to turn something off if it doesn’t affect frame rate here )
  1.Decrease resolution
  2.Use a Render Quality other than 100% (try 85%)
  3.Turn down shadows
  4.Turn off options with checkboxes (no order here, cards all vary in the costs of these)
  5.Turn down lighting quality
  6.Turn down flora quality
  7.Turn down model quality
  8.Turn down particle quality and effects quality together.
  9.Turn down texture quality
  
  Scenario B: Your fps number DID NOT go up much
  1.Lower the audio quality
  2.Lower the Terrain quality
  3.Lower the particle and effects quality (yes both of these)
  Your GPU isn’t limiting you it should be possible to get better looking graphics. Reset to HIGH, and then go back to step 4 with the HIGH settings on everything.
  
  There are other settings in the UserOptions configuration file that can be changed, but if we didn't put up a UI section for it then some bad things might happen if you change them. You make these changes at your own risk for now - we do plan on adding some additional options as we stabilize these things and hope to put more information here. Also, as we make and publish new patches it's helpful to start over from scratch with your options again once in a while to see if we've made improvements that help your specific system.

Shameless borrowed from SA.

Some interesting dialogue from CycleMcHurtz (PS2 Dev) for those interested.

http://forums.station.sony.com/ps2/index.php?threads/tweak-guide-v0-1.17230/page-18#post-585359

I based this on your questions and some others I've seen over the last day or two. I typed it up while eating lunch, so pardon the crumbs. You folks are taking your time to help test the game, so I figure you deserve someone to take a little time explaining what you see. I won't have much time to respond, so please take this in the spirit is was intended - to explain simply what's going on. Thanks, and keep shooting!

[ DX9 engines can only use one thread ]
Mostly false. There are technical details involved, but only certain tasks need to be done in the "single" thread here - they are the important ones, but not the only thing that the game and driver have to do with the graphics card. Programmers can (and we do) have multiple threads working on graphics data while still using DX9.


[ Planetside 2 only uses x cores/doesn't support multi-threading ]
False. This is a misunderstanding of the problem. If you look at core usage in the monitoring software of your choice, you will see one core used much more than others most of the time. This is currently by design, but not idea. Other cores and threads can get a substantial amount of work to do as well, but the work is "situational" - it depends upon what you're doing.

You could be loading things off the storage media, working with audio files, performing complex math equations. There are a lot of things, and much of the time the AVERAGE (what most monitoring software shows) is less than 100% (sometimes less than 50%). Not all the threads can run at the same time (and they SHOULDN'T either) and sometimes one thread needs an answer to a question it asked a second thread to do, so someone has to wait. Some of these are quick to find and correct, and others take substantial time and effort to remove. Doing these things too quickly or without serious analysis often results in significant problems which usually result in visual anomalies or random crashes.


[ The CPU / GPU indicator is wrong ]
False. The problem is that not everyone understands what it's telling you. When the indicator shows [GPU] that means the graphics card is getting behind drawing AWESOME. The game code (CPU) is feeding information (through the driver) to the graphics card faster than it can fling pixels at the screen. The game eventually has to wait for the graphics card to catch up.

If the graphics card is finishing its work FASTER than the game can feed data to it, then the indicator shows [CPU]. This does not mean your CPU is at 100%, it means the graphics card is getting bored. You can give it more work to do by turning up some of the graphics settings. AT THE MOMENT the optimal point is where the GPU indicator is flipping to [CPU] in large battles, but goes back to [GPU] when things settle down a bit.

We still have work to do, and we know this very well. I have reports going back to last November that show the different changes we've made and how it's affected performance (yes, we've been paying attention to performance that whole time). When Smed says we're focused on performance optimizations he's right, and we've finally got time to get a great group of really smart people together to all work on this together because most of the other features are pretty much ready to go.


[ Low settings have low frame rate - the game is poorly optimized ]
Not fair, but partially true. Optimization is a continuous and iterative process, and does not affect all PC configurations in the same way. Iterative means we have to design a change, test it internally with tools to see if the change affects the game in the expected way and then we give it to the world to break (and you folks deliver splendidly). We then evaluate the results, make changes and adjustments, and do it again. We actually had a test zone what was 1k x 1k with continuous explosions every 10 meters. It was awesome, and it showed us many things we needed to improve.

Low settings are a problem. For many years, people have associated low settings with awesome frame rate. With some of the recent generations of hardware, this may not be the case. Which one of these is you?

[ I have the most amazing video cards ever. I mortgaged my house and installed special power feeds so I can have 14 graphics cards running in my 10-foot tall case with nitrogen cooling ] - That sounds amazing! I'll have to come visit, and you should set your "Graphics Quality" to High.

[ I got a card people recommended for me a year or two ago, and it's pretty good ] - Fair enough. You should start with "Graphics Quality" at medium.

[ I think I have a graphics card, but I also think it uses crayons ] - No worries, you should try "Graphics Quality" at low. Don't eat the crayons.

Note that I said "Graphics Quality" - that's the setting to keep an eye on in this case. Not to be confused with "Render Quality" or "Overall Quality" - they are different and you adjust those for different reasons. The reason you should do this is because much of the time the graphics cards nowadays have power-saving features that dynamically clock up and down depending upon how much work they get.

If you have the most amazing video card ever and set "Graphics Quality" to low your hardware will laugh at you and them probably go to sleep most of the time. This causes really strange things to happen, and can significantly affect the frame rate. Sometimes you can find a "performance mode" setting somewhere that can prevent the dynamic change from happening, but you might as well just go to Medium or High instead and give your hardware something to do.

Why aren't you in our outfit? Hmm?

http://wpplatoon.com.au/index.php?threads/introduce-yourself.1899/
http://wpplatoon.com.au/index.php?threads/planet-side-2-igns.1901/
http://wpplatoon.com.au/index.php?threads/aurora-gaming-planetside-2-teamspeak-details.1898/

Get on it There's only one proviso to begin with and that is that you are TR on Briggs.