Performance on Low-end Machine

[Wasserblaffer]

Last week, I got this game for a friend's birthday, as we used to play Total Annihilation fanatically when we were kids. I am confident it runs fine on his desktop, since he has a pretty hefty machine.

However, I also got myself a copy, so we might play together again, figuring I could see how it runs later, and ask STEAM for a refund if it doesn't. The system requirements were a bit vague, and I've read mixed messages about the games performance. Now I've booted the game for a few minutes, and I am still not quite sure. The menu, server navigation, and setting up a game seems terrible, yet it works more or less fine ingame. The game also says my machine's specs "do not meet requirements for offline play", even though on paper minimum requirements are passed, and I was under the impression that offline play would generally be less demanding than online play.

So, I was hoping some of the more experienced players could tell me a bit about the game's performance on the long term, during actual prolonged matches.

I am playing on a laptop with the following specs:

- AMD A8-7100 APU
- with R5 Graphics
- 8GB RAM

I know I can't expect a "master race" performance, but I'm not looking for that. If it runs smoothly on low settings, with all bling disabled, I'm fine with that.

Not being salty here, just clueless. I really like the concept, I just want to know whether I'll actually be able to enjoy it a bit on my office-grade hardware, and STEAM's 2-hours isn't actually a whole lot of time to test a game like this properly.

[mikeyh]

You'll only be able to play online with shared public servers.... which is LESS demanding.

For a local server / offline you really need 12GB with integrated graphics and a higher spec CPU.

Your CPU will be weak for bigger / longer games.

GPU should be OK for low settings depending on resolution.

https://wiki.palobby.com/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation_Server_Sim_Performance_/_Time_Dilation_/_RAM_Usage

[MrRagez]

You should be fine, I've got a crappy AMD FX-6300 and it handles it just fine.

[blutooth]

When you play offline, your PC has to run the server as well as the client side of the game hence high minimum specification.

However if you plan to play on a local LAN, you can have the stronger PC host the game and run the server.

[Quitch]

Originally posted by BluTooth:

When you play offline

To note: BluTooth means literally offline, not single-player.

[Jackbandanna]

Up until very recently, I played PA and PA Titans on a ATI 4670 (1GB), released in 2008. Using mostly low settings, I managed around 30-40fps at 1080p. I swapped that GPU out for the recent RX 460 and tend to go 60-100fps on medium @1080p. My FX-6300 CPU has stayed the same and is prolly now my bottleneck. Also last spring I went from 8GB RAM to 16GB. For PA this was not much of an improvement but now I don't need to close Firefox/Chrome when playing on a massive system, as web browsers these days can eat up a few gigs of RAM and some poorly designed/massive PA planet systems can demand well above 4GB.