Planetside Technical / Performance Question

Games
1

So I’ve been running PS for a bit over a week and its been a good performer on my system, although I do encounter some server lag from time to time. Also, it seems to be a memory hog as alt-tabbing in and out is VERY slow and the HD seems to chug a lot after I quit the game (implying that the game is sucking up a huge amount of HD space for virtual RAM, but I’m not technical enough to know if this is true.)

However, overall the game performance is fine. But last night I got the Air Cav cert and have tried flying the Mosquito and Reaver. In VR both were fine, but I tried recently on 3 different continents in real combat and I am getting brutal lag. Its a very choppy kind of lag, not the kind of sluggish framerate lag I would associate with a weak video card, and not the “whole world freezes” of server lag. It specifically occurs when I turn - I will turn 30 degrees, freeze, wait 5 seconds, then turn some more, then freeze again. It makes dogfighting and aerial combat a huge pain. In fact it makes it nearly impossible.

Now I’ve been able to fly the Lib, Lodestar, Gal, and drive all the ground vehicles without problem. And I have NO problem when on foot, etc. This appears to be Mossie/Reaver only, but I’ve tried it multiple times in different situations and its very consistent and repeated.

So right now i can’t really dogfight.

Any idea what the problem is?

My system is P4 2.66 with 512 megs of RAM (I believe its 400 DDR but I am not sure), with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200, and 80 Gig Ultra ATA HD. I am running the NVidia drivers from October 03, the 5.2.1.6 build. While not a master machine this system has been extremely solid with all games I’ve tried and a good performer. I am running PS at the recommended settings of 1064x768, 32 bit.

Is this a server problem common to all fighter pilots? Is this a video card / framerate issue (due to the high turning speed of the fighters?). Is this a RAM problem? Or something else?

If I need to upgrade RAM or video card, I can probably do that as I am considering building a 2nd machine. Or is this a driver problem?

All help appreciated :0.

I would really like to get some dogfighting in.

Dan

PS How do I check what sort of RAM I have without cracking the case?

2

Bump your RAM up to 1 gig. I get choppiness in huge battles only, and don’t see any other problems anywhere else.

3

What XPav said. One of the good and bad things about being in the air is you can see a ton of units and you have to handle information from all of them. The CPU and memory takes the brunt of this workout.

– Xaroc

4

Thirded. PS is the game that I went from 512 to 1GB for.

5

Alt-Tab still takes a minute even with 1 GB of RAM. It’s not like UT2k4 or Vietcong where task switching might entail a pause of 5 seconds at most.

So start up teamspeak before you launch. :-)

6

I’m going from 512 to 1 gig this weekend. It’s like looking forward to a party, I’m getting some beer and some balloons, maybe smoke a cigar.

7

OK I need more RAM - how do I tell what kind i have in there now? Do I have to crack the case or is there a software way to check? I just don’t remember what I got when I bought the machine, and I assume i need matching RAM now.

Dan

8

Yeah, PS eats RAM like there’s no tomorrow. The planetside.exe process peaks at 700-800MB at times, and it causes the kind of lag you describe even on foot on my machine. Pretty much makes it unplayable for me before I upgrade to 1 gig. :(

9

Well I had to crack the case to learn that I had DDR 266 RAM. I then went and bought another 512M which will bring me to a 1 Gig of RAM. Is there any reason (for PS or other current gaming) to go over 1 Gig? The RAM was relatively cheap so I could be convinced to add more if need be.

Now I have to get home and install the stuff.

Dan

10

1.5 gig would enable you to turn the windows swapfile off completely, which is the single best method of increasing windows performance - alt-tab from even planetside is instantaneous in this situation, and there’s very little of the common HD-thrashing lag in any game because windows isn’t trying to cache newly-loading objects to the #$%^ POS hard drive VM swapfile.

You can get away with turning it off with 1gig in some cases, but planetside is so loose with memory (more so than any game I’ve played) that you may sometimes run out of ram even with 1gig (depending partly on how much other crap is turned on/installed in windows), which will bring things to a rather sudden end.

A gaming session on a system with virtual memory off is as close to pure delight as you can get on a given hardware installation.

11

Only problem is that a few of the newer type MBs have three memory banks but bumps down the memory speed if you use all three. I don’t pretend to know why they do this, and I dunno if it’s worth (for me at least generally speaking) to get another 512 for 1.5MB but drop the speed to 266 or whatever.

