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MMO games stutter really bad in big populated areas


RichAC

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Have you tried turning Superfetch off?

ya i tried this, i think it was slightly better but not enough to matter. I still get tons of cpu spikes in populated areas.

 

 

Could it be my network card i wonder now?

 

Could be. You can run speedtests, but that won't tell you much. Best thing I can think of to try is if you own an RTS, play single player and get a shit-ton of units on your screen at one time during a battle and see what happens. RTSs are like MMOs in that they're very reliant on CPU and RAM. Just be sure it's single player so you don't have any network variable there.

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I would recommend reducing your pagefile as @ClayMeow said, see if it clears anything up. If not, I would highly recommend borrowing some RAM from somewhere and see how things go. I had some strange issues and my system passed Memtest86+, but in the end it did turn out to be the RAM

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Well MMOs are not exactly the best optimized games.   Add to the fact you have some free ones on your HDD and that would be the first blip on the radar that I would attack first.  If possible, reformat your HDD, if not remove all but your key essential games and see how they play.  If the machine is behaving, I would add a game at a time as the desire to play those games come up.   I try to keep my PC light for this very reason.  I have had other games impact performance on a system level as well just impact other games.  I think my issues were related to how some games modified DirectX on my machine.

 

Speaking of BF3, it was one of the more troublesome games for me.  I finally got tired of installing and unstalling that piece of crap software.  I'm pretty picky on which games I install on my machine now. I get most of my games on the console to keep things simple and buy the really awesome games on the PC. 

Ya interesting you say that, all these free games I notice installed pando media booster on my pc. Which is apparenlty known spyware that steals your bandwith. I had to uninstall it after installing these games. I coudln't believe it who knows what else they put on my machine to spy on me. The process was even eating cpu when it was using no bandwith. wtf was it doing??!! lol same thig with global agenda. they ask you if you want to update in the background. Even if you say no.....their highrez process is constanlty on your machine using cpu and alot of memory. its scary shit.

 

Aion was crazy just to even get working in the first place. I had signup issues. I have have 2 diff passwords and keycodes for the game, i've never seen anything like it. I tried to use a diff email address for a free trial account of wow to test the game to no avail, because i had a trial account of gw back in 2009. A game i eventually purchased! and then i kept getting disconnected in aion..... I had to make another master account with the same email i used for the aion account, give them my full name and address, so now i won't disconnect anymore....HHAHAHA its all becoming a fkn joke on the pc man.

 

 

 

But ya i'm basically on a fresh install.

 

I have a dell machine and deleted all the dell partitions.... did a diskpart /clean all. reinstalled fresh using the windwos disc. updated everything you can think of. bios hdd firmware, amd chipset and video drivers, realtek sound, broadcom netcard, etc.... my pc now boots up with the snap of a finger even with prefetch off. but i still get cpu spikes after long matches in bf3.

 

and i get cpu spikes and hdd caching galore in these mmo games. It just feels like we buy all this hardware for parallel processing with a mutlthreaded cpus and dx11 cards. But these programmers still want to program for games like we are still in the 90s. I wonder if people with core 2 duos on xp and vista are running the game better then me...lmao.

 

I know i never had issues with wow on my p4 xp system. and now i'm reading threads about people dropping to 20-30 fps in world of warcraft with 955be phenoms and 6870 gpus. when i ran the game fine on my pentium 4!!!! I can't even say its just an amd problem. because people with i7's and nvidia cards get the same exact cpu spikes in bf3 that i get, and noone is left playing that game. why would they make bf4 for the pc? its all mind boggling. their server says 50,000 online a day. but where? i don't see many populated servers in my browser....with no filters. BF3 is a ghost town now.

 

 

IMO, I think there is just not enough people left in pc gaming. And the people that still play dont' know whats going on and dont' complain about the right things or don't care. So these developers don't care enough to fix compatiblity problems. They already make it clear they don't favor parallel programming. most companies have abandoned pc gaming years ago.

 

I have a feeling i'm gonna buy a new hdd, and still have the problem.

 

I give up and will try to get a console whenever the next generations come out in a year or two. I have no choice.

 

I'm still crossing my fingers its a hdd issue. But I'm starting to doubt that.

Edited by RichAC

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ya i tried disabling that in windows power management. is there another way to make sure?

 

and no i haven't tried another drive yet. The thing is the drive is caching very often when playing these games. I don't think it even has time to go to sleep sometimes. It doesn't seem normal.

