Planetside says CPU, hwinfo says GPU

Here´s a question for you. I´ve played alot of Planetside 2, and my cpu has always been the bottleneck according to the ingame alt+f. Even after I updated to a 2960XM, in fights involving 30+ people it´s the cpu.

Tonight I logged with hwinfo and this is what I got:


Total cpu usage avg 24%, rarely exceeding 30%
gpu usage avg 84, often maxed out.
You might say PS2 uses few cores and that´s why the total % is low but the max usage for any thread is around 60. I checked them all and that´s the only thread that high, the rest is 20-30%.

Minutes 33-42 is a drive through the countryside. GPU spikes.
Minutes 42-50 is a heavy amp station fight with low fps. CPU "spikes" to 30 (max thread drops though) and GPU drops to 70-80.

So, are theses figures normal? To me it looks like hwinfo reports the gpu as a bottleneck.

 

Yes that looks normal.

I'm also an avid PS2 player. This topic has been beaten to death already. Every other thread on the PlanetSide 2 forum is complaining about how this game is essentially single-threaded in its current state. The game has horrible optimization for multi-core CPU's. When you're just by yourself or with a few other players at the Warp Game then it's fine, GPU will always be the bottleneck. But if you get into some massive 100 vs. 100 Tech Plant or Bio Lab Zerg with infantry, armor, and aircraft, the one CPU thread that most of the gameplay runs on gets overtaxed and GPU usage and FPS plummets. Since you have an XM, overclocking your CPU will help immensely with alleviating this bottleneck, but just know that no matter what you do this game will always chug in big battles unless the optimization is fixed. O:MFG (Operation: Make Faster Game) is currently underway and the first big optimization patch is due at the end of the month.

As for your graph, don't assume just because it's showing that one CPU thread isn't maxed out doesn't mean the CPU isn't the bottleneck at that time. The noticeable drop in GPU usage should be a dead giveaway. I'm not entirely sure how the CPU thread co-dependencies have shifted over time as the PS2 dev team optimizes the game more and more, but it could be that the main CPU load shifted to another thread during the Amp Station fight. I'm not sure how big your fight was, but I would be overjoyed to be getting 70-80% GPU usage in any Zerg. In huge fights I usually get 20-30 FPS and <50% GPU usage. I can't even get your level of GPU usage in medium and small fights, only at the Warp Gate.

My great hope is that the optimization patches will fulfill their promise and fix what is this game's only glaring weakness, its awful performance. When that day comes I will leave the Battlefield series behind and make this my main online multiplayer FPS. This game far eclipses that once-proud franchise, which has been run into the ground by EA, in almost every way. Once I started playing PlanetSide, Battlefield just felt shallow and puny in depth and scale. I'm not spending $60-$100 of my hard-earned money when I can get something better for free.

 

I haven't played in a while, but when I played there was times during the alerts where there was a large number of people fighting in a small area, stuff would freeze and lag and it happened to everyone. Sometimes the server can't keep up with how many clients its gotta send data to and then everyone starts to suffer. It didn't happen very often, but hope they fixed it. oh and btw, long live NC!!

 

VS and TR are where it's at. NC just like to get in the middle of things. Hey, it's not homo if it's a three-way.

I haven't gotten too many network-related problems with the game either. The worst thing that's happened is people and vehicles would float in the air when they crested a hill. Weird thing is I could still shoot them accurately even in the air. But it's a rare issue and frankly I'm surprised how good network performance is most of the time considering the scale of the game.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I didn´t know the topic had been beaten to death, I have mostly seen threads containing "zomg bad optimizationz!"

Guess I more wanted help looking at my graphs, which still seems a bit strange to me for being bottlenecked by the cpu. Anyway it sounds like I should be happy with my gpu usage at least

 

I am glad to see other PS2 players on here nice, haven't played in over 6 months, I love the game but stopped because I thought it best to wait for the few features I really wanted too see implemented (continent locking, recertification, vehicle zoning, gifting amongst others), and because I was getting tired of them OPing and nerfing everything left right and center, so I thought it best to wait till they found a balance, wasted enough SC as it is .
Most of the changes I want still do not seem to be in yet, and on the roadmap it says unscheduled, that is not a good sign, they must be too busy porting to consoles .

 

If you've been keeping up with the forum, everything in the Roadmap was changed to unscheduled to reflect the fact that all new content and gameplay tweaks/changes have been put on indefinite hold. The entire PS2 team is focused purely on optimization from now until release on PS4 at the end of the year. While I'm happy that this will mean much better performance for me on the PC and poor performance is the #1 reason people quit this game, like you I can't help but feel that the main impetus for this was corporate pressure due to the impending release of the PS4 and a mad scramble to get this game working on that weak-a** Jaguar CPU which would be murdered by the single-threaded nature of the current game. As far as I'm concerned, this game has been in a beta state for the last year in terms of polish, performance, and stability.

The first big optimization patch is due at the end of the month, so if there's a good time to return to the game after a long hiatus this would be it.

 

Thanks for the heads up, I will definitely give it a try .

 

I'll probably jump back into PS2 in november when I get my custom desktop built so I can play with all the eye candy on.

Edit: What servers you guys play on? just curious.

 

I'm on Ceres, as a VS I was part of the Foundation when they first took off, when I decided to take a break we were over 400 people in the outfit .

I will also give it a try in November, though I will still be playing on my crappy old Dell 15R, with 5650m, ugh I really got to upgrade, but I'm going to try lasting all the way to summer next year, Maxwell FTW . ^^

 

I play on Connery.

 

I played on Helios with =ADK=, but its been a while.

 

Yeah you've been out of the loop for a while. Helios doesn't exist anymore. It was merged with Connery a few months back.

 

I was around for the merger. Just forgot for some reason.