BF2 Lag: My problem or theirs?

[Stuxnet]

I?m trying to get to the source of a problem I?m having with BF2. At just about every crucial point in the game (such as an enemy confrontation), the game hitches like crazy. It feels like pretty severe lag. Does anyone else run into this? I?m not seeing any packet loss and my ping times are great on the servers I play on. Framerates are fine, too. I have an AMD 64 3500+ with 2GB of RAM and a 6800GT.

It seems to happen whenever any real action starts happening and it?s really starting to hack me off. A lot.

I was just wondering if this is happening to everyone or if there?s likely something wrong on my end. I don?t seem to run into these problems on the other two games I play online (CS:S and UT2004).

 

[Azndude2190]

Do you have the latest drivers?...or maybe you need to rollback on a driver...did you play around with the games settings?...

 

[royaldank]

Have you tried playing single player? If there is lag there, it's obviously on your end.

 

[Stuxnet]

I have the latest drivers from nVidia and I've tried changing game settings, but nothing has worked. Single player plays very fluid with no hitching.

 

[imported_FishTaco]

In BF2 options, is your connection settings set to cable 256K or better instead of T1(LAN)? Not sure if that will help, but it might.

With your specs, I wouldn't suspect an issue related to your hardware. The most likely culprit is going to be the server you're playing on. Yes, it may have a very low ping, that just means the machine is close to you on the internet. But BF2 on the server side is also pretty CPU intensive and the server you're trying to connect to may not have a good enough CPU or memory. There's no way to tell from the ping, the ping just indicates how long a packet takes to get to the server and how many packets were lost on the way. So my advice is to try a different server. Preferably an unranked server since the ranked servers need even more CPU and memory to track everyone's stats. Also with EA requirements to become an official ranked server hosting company, (they have to put up X number of free public ranked servers to be able to rent out ranked servers), you can bet alot of those ranked servers are overloaded.

 

[luigi1]

I have to agree here. I'm running simular hardware and have no issues but there are POS servers out there that lag like crasy. I always play on ranked servers and there are a lot of bad ones, there are also good ones. So try a different server.

 

[Sureshot324]

It's the server. Running a BF2 server is very resource intensive and there are a lot of people running BF2 servers with player limits way too high for their hardware to handle.

 

[Stuxnet]

Thanks for the input guys... maybe I'll try unranked servers for awhile and see if that alters my experience.

 

[Kaspian]

Do you lag with all map sizes 16,32,64?

 

[Stuxnet]

Yeah... it's almost as if the game just "chokes" whenever something important is happening. For instance, I'll be strolling along just fine... then I'll see an enemy, and as soon as I engage the enemy, it's like the engine says "okay, let's see how you do with a BLINDFOLD ON!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!".

 

[ahurtt]

What is the paging file size for your Virtual Memory? One thing you can do is set the Virtual Memory paging file size to Custom size and set the same minimum and maximum size to keep the OS from having to resize the page file. And put the page file on a separate drive that is not used as much if you have 2 drives or more. You have 2 Gig of RAM so the page file shouldn't be much of a factor but I don't think you can ever truly altogether get away from using it.

 

[jrphoenix]

I am having the exact same experience / problem as you. You can see from my systemp specs that I have 2Gb and a 3800+. I am starting to wonder if its my crappy Verizon DSL (switched from cable about 2 months ago when I bought a new home).

 

[40Hands]

Sounds kind of like the problem I had.. When the game started to slow down, could you just turn around and face behind you and it would be smooth again?

Make sure your sound card drivers are updated and also check out your BIOS settings and disable "fast write" and try increasing your video aperture size to at least 128. I am not sure what one of these settings fixed my problem but I have not experienced it since doing this.

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: Sureshot324
It's the server.

Yeah, I would tend to agree, the server may be forcing clients down to 56k or may not have the bandwidth or power to support the number of players they are trying to use.

I tend to connect to ~40 person max servers because of this. VERY few 64 player servers have adequate resources to serve a 64 player game.

If you haven't set your client side option for bandwidth to at least 128k, then do that. Most decent servers will limit this for you to 128k or 56k but you want to be able to take advantage of 128k if they limit to that. There is little need for anything higher, few servers are actually going to have more than 128k dedicated bandwidth per player (64 players * 128k = 8megabits of bandwidth both up and down)

 

[jrphoenix]

Originally posted by: BroeBo
Sounds kind of like the problem I had.. When the game started to slow down, could you just turn around and face behind you and it would be smooth again?

Make sure your sound card drivers are updated and also check out your BIOS settings and disable "fast write" and try increasing your video aperture size to at least 128. I am not sure what one of these settings fixed my problem but I have not experienced it since doing this.

What's a fast write? That's in the BIOS? How do I cahnge the video apeture size to 128? Will that affect my LCD? See link below for system specs. Thank you!

 

[luigi1]

I'm not an expert but I'll try to relate what I know/have heard. Disabling fast writes may help, but it may hurt. Do it try it, if its worse undo it, I dont think you can hurt anything here. AGP apture size is the size of data youre prosessor and vid card talk through. I think 128 is the right value, at least thats what I've always set mine as. Sound card drivers and I'll add sound card setup in the game can be HUGE. The top setting will cause lag and stuttering for me, expierment with these serttings. As I set here typing this the sound card settings seem like there gonna be your problem. Hope all this helps you. Get back to us and let us know.