 

but ya there was an urgent firmware update for that drive. seagate nor dell specified exaclty what it fixed though.

 

 

EDIT: i also notice high dpc latency when downloading with utorrent or sometimes browsing webpages, streaming videos. Could maybe this be a network problem that causes the hdd to cache more?

 

i don't believe it to be a soundcard problem or usb problem.

 

tks again for the replies.

Edited by RichAC

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Hey stackrainer,

 

Man it took me a while to find this link again.  I wanted to link you the firmware update i did.

 

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/223631en

 

The dell site says its for intermittent boot issues.  Which i did have occassionall on their board.  Seagate is saying its for SB850 chipset problems, which i don't even have on my board is a 750.   But  I would hit restart from windows, and it  would sometimes not start back up.   Was driving me nuts.  So i updated the firmware...and applied this update,  which was a real pain to do since i needed a usb key.   It changes the firmware on the hd103sj from something like 1aj10001 to 1aj10002.  you can check after with seatools or reboot again with the usb key.  I wonder if i did it 2 years too late.  and the hackers already killed my hdd haha.

 

It hasn't fixed my lagging issues though.   I originally thought my lagging issues to be possibly due to my network card.  Because disabling my netcard seemed to stop my latency issues.  And it seems to be an issue when downloading.  so i wasn't sure if its the hdd or network card.  or possibly my router....but i'm doubting that now.  Or i thought the base filtering engine and windows firewall.  since when i was geting crazy latency restarting those fixe dthe issue.  But then i remembered i uninstalled norton originally trying to fix the same problem.

 

So i just downloaded another latency tool called latency monitor.  Although, my best bet is prolly the windows sdk performace toosl pack.     But latencymon tells me after running it for hours....that the bad latency file is  storport.sys.

 

Does anybody know exactly what storport.sys is?.   Im not finding much info on it.  I believe it is again pointing towards the hdd as the problem.  I have no other latenc issues besides this. Still wondering if theres something wrong with the hdd.

 

Any thoughts?

Edited by RichAC

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Another thing that I would try is to go to your motherboard makers site and get all of the drivers updated on the chipsets maybe? I'd also try switching the sata ports on your motherboard to see if that changes anything. I guess its worth a shot.

 

Thanks for the link btw :D

Edited by stackrainer

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Another thing that I would try is to go to your motherboard makers site and get all of the drivers updated on the chipsets maybe? I'd also try switching the sata ports on your motherboard to see if that changes anything. I guess its worth a shot.

 

Thanks for the link btw :D

 

oh changing the ports is a great idea.  I will get right on that.

 

ya its a dell machine.  it uses the basic amd chipsets.  the new 13.1 catalyst for my graphics card automatically updated them.  i updated the realtek sound.  net card everything bios, hdd firmware.

 

i just read the reviews on this  samsung hdd.  it gets amazing reviews man.  i'm so pissed right now.  100 dollars on amazon and newegg.  sigh...  althought i have been reading alot of forum posts on seagate that this year for many users the hdd has suddenly been failed to recognize in the bios or failing to boot the O/S.   I'm guessing thats the main reason for that firmware update.  

 

quick question.  If i buy a new hdd.  do you recommend something for no more then 60 dollars that would be good for gaming?

 

i believe my motherboard only supports sata II  because of the SB750 chipset?  am i correct?  I just reinstalled windows again so i have to reinstall adobe reader to download the manual..lol   I read I can still plug a SATA III hdd into the SATA II port?

 

does this make sense?  I guess it automatically clocks down to the SATAII speed?  is it worth it?  I'm lookin for i guess a 500gb around 50 bucks.  I don't think i can afford another TB right now :(.

 

Thanks,

 

Rich.

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stackrainer,

 

i forgot to mention the hdd is very noisy.  I don't remember it being this noisy but maybe its normal and I'm imagining things.  Is yours very noisy?  Its the noisiest thing on my pc right now since my fans are extremely quiet...lol

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http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=154257&mpage=1

 

this thread made me depressed.  This was back in 2007 and it seems nothings changed.  It prolly only got worse with every game patch and windows udpate..   No wonder all these games are free now.   I'm still trying to get my hands on a wow trial just to see if blizzards programming is any better...

 

I've heard in gw2,  if your even lucky to get into a world pvp match after waiting for hours in a que.....it also lags disgustingly.   :(

Edited by RichAC

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Have you tried turning Superfetch off?

ya i tried this, i think it was slightly better but not enough to matter. I still get tons of cpu spikes in populated areas.