— Alan

12

If anyone has an answer to/good way to look up the performance issues that arise from getting more ram which performs at a slower speed I’d love to hear it. Right now that consideration is the only thing stopping me from immediatly running out to the store and upping my ram to 1 gig.

13

If anyone has an answer to/good way to look up the performance issues that arise from getting more ram which performs at a slower speed I’d love to hear it. Right now that consideration is the only thing stopping me from immediatly running out to the store and upping my ram to 1 gig.[/quote]

Same here!

14

The speed difference between DDR333 and DDR400 (for example) is infinitesimal compared to the speed difference between a machine which is swapping memory to the hard drive, and one that isn’t. More ram is always good if you experience swapfile usage, even if it bumps you down to the next nearest bus speed (or even takes you from dual channel to single).

Modern games, btw, don’t currently benefit from speedy memory as much as older ones (like Q3A) do - they tend to be CPU and/or GPU bound much more so than memory bound. Which is why the massive memory bandwith advantage of the dual-channel DDR400 boards (i875/865) that is seen on synthetic memory benchmarks like Sandra aren’t reflected in things like UT2K3/4 benchmarks.

15

OK I have 2 512 Meg chips installed, both are PC2100 184 pin DIMMs. I installed them twice, everything looks fine on the motherboard. Everything seems fine.

Unfortunately when I run the little Windows help program it tells me I only have 512 Megs. I tried rebooting to BIOS but I can’t seem to get a screen that tells me how much RAM I have.

In theory I should have 1 Gig now. Is there any way to check this?

I suppose I will run PS and test it.

Dan

16

Crap I don’t think its working. I plugged the RAM in, it looks fine but I seem to only have 512 M. :(

I’m kinda frustrated and don’t what to do next.

Any suggestions?

Dan

17

grab this:

It’ll tell you how much ram you have, and what the speeds are, etc. To troubleshoot, try booting with only one of them. Then swap them out and boot with the other. Once both check out (or don’t), you’ll at least know if you have two good sticks or not.

18

OK I grabbed it and got confusing results. Under the memory tab it tells me I have 512 M, listed under “general”. Then below that it shows I have two 512M DIMMs installed, which should mean I have 1G.

I saved the little info file: here is my RAM info:

CPU-Z version 1.21
Memory Modules Serial Presence Detect (SPD)

Module #1

General
Memory type DDR-SDRAM
Manufacturer (ID) (0000000000000000)
Size 512 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC2100 (133 MHz)
Part number

Attributes
Number of banks 2
Data width 64 bits
Correction None
Registered no
Buffered no

Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 100 133
CAS# 2.0 2.5
RAS# to CAS# delay 2 3
RAS# Precharge 2 3
TRAS# 5 7

Module #2

General
Memory type DDR-SDRAM
Manufacturer (ID) (0000000000000000)
Size 512 MBytes
Max bandwidth PC2100 (133 MHz)
Part number

Attributes
Number of banks 2
Data width 64 bits
Correction None
Registered no
Buffered no

Timings table
Frequency (MHz) 100 133
CAS# 2.0 2.5
RAS# to CAS# delay 2 3
RAS# Precharge 2 3
TRAS# 5 6

To my layman’s eye that seems to say I have two DIMMs, each at 512 M. But my PS performance is just as bad as ever - I did get on and promptly flew a Reaver to lag-death (again!).

I really appreciate any help on what to do :(.

Dan

19

Try this - take the two sticks out. Put #1 in slot one. Boot. Does it work?

Put #2 in slot one. Boot. Does it work?

If both are yes, then slot one is good (obviously) and both ram chips are good.

Now repeat that test with slot 2.

There’s one of two things wrong here - bad ram, or bad motherboard/ram slot. It happens.

EDIT: I should add, I personally have had a motherboard where both ram slots worked, and both sticks worked, but they wouldn’t work together.

20

Well I was able to determine that the RAM card I bought just wouldnt work in either slot but my original RAM card (chip?) was fine. So I took it back to Fry’s and exchanged for a Kingston 512M card. Installed that and everything seems fine.

On to trying Planetside!

Thank you to all the tech dudes who helped me :0.

Dan