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Somebody at FPS admin found the cause of the lag problem
I assume the connection at Treyarch is extremely fast, so if this is true, then I can see how they missed it in the testing. Yet another reason for a large scale beta...
I spent all day yesterday trying to identify the problem here, and it finally came down to Black Ops Live Stat Streaming.
How I Identified it:
My friend was having big lag issues, even though he has a monster of a PC (i7), far better than mine, but was barely pulling 40 fps. I told him my puny Phenom II X2 was getting an average of 80-100 fps. He was as perplexed as I was, until I suggested he bring his PC round to my house and use my connection (50 down, 30 up). Once he was setup on my connection, his PC did much better, with an average of 90+ fps. So, we concluded that it was the connection - he had a meagre 1 meg up at his home, but with the 30 up I have at mine, it managed much better. Why?
Well, from the moment you log into Black Ops it starts live streaming your stats. This is why even the menus lag - it is getting data to display about game events, such as bombs destroyed, wager contracts made and fulfilled, etc, etc. This data is sent every 2 game frames, both up and down. It is constant.
How I Solved the Problem:
I set to work building a program that runs Black Ops in a shell, and wanted to block the port used for the Live stats streaming. However, doing that kills the game dead, as it "thinks" the stats server is offline, and it wont let you play, displaying a "our stats are offline at the moment please try later" type message. So, I "spoofed" it into thinking it was sending and receiving (with a null byte data packet) and that cured the lag. However, it meant no levelling up etc.
What I did next was cache the game data to the side in a holding sub program, and held it for 4 seconds (had to play around with the timing to find the sweet spot), then transmitted it. Bingo! We have a winner. Started pulling better than 125 fps.
All this informed me that this was the reason some people are getting lag, while others aren't getting it nearly as bad, and it all had to do with their up speeds - if you have a good up speed, the lag isn't nearly so bad.
What I did with these Findings:
I sent all this info over to Treyarch, and was pleased to hear they had been working on something similar. I was concerned I may have incurred a VAC ban because of the game shell, so they said they would speak to Valve for me.
Let's hope they rolled this fix out for everyone (console and PC alike) asap.
How I Identified it:
My friend was having big lag issues, even though he has a monster of a PC (i7), far better than mine, but was barely pulling 40 fps. I told him my puny Phenom II X2 was getting an average of 80-100 fps. He was as perplexed as I was, until I suggested he bring his PC round to my house and use my connection (50 down, 30 up). Once he was setup on my connection, his PC did much better, with an average of 90+ fps. So, we concluded that it was the connection - he had a meagre 1 meg up at his home, but with the 30 up I have at mine, it managed much better. Why?
Well, from the moment you log into Black Ops it starts live streaming your stats. This is why even the menus lag - it is getting data to display about game events, such as bombs destroyed, wager contracts made and fulfilled, etc, etc. This data is sent every 2 game frames, both up and down. It is constant.
How I Solved the Problem:
I set to work building a program that runs Black Ops in a shell, and wanted to block the port used for the Live stats streaming. However, doing that kills the game dead, as it "thinks" the stats server is offline, and it wont let you play, displaying a "our stats are offline at the moment please try later" type message. So, I "spoofed" it into thinking it was sending and receiving (with a null byte data packet) and that cured the lag. However, it meant no levelling up etc.
What I did next was cache the game data to the side in a holding sub program, and held it for 4 seconds (had to play around with the timing to find the sweet spot), then transmitted it. Bingo! We have a winner. Started pulling better than 125 fps.
All this informed me that this was the reason some people are getting lag, while others aren't getting it nearly as bad, and it all had to do with their up speeds - if you have a good up speed, the lag isn't nearly so bad.
What I did with these Findings:
I sent all this info over to Treyarch, and was pleased to hear they had been working on something similar. I was concerned I may have incurred a VAC ban because of the game shell, so they said they would speak to Valve for me.
Let's hope they rolled this fix out for everyone (console and PC alike) asap.
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