Bloodwinter Clan

Ok, i'm getting pissed at my machine. I'm lagging at all the battles. Sometimes Emain, sometimes alb, and DF occasionally. It seems like it takes my machine a lot of time to load characters (albs/hibs, etc.). I want to know if there's anything I can do to increase the speed or whatever.
Here are my machines stats. BTW, this is more than the recommended requirements for daoc/SI. This is a relatively new machine.


Pentium 2.4 ghz
GeForce MX 420 64 mg
256 RD ram (if that makes sense?)
Soundblaster Sound card
40 HD


Think thats it. Any help would be appreciated. If I missed any vital info let me know!

THX

more memory would help...

try defragging your harddrive

memory would definitely be a plus (double up what you have), you may also want to try turn clipping down in game, that helps tons in all situations.


Never forgetting to download the latest drivers for all your goodies.

More memory and get rid of that god aweful geforce 4 mx. Those things have a really bad reputation. if your going to get a Geforce get a TI of some variety. Geforce 3 TI's outperform GEForce 4 MX's. 128 mb vid ram card would also help. If you can afford it go for a 4TI 4200 (~180 bucks) they are a great card and can handle the new 8x agp's which will greatly increase your throughput. If you really have the money to shell out get one of the newer 8x agp 4TI 4600 series GeForces. I've heard good things about the new RADEONS as well so thats something to consider. Also bear in mind that the new series of Radeons and Geforce 5's are coming out soon, so if you wait till they release you can get a great deal on a 4TI or Radeon 9500/9700.

aye more ram (1.5 gig DDRAM here) and MXs aren't very good

I have:
XP1800+
Gainward Geforce3
1.5gig DDRAM 2100(i think hehe cant remember speed)
60 gig 7200rpm HD

the rpm on your hard drive matters a lot when you are loading stuff from your hard drive. When you increase your ram to 1 gig, remember to increase your VM to 1.5gigs. It will help out a lot.

Also are you running SI or DAOC?

I run SI on my system and can most of the time run 2 ACCS(when ISP isnt messing up hehe)

Its fun to do quests and exp solo while you are waiting in a keep for albs to attack it.... if you dont die of old age first

Question about the clipping! If I turn clipping down, will I still lag my ass when the alb/hibs enter the plane? It seems that is the problem most of the time. When we enter a situation on more than 20 hibs/albs.

I did plan on getting up to 512 on my RAM at least too. I'll give the clip and the RAM a try. Thanks for the Replies! And I'll take more too!!!!

maybe before resorting to buying more ram (which definitely helps), try any of the following:

1)trying closing everything running in the background before you startup daoc.

2) if you're in windowed mode, try taking it out of windowed mode, to see if that alleviates anything.

3) try running a performance monitor to see if that can locate any optimization problems / system bottlenecks right off the bat. if you have something configured wrong which is bottlenecking your system, using one of those would probably be the easiest I suggest running something like SiSoft Sandra to benchmark, compare performance with other systems, and to locate specifically which subsystem is underperforming.

4) what resolution are you running? try dropping the resolution and seeing if you still lag in battles and df.

If none of the above fix your problem, then your issue is most likely NOT performance based. It might have more to do with your network connection. Do some analysis on your internet access.

Some real easy easy methods is to check your bandwidth / latency. a simple check is like during primetime, doing a ping or pathping to some internet location (like yahoo for instance). ping will tell you your latency and pathping will tell you your connection / packet-loss percentage (ping takes around 1-2 s to run, pathping takes about 5 min).

to run those, open up a command window (if you're running Windows 2000 or XP, goto start menu, run, and type, "cmd" <enter>. In 95,98 or ME, type "command" <enter>). Then type "ping www.yahoo.com" or "pathping www.yahoo.com". I think Pathping is a win2000/xp only utility.

here's a quick place to test bandwidth:
http://webservices.cnet.com/Bandwidth/

As they said, more ram. 512 is a bare minimum these days, and yet is often plenty. SWG will eat a bit more tho.

The MX card is NOT designed for games. In fact it is not directx compliant in many aspects. It is strictly for desktop users and was built to be included in office type machines. In essence, it is really a geforce 2 card. Check out tomshardwareguide.com if you like, there are several discussions about it. In fact Nvidia received so much flack over it they are going to drop the ti/mx thing, and make it clearer that the MX sucks for games.