Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

[Glitchking9]

Basically whenever I look in another direction I get a nice spike of framerate lag before the game goes back to 60+ fps again. It lasts anywhere from 2 seconds to 4 before it goes back to buttery smooth gameplay. Frapsed showed it going down to a minimum of 10 fps during those times but I'm not sure if fraps will show lower numbers than that . My game also tends to stutter/lag when I get into gun fights, specifically close range. However that tends to only happen when I haven't already gone through the 'new area' lag spike I described earlier. I run the game on all max settings with AA off. My internet connection is not the problem, as I had these problems with a ping of 16 and experience this to some extent in singleplayer mode. I noticed these problems lessening when I ran the game on medium and lower graphic settings, but when I'm just standing still in one location with no new actions going on my game runs silky smooth. If this helps at all, I often hear my hard drives spinning during these lag spikes. The game tends to stutter occassionally as I run from one location to another. It's really annoying..

So I'm not sure which hardware or whatever is the culprit, though I'm thinking it's my memory. Here's my specs:

P4 2.6ghz
1gb (512 x 2) PC3200 DDR400 RAM
2 74gb 10,000 RPM Raptor HDD's in a RAID 0 Array
BFG Geforce 7800GS OC (2 days old)
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS PCI (also 2 days old)
Thermaltake 420W PSU

Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated!

[knghtwhosaysni]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

That CPU is kinda feh, but I don't think it should be too much of a problem as long as you don't go into the larger servers. I think your problem is definitely your memory; you need more of it. I'd say get another 1gb set of 2x512mb.

[Glitchking9]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

Hm, alright, I'll see what I can do about upgrading my memory.. Don't think its worth the money or effort to replace the P4 with a slightly better P4 (like the 3.0 or something, it's a sort of dated mobo). Question though: Since I'm afraid of my mobo not liking all of its memory slots filled I'm considering a 1gb stick rather than a 2 512mb sticks. There won't be any problems if I have 2 512mb dual channel sticks and a seperate 1gb stick in my mobo, right?

Oh, forgot to put my mobo into the picture; it's an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe

[knghtwhosaysni]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

The problem with having 1x1gb and 2x512mb is that not all motherboards will run assymmetric dual-channel. I know mine does, and I'm checking up on your now.

edit: yeah, it turns out your motherboard has to have matching pairs for each set of DIMM sockets. So you will not be able to use dual-channel with that 3-stick setup.

[Glitchking9]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

I just upgraded to 2gb (4 x 512mb, maybe dual channel) PC3200 RAM, and it STILL lags horribly ingame. ESPECIALLY when I'm in a combat zone. I could only guess it's my 420w psu not providing enough power to my parts, or my cpu.. Any ideas? I'm not sure if my memory is running at the right rate, not sure how to check... It might be the fact that all 4 memory slots are filled?.. I don't know! =(

[knghtwhosaysni]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

Is it just the large 64 player servers that it stutters on? Does it happen in 32-player servers?

[Glitchking9]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

It stutters a lot less often in 32 man servers than in the 60 man ones. Turning corners in a 32 man server usually causes no stuttering whereas in the larger servers it stutters, and when there's atleast a handful of people around the corner I will lag for a few seconds depending on the player number. In the larger servers I also sometimes get large lag spikes where I lose control of my character for 1-4 seconds. My hard drive is on full throttle during those times. I hear my hard drive spinning a lot more and louder in the larger servers as well..if that matters.

But in the larger servers, when it comes to wandering around in a confined area it rarely stutters.. Just in areas where there are atleast a few people to load at once or when there's some combat going on I'll lag hardcore on the larger servers. For the time I tested my system in the smaller servers, I have had no experiences where I had to spontaneiously load several people, etc.

The only thing I seem completly cured of is lag at the very start of the game when the soldier type and map pop up.

I'm playing in a 58 pop server right now with next to no lag.. But I haven't been in any major fights either. It's really hard to generalize my performance, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that my performance clearly drops when I have to load a lot of players spontaneiously or when there's some action going on.

[|CBW|Simon]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

What are your in game settings for video and sound? Are you running everything at high?

What video and sound card drivers did you install. The ones off the disks or the more recent ones from Nvidia and Creative Labs?

I think a power issue would be more of a crash as opposed to just mess your frame rate when you turn and then let you go back to normal.

[Heavy552 AWG]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

The problem with having 1x1gb and 2x512mb is that not all motherboards will run assymmetric dual-channel. I know mine does, and I'm checking up on your now.

edit: yeah, it turns out your motherboard has to have matching pairs for each set of DIMM sockets. So you will not be able to use dual-channel with that 3-stick setup.

Exactly. I have that exact board as well and run 4x512 Kingston Hyper-x matched sets.

My stutter usually occurs when I fail to defrag my drives regularly. But does not happen too often, Im running a 3.0 Prescott CPU.

Another reason for the stutter on my machine is the old antivirus kicking in to scan at certain times of the week.

[Glitchking9]

Re: Frequent inGame Load Lag/Stutters

All my graphic settings are on high at 1024 rez. I usually get 25-35 fps average with that. My audio is also set on high and the audio renderer was my software.. maybe I should change that to hardware or Creative X-Fi. EAX is enabled. My graphics card driver is 9.1.3.1 (nvidia). When I installed my sound card card about a week ago I installed the drivers from their site. I have two partitions running on my raid 0 hdd's; one for windows the other for programs. The windows partition (which btw is 10gb big, if you know whethor or not that's too small) is being defragmented right now...

If this is a possible problem, my virtual memory/pagefile size was manually set to be stored on my program partition with a custom size: 2 MB initial size, 1534 MB maximum size. However I noticed at the bottom of this virtual memory window that the recommended size is 3069mb. My 2gb pagefile.sys file could not be defragmented since I made that change.

Well I defragmented my hard drives with PerfectDisk 7.0 and set my pagefile size to 200mb max. Checking my pagefile usage while the game is running however shows 1.07gb of pagefile being used... that's probably why I'm hearing my hard drive spinning so much, and maybe the thing that's slowing my system down?

I thought using the pagefile system was only necessary when you don't have enough ram, and that the pagefile system is a lot slower than regular ram is.