What in the world is happening?

[MenDAKE]

Okay, here's the thing. Myself and 7 of my buddies only play BF2 in a LAN environment. We all have very similar computers (AMD 3ghz 1GB RAM, medium range graphic cards), but for some reason 2 of my friends have a horrible time with BF2 lag. Oddly enough, last week only one of them had the problem, but this week it's two.

We are all IT professionals so the problem is not with needing to upgrade or repair our computers. We realize what the requirements are for BF2, and we've tried things like defragging, making suire PIO mode is turned off, clearing the shader cache, etc., but for some reason the game is copletely unplayable for two of my friends. It lags and spikes every 20 or 30 seconds for them. It also takes about 3 or 4 minutes more for them to load the game than it does for everyone else.

I know it's not a hardware issue because one of the guys who has this problem has a system that is virtually identical to mine every single way, with the exception that he has a better graphic card than mine (I have a Geforce 6600 and he has an Radeon 800). However, even with all his settings on "low" he still gets horrible, horrible lag, whereas I can play on medium and I get perfectly smooth gameplay.

Does anyone have any suggestions for us? Could it be that the problem is patch 1.3, because when we played BF2 a few months ago with an earlier patch this problem didn't seem to exist.

[venny]

Re: What in the world is happening?

network problems? inteference? u use the computer for other stuff? maybe virus attacks? firewall configuration?

[Ali G]

Re: What in the world is happening?

well, i've never seen this happen before =/

[imported_TheDragon]

Re: What in the world is happening?

yes - I have your mosy likely problem(s)
part(s) failure
happened to several of us
first thing is constant degradation in performance

likely culprits:
power supply
ram
vid card

good luck = I feel your pain (ie been there)

[BlueBunny63]

Re: What in the world is happening?

I've found that BF2 seems to love some video cards and hate others. My guess is that you're on the trail of the problem by noting that the difference between the two systems is in their respective cards.

Try swapping the cards between a badly-performing system and a good one, and I'll bet that you'll see the evil behavior switch to the formerly OK system, and the old evil one suddenly playing the game well.

Best of luck with it, though. BF2 is a crappily-coded product on many levels, so even if you sort out the video problems, you'll have no end of crashes when playing online.

[T-Unit]

Re: What in the world is happening?

This used to happen to me every so often and i finally figured it out a while ago:

(for me what happened etc)

when a new patch came out id d/l it etc, then id get a ping of 150upwards on servers i usually got 20 on, it was unplayable, skipping and lagging. eventually i found out my problem....
when i downloaded a patch the game file was changed and my virus prtector firewall program thing needed to ask me to grant bf2 access to the net as it had been modified...
before i play i close all programs etc for better performance and when shutting off my virus protector so it could not ask me - but for some reason it was still there and not fully shut down as it was disrupting my ping etc

So i just had to start up bf2 with all my programs running just once so i could grant the new version access.

(sorry if this isnt the answer you're looking for)

[ThIrD-EyE]

Re: What in the world is happening?

We are all IT professionals so the problem is not with needing to upgrade or repair our computers.

for IT pros, i would think you would at least list your full system specs yours and of both your friends computers. its hard to help people when you dont have all the info you need to make a suggestion on what is possibly a hardware related problem.

[TP.BigBoss]

Re: What in the world is happening?

in my views depending on your internet connections because apparently wireless lags big time i am told by a fellow clan member, if your all IT professionals should'nt you know this?? i smell a hint of a lie stiring here, im 16 and i can wire a pc up with my eyes closed and my hands behind my back using just my teeth(reality wouldnt happen) but still im great with hardware and software, but because you know a spec of a pc dont make you a professional my friend.

Professionals could click there fingers and know this problem because they wire computers up to there eyeball's. but this is not about you bieng a lier this is about the problem

[Track]

Re: What in the world is happening?

My problem was Zone Alarm. Turned it off and everything ran smooth.

[big_sammy_b]

Re: What in the world is happening?

funny also becuase as far as i was aaware AMD didn't do a 3GHz chip? Even the dual core 4000+ chips run at like 2.4 or 2.8 ghz don't they?