Frame Rate getting worse and worse

[truck5co]

Hey, been putting up with a crappy frame rate the last few months. It used to be in the hi 30s to mid 40s consistently. Now it seems to fluctuate alot but really hits some single digit lows when in a furball with 20 or so other planes around. The system is home built, P4, 3.0 gig, 4 gb memory, 512 vid card running Win XP with time warner cable. I followed some of the tips here, lowered my vid settings, 512 textures, disabled anti aliasing on my Nvidia card etc. Disabled skin down load and other skins, running game boost etc. I have done virus scans and spybot to make sure nothing runnin in the background although Im not entirely convinced something isnt running. My system idle seems to be jumping alot. Since trying some of the tips It has gotten slightly better but not much. Anything I'm missing? ANy other tips I can try? Can it be my connection? I even had someone PM me that I was warping the other day, 1st time I ever recieved that message. Its starting to really effect my ability to enjoy the game. Its at the point where I have to fly solo and find individual engagements. Any help appreciated,,,

                 ESU

[MADe]

Hi ya,

Try running monitor at its native resolution if you are not or reduce current resolution, 60Hz refresh rate with v-sync enabled.
Try running game in a windowed mode.
Modern lan cards can use the task offloading. Check for enabled.
P4, 4GHz, single core?
GameBoost you should loose, IMO. At minimum it takes away ram.
Turn off or minimize everything in the video cards AH profile.
I would turn off anything I could to get the 60-59 FPS. If you get that you can slowly up whats necessary to get quality image at good FPS.
Your machine works, right? You just need to find the balance. Save unnecessary cpu utilization. Turn off the music any app in background, strip it down.
Plane details at faster? Land objects at .1 mile? Familiairize self with the full-range, mid-range, short-range visual selections keys. Use of short-range visual will make for less screen stuff rendered, for instance. Less load on vid card.
Unplug any unnecessary hardware during gameplay, printers and such?????
Make sure all case fans, hardware fans and heat sinks are free of dust.

luck

[The Fugitive]

 Hit <cntrl><ALT><Delete> click on the processes tab at the top and then look at the bottom. How many processes are you running? The lower the number the better. XP, you can get it down to low 20's pretty easy.

Second to test your connection, get ping plotter HERE Install and run it and in the "address box" in the top left type in 206.16.60.41 that is the address for the Main Arena. Run it for about 10 minutes pinging every second or two. If you show any "red" on the graph you have a connection problem.  You can take a screen shot and post a picture here if you want more info on it.

If your running a single core CPU you may have to drop down to 256 textures in stead of the 512s your running now.

[gyrene81]

Hey, been putting up with a crappy frame rate the last few months. It used to be in the hi 30s to mid 40s consistently. Now it seems to fluctuate alot but really hits some single digit lows when in a furball with 20 or so other planes around. The system is home built, P4, 3.0 gig, 4 gb memory, 512 vid card running Win XP with time warner cable. I followed some of the tips here, lowered my vid settings, 512 textures, disabled anti aliasing on my Nvidia card etc. Disabled skin down load and other skins, running game boost etc. I have done virus scans and spybot to make sure nothing runnin in the background although Im not entirely convinced something isnt running. My system idle seems to be jumping alot. Since trying some of the tips It has gotten slightly better but not much. Anything I'm missing? ANy other tips I can try? Can it be my connection? I even had someone PM me that I was warping the other day, 1st time I ever recieved that message. Its starting to really effect my ability to enjoy the game. Its at the point where I have to fly solo and find individual engagements. Any help appreciated,,,

                 ESU

what type of grapics card slot do you have on the motherboard?  what video card are you running?

make sure anti-aliasing is set to "application controlled" in the nvidia control panel. turn textures down to 256, turn off detailed water, weapons effects, other player skins, vehicle effects, horizon. experiment with turning off detailed terrain or bump map terrain, switch betweent the two and see what gets better results. turn off windows update, as well as the auto-updater for any other apps that you have installed (i.e. flashplayer, java, etc...), turn off anti-virus active scanning processes.

