Lag and choppiness

[Emeraq]

I'm running a 2800 Athlon XP with 1 gig DDR memory, a Geforce 6200 OC, 256 MB 8X AGP card, with cable ISP, yet I'm running extremely laggy and choppy on this game. I run CoH and Guild Wars just fine, both of which have much better graphics.

Does the game always run this bad? Any suggestions to help it run better?

[BKBanzai]

for a good population, yes. Some people have decent performance, some might even have good performance.

Supposedly there was additional optimization added to the game with this latest patch; however, I think it, like most performance patches, have benefitted some of the population and worsened things for some.

Try turning down some of your graphics settings. Some town you might want to avoid, Bristugo is very bad for me now.

[Theolaerynn]

It has somehow made the memory leak worse for me. I start hitting the swap file after about an hour of play, and I have 1GB of DDR400 (running at 333 to sync with FSB) in Dual Channel mode.

Optimizing for performance should not require further dumming down of settings, by the way. That is a bit of a opposite reaction to what should happen. Hell, as a programmer I could do absolutely nothing and tell you that 'optimizations' require reducing performance-impacting settings, and you would 'suddenly' notice improved performance.

I don't envy AE or any other software company, in that they have to troubleshoot such a wide variety of hardware and set-ups.

[AA0]

After patches, its always best to delete your old graphics prefs file... this last patch had a significant change to those.

[Theolaerynn]

Hmm. I don't think I did that this time, now that you mention it...

[Brassandyn]

After patches, its always best to delete your old graphics prefs file... this last patch had a significant change to those.

hmmm... where are these located and what are they called?

[Fridlekh]

by default: horizons\prefs\clientprefs_graphic.def

[TheRock]

lol get used to it...it is not going to get any better :)
This is an on-going thing that they don't seem to want to fix....no matter how many pled or actually quit the game over it.
I had a AMD 1.2g with 512 ram and there is no difference since I upgraded to a Athlon 64 3000+ , 1 gb corsair ram, ATI 9800 Pro 256 ram, Cable 300kbs.
I can download from many sites at 300-315 k but I have to keep my graphics settings at medium and contend with the lag in Horizons.
So join the group lol
.

[Goriax]

You should be able to do ok. At least until the memory leak kills you. Then you would probably want to relog.

On some systems the sound can cause choppiness. Might try turning off 3-D sound and see if that helps. Go to the video tab of the options dialog and try a few things. Certainly turn off shadows and set your view distance to something reasonable. There have been several threads on tuning things so might want to hunt around.

HIgh download speed isn't going to be helpful except when loading new terrain or patching. It wouldn't help with lag or choppiness in most situations.

Some of the graphics settings will bring any computer to its knees. I don't think there's a computer made which can run it at a reasonable fps with everything to max.

[Nikodemus]

If you have the view distance set all the way upyou might want to reduce it to about 1/4 or 25%. That will take care of most of the laggyness and choppyness.

[TheRock]

Horizons graphics is beautiful but only if you stand in one spot and gaze at it. It is a pity that they made such beautiful graphic detail and we cannot utilize it.
What good is a game if you have to lower all these great effects to the point where you are missing most of them? Why give us the options to max these out if they make the game suffer bad when playing?

[AA0]

Have you even looked at the graphics settings now?
I have mine close to maxed with the exception of a few huge performance killers like ground clutter and real shadows.

[Tribunal]

Have you even looked at the graphics settings now?
I have mine close to maxed with the exception of a few huge performance killers like ground clutter and real shadows.

I'm with him... and I havn't boughten anything new for my computers performance. I guess I'm just one of the lucky few.

[BreeOge]

I have a

P4 3.2gzh
Asus mobo
6800 Geforce Ultra
1 gig of ram.
All watercooled

And I still lag if I set it anything above med. [:'(]

[AA0]

My best guess is that performance degrades from the shear amount of HZ's harddisk access. HZ really needs 2 disks, both fast as hell, one you keep you swapfile on, one you keep hz on. And they need to be kept defragged.

[Pharcellus]

I'm actually pretty happy with the frame rates I get now. Even with max view distance, it is MUCH better than it was.

That said, the memory accumulation/leak/whatever is still there, and after it starts hitting 1.5Gb, things slow down a lot, and eventually the game will crash.

There are a lot of people reporting ctds as well also. Repeated ones in a short time period.