Planetside 2's first Performance Update goes live, makes faster game

SOE have today released the first step of their OMFG (or, Operation: Make Faster Game ) initiative. Performance Update 01 has just gone live, and it's changelist is a catalogue of tweaks, full of words like "optimized," and "faster," and "reduced". It turns out that framerates are OP.

Refactored game rendering to better utilize multiple CPU cores. The same has been done for UI rendering.
Optimized the CPU cost of some purely aesthetic physics objects
Added adaptive complexity levels for physics simulations based on current client performance
Disabled redundant physics processing between remotely-simulated vehicles
Improved simulations between complex compound shapes, primarily vehicles
Sound emitter optimization
Numerous optimizations have been done to remote character processing to reduce the cost of per-player processing.
We found that players getting in and out of vehicles was causing some performance issues. This has been addressed and is working as expected, now.
Audio asset clean-up
Added a frame rate smoothing option. (This is on by default and trust us, you probably want this. It will make your frame rate smoother and reduce spikes. Your FPS counter will show as lower overall, but that's not a bad thing.)
Adjusted the default graphics settings. (If you push Reset to Default, it will set the graphics settings appropriate for your system.)

That's not even close to the full list of changes, though. To see everything, head over to the Planetside 2 forum's announcement post .

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.