Battlefield 2 problems -- I think it's my computer

[tomster2300]

Hey,

I've been playing the Battlefield 2 demo and I've run into some problems. The stupid thing lags when I don't believe it should, and I'm not talking about online play. It began while playing online but I began to feel it was my system, so I played it in single player and have the same problem.

I'm running it in 1280 x 1024 with no AA and it runs well until either I turn fairly sharply or a lot of things begin happening. It will stutter and sometimes come to a complete halt, freezing for a good minute. After that it'll be be nice and fluid until something else happens. The odd thing I found was that when I disabled my onboard sound in the device manager (that's all I have) and tried playing again in single player, it ran a lot smoother, even through the initial heavy action. Once I played for 10 min. it froze and my computer actually crashed to a blue screen with white writing on it. It has done this two times since playing the BF2 demo (the other while playing online) yet I was unable to read what it said because my computer was set to auto reboot whenever something fails. I changed it so it wont reboot now, but it has not done it again.

I have added two sticks of ram to my computer equaling a gig, and other than Doom III this has been the only game which could truely stress my computer. Nothing ever happened like this in Doom III, the gameplay was extremely fluid...could it possibly be this ram? Or do you think it might be the audio?

I'm going out tonight to buy BF2 -- I'm hoping the retail version will be more stable than the demo, though I'm skeptical. Something is telling me it's my computer rather than a faulty demo. I ask online while playing and nobody seems to have the same problem as me. I know it's not lag, I keep a ping of 30, which I know is smooth playing.

Please somebody help me, I have looked forward to this game for so long and would be highly disappointed if it wouldn't run correctly.

Thank you.

[New Guy Jr]

I haven't had any issues with the system in my sig or the new AMD 3200 sytem with the 6800GT. Have you tried updating the video card drivers?

[Stuey]

I don't remember where I read this, but it said somewhere that disabling EAX sound will increase game performance. I'd suggest trying this first. If this doesn't help your performance, turn down the sound quality in the game's audio options screen.

[tomster2300]

Originally Posted by Stuey83 I don't remember where I read this, but it said somewhere that disabling EAX sound will increase game performance. I'd suggest trying this first. If this doesn't help your performance, turn down the sound quality in the game's audio options screen.

I heard that too, and I've tried it. Nothing works. I've tried everything, I've downloaded the latest nvidia video card drivers plus the latest nforce drivers for my motherboard. No clue what's wrong. I just tried it on low audio and nothing is different. It just happens when I get in the midst of a battle. This is so frustrating. Nobody knows? I'm thinking about reformatting, do you think that would help? I defragged last night and ran spybot and adaware - I have no viruses. Thanks.

EDIT: Do you think buying an Audigy 2 card would help relieve any audio burdens being placed on the computer? Do you think that's it?

EDIT: I started thinking about it, do you think that it could be my hard drive going bad? Perhaps that's why I got the blue error screen when my pc crashed.

EDIT: I'm getting good at posting edits . I ran it with medium settings and it did fine for about 10 - 15 minutes -- nothing happened. Then the skipping / lagging began occurring, and then it began freezing for minutes on end. It looked like a dern slide-show. Thanks for the help so far - hopefully I can figure this thing out.

[Turbo91Bird]

Set your lighting and your textures to medium. Also, I have a gig of ram and with my stuff set all on high, I had to buy another gig of ram because even the demo was eating up 1.6GB of memory. Try the lighting and textures and see what happens. Also, check temps on the card and cpu.

[Hi Ho]

When I installed the demo I had the same problem as you though not as severe. The first thing I did was set everything to high to see what would happen. It would work fine until I tried to make a 90-180 degree turn. Then it would slow down to a crawl but not freeze. I tinkered with the settings and eventually set most things to medium and now it works fine. I'm running at 1024x768.

[tomster2300]

So you think it's the settings and not something going wrong with my computer? I thought my pc would be able to run this well with my settings, especially if everything was set to medium. Thanks.

EDIT: Well I went back and set the terrain to medium too, noticing that it was still on high, and now everything flies. Nothing is lagging and it's frag after frag of joy. What is it that makes the terrain rendering such a resource hog? That must be it since it's the only thing which I changed. Any ideas?

[spyder003]

It's just a demo, don't worry too much about it. Most aren't optimized like the full game, hopefully it'll run better for you.

[spartan015]

i dunno... my demo worked fine. last night i got the game... bam almost every level freezes... tho its prolly my graphic card gonna get me a 6600 if i can.

[Hi Ho]

EDIT: Well I went back and set the terrain to medium too, noticing that it was still on high, and now everything flies. Nothing is lagging and it's frag after frag of joy. What is it that makes the terrain rendering such a resource hog? That must be it since it's the only thing which I changed. Any ideas?

The terrain has a lot of polygons to render as well as textures. It takes a lot of power and video memory. That's one of the things I have turned down to get good performance.