[ebfd11]

Truck5

Post a dxdiag here with the top 1/3 of it and see what people can decipher from that. It might be your machine might not be able to handle the game anymore.

LawnDart

[truck5co]

ctrl alt del- 58 processes running. How do I know which I can shut or cant shut?
pingplotter:

[truck5co]

what type of grapics card slot do you have on the motherboard?  what video card are you running?

make sure anti-aliasing is set to "application controlled" in the nvidia control panel. turn textures down to 256, turn off detailed water, weapons effects, other player skins, vehicle effects, horizon. experiment with turning off detailed terrain or bump map terrain, switch betweent the two and see what gets better results. turn off windows update, as well as the auto-updater for any other apps that you have installed (i.e. flashplayer, java, etc...), turn off anti-virus active scanning processes.

Nvidia geforce 7300 512mb agp slot.
anti aliasing set to app controlled
turned off what you mention

[The Fugitive]

Hop 5 is crap and anything after that is suspect. Skuzzy mentioned that it may take months for the east coast to recover from the hurricanes and other storms we have recently gotten hit with. This shows your connection does have a problem, but it looks like its coming out of your router clean so it's not on your end.

Time will most likely clean it up, but it looks like your computer is ok.

[SPKmes]

ctrl alt del- 58 processes running. How do I know which I can shut or cant shut?
pingplotter:
(Image removed from quote.)

If you are like me and don't know what is safe to stop running or not  have a look for at Game booster it will trim it down for you...there still maybe some that you can end that this keeps running but this will atleast bring it down quite a lot.  there are some others but this is one I am familiar with

[truck5co]

If you are like me and don't know what is safe to stop running or not  have a look for at Game booster it will trim it down for you...there still maybe some that you can end that this keeps running but this will atleast bring it down quite a lot.  there are some others but this is one I am familiar with

Running GB for th elast few weeks, seems to help a little. On average it halts about 22-23 processes.

[gyrene81]

the 7300gt was good for its time but, definitely stone age at this point. the only way you could beef up your graphics card (and it would be marginal) would be to purchase an ati 4650 or 4670 1gb. you could probably run 512 textures and detailed terrain, maybe.

windows xp along with automatic updates and your anti-virus,  you can safely disable or set to manual the following:

bits - manual
computer browser - manual
distributed link tracking - disable (if you're not using avg anti-virus)
error reporting service - disable
fax - disable
indexing service - disable
remote registry - disable
security center - turn off all monitoring then disable
server - disable
task scheduler - disable
terminal services - disable
themes - disable
wireless zero configuration - disable if you're not using wireless network connection

http://www.blackviper.com/2001/07/28/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-service-configurations/

don't rely on gamebooster to do all of what you can do. it's great to use once you have manually configured your system for good performance already.

[SPKmes]

I use the 4650 1GB ..... I used to be able to run at full graphics with hires 60fps...when I got into areas with a lot happening it would cause me a frame rate drop but then I turn off the terrain and it was fine.....over the last couple of versions I have to keep the graphics off but still run 1024 if and have 55-60 frames some maps are better than others it seems also .....

[MADe]

go to black viper.com, he has a page on the what, when, why of processes and what you can disable or set manual as per os.

your ping plot, set it for 100 traces and 100 samples shown. it will give you the average over a period of time. above could be just a spike at that moment. i have been going around with this myself. i have been doing larger sample plots once a day.


100 traces/ 15sec delay /trace, 100 samples included.
note average ms, note the disco possibility, note that every hop experienced a slow down at one trace or another.

[AWwrgwy]

Clean your heatsink.

Heat is a killer.



wrongway

[truck5co]

Made all the adjustments as per black viper. Will clean heatsink also. May be a stupid question but do they make a better cpu that'll fit my MB? Also I looked at the ATI 4650, may give that a whirl.