Video Lag

A

Angeliqua

Dalayan Beginner
Hello, I've searched through the forums for a fix for this and have not found one. 

I'm having a problem with video lag... I'm in the green and when i try to play, I'm getting about 3 or 4 seconds of lag (to where I cannot run/cast/move the cursor/do anything).  I played the game back when it was Winter's Roar and last year after the switch and have never had this problem.  Though I am on a new system now. 


I'm on a Macbook Pro using Bootcamp... Win XP Home (SP2), 1 gig of RAM, CPU: Intel Core Duo, 2ghz... ATI Radeon X1600 with 256 VRAM.   I've tried rebooting, re-installing the patcher, updating drivers and screwing with the settings.  I hit advanced and repatch every time, and I have WinLauncherXP to restrict the CPU to 1. 

The really weird thing is that I was able to play for about 2 hours (well... run around in the dream in between doing other stuff) without any problems... everything ran super smoothly.  Not sure what went wrong after that.  I have the sound off and minimal settings... I wish I could remember the resolution but when i try to log in to check, even with one account now... I am lagging too badly to see.  I have tried with and without EQwindows and the game does not like it when I try to play without (I get an error after after going past server select, eqgame.exe I think).  I have also tried to use EQPlayNice to no avail. 


I'm not really sure what's wrong.  The game was being finicky before I had that 2 hours of smooth playing, too.  So why it chose to play fine for a couple of hours after is beyond me.  I was going to play these characters while waiting for my accounts from last year to get reset, so I guess this is a good time to figure out what's wrong.


Also, not really a technical question... but while I was able to play tonight... in the dream... when I talked to the sorcerer and she gave me the spell, I was not able to cast the spell because I had insufficient mana.  My stamina bar was jumping all over the place, too.  My friend that I played with last year is starting up again with me and he had the same problems.  So we can't get past that part.  Just thought I'd throw that in.


Ideas? 
 
Well you can't really expect people w/o dual core systems to know what WinlauncherXp is. Read that and skipped :psyduck:

OK I have a weird idea here, since what you describe doesn't seem to be Video lag at all.

Do you have /log on? Or /autolog activated in your .ini? If so, check the size of your logfile. Not kidding here, I had it at 300 MB once on live and it caused problems which you describe here.

What else? Check router, firewall, deactivate Virus scanners. GL
 
I have no virus scanners or firewalls, ping is fine and there aren't any blocked ports.


The log option is set to false in the .ini ...


The only thing I can think of is video lag... essentially what's happening is the frame rate is fucked. I'm going through everything in my head trying to check off what it could be.
 
Yes I have... without EQW I get:

eqgame.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
 
Okay well through lots of testing the one common thing I've found in all of this is that I get at most one good session of SoD per session of being logged into windows... meaning that I reboot, and one of three things happen:


Scenario 1 - I start the game a few times getting eqgame.exe errors while attempting to connect to the server, when I do get it loaded... it runs perfectly with one window... and then two. Once I log off either account the lag starts.


Scenario 2 - I start the game fine the first time and it plays fine with 1 or 2 accounts and the moment I log off one account the lag starts.


Scenario 3 - I start the game with random chance of error, and either way the lag starts.



Once the lag starts, no matter how many times I restart SoD... there is no way to stop it from happening without restarting. This seems to be the only common denominator when testing all of this... everything else is random. Also, the lag doesn't always start when I log off an account... sometimes (randomly) it will start during a session, which is why I cannot simply reboot every time to be able to play.


I have spent more hours than I should researching these boards and the Apple forums... because this game is relatively small in number of players it has proved almost impossible to find someone out there with the same exact setup as myself AND the same problems. I know a few people here are running bootcamp but the only problem that ties me to them is the duel processor, which I have already had a problem with and have been able to successfully fix on my own.


Very frustrating... I think this is the first time I haven't been able to fix something when doing this much research. This is the only game with any problems I've encountered on both operating systems. My brain is melting.


If you guys have any other suggestions, let me know. I appreciate the ones so far.
 