 

 

Could it be my network card i wonder now?

 

Could be. You can run speedtests, but that won't tell you much. Best thing I can think of to try is if you own an RTS, play single player and get a shit-ton of units on your screen at one time during a battle and see what happens. RTSs are like MMOs in that they're very reliant on CPU and RAM. Just be sure it's single player so you don't have any network variable there.

 

 

only other game i have right now is bf3 which actually doesn't run too bad on 64 player maps.  It does run slower then if i'm on 32 players.   but i still can manage 35-60fps at 1080 res on medium settings.  And that is a game that breaks most pcs.  Only time i have a hitching issue in the game is when the chatbox gets filled with too many chats,  which happens to alot of people though, and apparenlty was a bug that was patched in bc2.     The suggestion in that game is just to avoid 1000+ ticket servers.  But to be honest theres really not many servers anymore in that game.  People have too many issues with it.

 

That also always felt like a ram issue to me though.   I thought it was the memory leaks in my o/s.  but after a fresh install i no longer have  explorer.exe,  dwm.exe, or csrss.exe leaking huge anymore.  matter a fact all my processses would increase in ram a little.   But even without those issues I still get the chatlag issue in bf3.

 

I don't own any other games.  is RTS real time strategy?  do you recommend any?    I did use to have skyrim on here, the hdd would cache alot on the highest settings....but on medium settings it ran pretty good.  I could install guild wars again i guess...but that is not a persistent world and may not be a good test.  although in towns theres could be alot of peeps.  I'll give that a shot.  I'll also install bc2 again and see if that still runs well.

 

i have 2x2gb kingstons and  2x 1gbs, I assume this is a normal setup.

Edited by RichAC

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so i downloaded a trial verison fo this program called HDtune.

 

It said for my hdd health a warning.    and Ultra DMA cyclic redundancy error.   which i read online isusually due to a faulty cable?  i got 4 erros.

 

and here are the benchmark results

 

minimum :  43.4 mbs

maximum 136  mbs

average:   104.1 mbs

 

access time :  15.6 ms   =   was in yellow.   seems pretty high.  the specs of the drive online say it should be at 9ms?

burst rate   :   115.0 ms

 

 

I'm curious what your results are stackrainer?

 

but update.  since reformatting and resintalling O/S and immediately updating all drivers again.   i have not seen any bad dpc latency anymore.  So i guess i can rule out drivers now at least.  so thats awsome.  we'll see if that lasts whenever i install utorrent back on..haha.

 

 

 

EDIT:  actually when comparing to http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb-hdd-7200,2430-2.html   i'm not that much slower.   my burst rate is way under though?

 

 

EDIT:  i got much better results with a program called   hdtach.  same avg  100-115.   but max 150   and burst speed 211mbs.   It seems my drive is working normal with these tests.  I dunno man. 

 

I think i'm chasing ghosts again...     I think these older game engines just run like crap on newer hardware, or are just programmed like crap period.   and most game developers are just more focused on consoles.  I feel like the pc industry is dying.  People would rather buy overpiced ipads...which is just a glass coaster to me, that I can't do anything on.    I give up man.   My cpu is fine,  my gpu is fine.   I guess the only thing left is my memory.   and i bet thats fine too.

 

 This is all just too shocking to me.  EA Dice was my last hope.   it seems  I bought an 800 dollar computer for windows aero...lmao.   I blame the spammers and viruses and Hackers! They killed the pc industry!  Someone should kill them!  JK>

Edited by RichAC

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I don't think you'll see a big difference if you get a sata 3 HDD and put that on a sata 2 port. Actually I did that with mine at first and did not see much of a real world difference.


I went ahead and did that benchmark I got this:

 

minimum: 76.2

maximum: 145.3

average: 115.8

 

access tune 14.6ms (it was also in the yellow)

burst rate: 153.0 MB/s

 

Also my HDD is very noisy also.

 

One other thing that I would try is to go into the bios and change the connection type. Your computer might not boot and you might have to switch it back though so just be forewarned. You can change it from a ATA connection to a AHCI or vice versa.

 

Also, do you have any other drives hooked up to your computer?

 

From the benchmarks, it looks like to me that your minimum is awful low, maybe you were running a torrent in the background? If not that is probably the issue right there.

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