Planetside 2 drops first Performance Patch, provides monumental FPS increase

SOE has been promising major Planetside 2 performance updates for a long, long time now and I am happy to announce today the developer has made good on those promises. While only part one of their ongoing "Operation: Make Faster Game" project, SOE's first performance patch released today marks a HUGE increase in playability across the board.

Just how large are these increases? Let's put them into perspective, shall we? If you couldn't play above 20 FPS before, chances are you can now play at a steady 40-60 FPS in even the most intense firefights. Did I mention that 40 FPS is on high settings? Even players who were previously averaging 40-50 FPS are now seeing their FPS double. Mind you these performance increases are coming without noticeable decreases to the games graphical fidelity.

Just how did SOE pull off such wizardry? If you've been paying attention to the Make Faster Game video diaries, you may already have some idea as to what all went into making this happen. However, PS2's patch notes do a good job of filling in the blanks:

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.)

And that's just the general performance fixes! Other improvements include animation updates, plugging memory leaks, UI optimizations and more. General, non performance quality of life improvements and bug fixes have also been made, but overall there is too much to list here. For the full patch notes, you'll want to check out the official patch announcement here.

Have you had a chance to try out the new update? How has your performance been affected?