Hmm...Found a review about your vid card on cnet http://reviews.cnet.com/ATI_Radeon_X1600_XT_256_MB/4514-8902_7-31530063.html

Pretty sure the 1600XT is what you have...

ATI Radeon X1600 XT (256 MB)
http://reviews.cnet.com/4505-8902_7-31530063.html

At a glance

* Release date: November 30, 2005
* Editors' rating: 5.8 Average
* Editor's take: The 3D scores on this card lag to the extent that we wonder if ATI is abandoning the middle ground of 3D cards in order to focus on home theater.
* The good: Shader Model 3 and high dynamic range lighting support; Avivo video decoding.
* The bad: Performance lags on real-world game tests; dual graphics card support depends on a special CrossFire Edition card with a murky release date.
* What's it for: Enhancing video on your PC; playing 3D games at barely acceptable frame rates.
* Who's it for: Mainstream gamers with smaller or expansion-limited systems, especially those with a movie-watching bent.
* Essential extras: 3D games, an extra 16x PCI Express slot for a CrossFire Edition card, if you want to double up later.
* The bottom line: The 3D performance of ATI's Radeon X1600 XT is surprisingly weak, but its video features make it a sound upgrade to aid PC movie watching.
Click to expand...

I just think you may not have the best of video cards, but that aside, from your symptoms, something is going on there that's for sure. It sounds as if something is hanging up/not getting flushed out of cache ? It's the RAM that has me wondering. Just how much ability do you have to configure your video card?

I read some of the various Apple forums regarding this make/model and the problem you are having seems to be common among 3D games. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Oh, you said you got the eqgame.exe error when *not* running eqw - make sure you have nothing else streaming on your home network when you try - seems odd, I know, but when my bf has a torrent running, I cannot play.
 
I'm the only one in my house that even knows what a torrent is.  No one else was even on the network when I got those errors.


I wish I felt the same way about the video card.  Game Live plays fine, WoW plays beautifully... if I really felt like my card was crap I wouldn't be so frustrated with it now.  It's not top of the line but I'm not looking to score high benchmarks with my system here, I'm trying to get it to play a game that it should play.  If it can play Game with models, sound, and all detailed level options on high... it should be able to play shards with all that stuff turned off. 


I have a few programs to tweak the settings.  I can overclock it if I want to, but I really don't think that will help.  There is something I'm not seeing specific to SoD and my setup...


This is the only game I want to play and it's not working :(  Thank you for trying to help anyway.


Someone come to my house and fix it.  I'll make you tea and cookies.
 
I don't know much about Mac issues, but I used to have an error I would classify as video lag on my laptop when I started playing. The problem was my power settings. When I changed the power profile from laptop to desktop, the game ran fine. I think this is because it wasn't giving eq the watts it needed to run properly. If there is such a setting for a mac, I recommend you try it.
 
Since it is an Intel processor that you're on it could be related to the intel speed step which regulates performance for laptop based systems. Manguadi was correct that on some laptop systems you might have to change the power settings under your display settings. The other thing you could do too is turn off Intel speedstep in your BIOS settings and try that. Turning it off just makes your laptop run at 2.0 GHZ all the time, where Intel Speedstep just regulates your MHZ to conserve power and heat.
 
I tried changing the power to desktop and that did not seem to have an effect. The other night I was successfully logged in with two characters but it would choose random times to lag... and zoning was not a lot of fun at all, the game was pretty unplayable because of this.


I might try the CPU setting in BIOS as suggested. I'm gonna keep researching this, too.
 
I have had virus do exact thing to me and it only effect some games while others were totally uneffected. this went on for a few days then did a complete system scan on all files and found it and not a single lag-freeze problem after. Win xp has a built in firewall, but that shouldnt cause a problem. id suggest doing a search for a free virus scanner and running it, make sure you have it scan ALL FILES in option/settings, not just selective files. and today, you can get viruses just from visiting a web page without even downloading anything, as most of a web page is downloaded in to a temp files folder by defult. and that is done with all browsers, IE, firefox, netscape, and opera. GL
 
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