[Turbo91Bird]

After I got my 2 gigs of ram in there, I set EVERYTHING to as high as possible and my performance is still sweet. So it must have been the ram that was holding me back like I thought it was and kept giving me that pb error. btw: the game looks bad ass with everything on high

[tomster2300]

I figured out what was wrong. Nvidia released a driver update on June 22nd, coinciding with Battlefield's release. It fixed and updated everything for the new game. I downloaded it after googling my problem and found somebody with a similar situation - he had been told to download it off the website. I installed it and now everything looks spectacular, and I'm able to run it all on high too at 1280 x 1024. You're right Turbo91Bird, it's very nice looking.

Ironically, the driver comes with the game. I saw that on installation, but I figured it was something older than what I already had -- turned out I was wrong. Now it doesn't pop up and tell me I have to update my drivers to get optimal performance when I play -- if I had heeded that warning the entire time I could have bypassed all this trouble. (Though I guess I couldn't have since the driver was only released the day after Battlefield was sold, oh well).

Thanks everyone for helping me -- the game is still a tad jumpy at times, but it's a fair trade off for the visual treat -- plus it's not near as horrible as it was.

[Yuanji]

no the driver nvidia released latest were the 77.72s and if i'm not mistaken, BF2 comes with the .30s anyways, if you have the .72s and use Windows Media Player, you should set it to high quality under tools and options because the drivers make it play a bit too bright

[Hi Ho]

anyways, if you have the .72s and use Windows Media Player, you should set it to high quality under tools and options because the drivers make it play a bit too bright

Huh???

[Yuanji]

high quality mode turns off layers or something like that. the 77.72 drivers have a bug that makes Windows Media Player play videos extremely brightly and doing that fixes it

[Hi Ho]

Oh I see. I was thinking sound. I couldn't figure out how video drivers could affect the sound quality.

[tomster2300]

So wait, the drivers in the game are higher than the ones nvidia released?

[Yuanji]

no. i think the ones released with the game or at least with the demo were the 77.30s the 77.72s are the latest ones but they have a WMV bug

[tomster2300]

I gotcha -- I'm sorry, I'm very sleepy and didn't catch the obvious number difference. 72 is greater than 30, duh.

I just noticed the bug -- is there a fix to this?

[electricgroove]

Is there a fix to it? I posted a topic on it only to realize its a driver bug

[tomster2300]

I fixed this problem even further by enlarging my AGP Aperture from the default 64 nit to 256 - my card is 256. Now I hardly skip -- if at all, when I have everything turned on high at 1024 x 768. The drivers really, really helped everything -- the 6800s were not ready for battlefield, so the drivers updated them.

[Iniamyen]

I hope I'm not hijacking this thread, but last night I noticed a similar problem on my computer. Initially when I installed the game, I had everything all the way up with 6xAA, EAX enabled, *everything*. And it ran fine. About a week ago I decided to turn lighting and terrain to medium to smooth it up a bit. I don't know whether it was noticeably slower than when I installed it, but I just wanted it smoother. Last night for the first time, sure enough, I noticed some occasional stuttering with these new, lower settings. Pretty subtle, but consistent, small stutters every 2 seconds or so.

Needless to say, this is ticking me off. BF2 is a really fun game, but I get the feeling it was very rushed, and they didn't put any optimization into it. I have installed NOTHING since BF2, and I defrag probably once for every 24 hours the computer is on. What gives? For the absolute resource hog that BF2 is, can't they make it run smoothly?!

[tomster2300]

You might need to the newest drivers from ATI -- I don't know what they would be since I only use nvidia.

[Hi Ho]

All of EA's latest games seem to be major resource hogs and only perform OK on very high end systems. That's one reason I want to see more games using the Source engine. Unfortunately it seems that's not going to happen.

[tomster2300]

Originally Posted by Hi Ho All of EA's latest games seem to be major resource hogs and only perform OK on very high end systems. That's one reason I want to see more games using the Source engine. Unfortunately it seems that's not going to happen.

That's a waste too since the Source engine is very nice. Unfortunately BF2 seems to run smoothly with everything maxed out only on 2 gigs. Bummer huh?

[pointblanksaint]

plz help!!!!!!!!!!!!! just take a look at these specs and see if there is a reason why i cant come close to running it on a good amount of detail, so far the highest detail i can get out of it is med\low. it drops frames and pretty much sounds alot like that guy aboves problem, where you get into a more dense area of other players and the rendering goes up and my comp starts crapping on me.

amd 2800+ xp cpu 2.08
2gb pc 3200ddr (duel channel)
400w power supply
brand new heat sink to processor, with a grand total of 6 fans
nvidia 6800 GT 256mb oc at factory settings.
all updated drivers for chipset, vidcard,mobo, etc.
the one idea that i have is that it is originally a compaq modified to these specs, it has an asus mobo, only being that it is compaq it there are corners cut in the developement, making it not really the same as an out of the box asus mobo. all of the above have tested well with everything, and every other game i own runs well with the exception of bf2.

[Jaggannath]

I really can see no reason why that wouldn't play it well PBS... What mobo is it again??

[pointblanksaint]

well the technical name for it is A7V8X-LA (Kelut) but its like a different variant of the asus mobo. either way, somewhere im being bottlenecked and i cant find it.

[pointblanksaint]

btw, thanks so much for replying... just hearing someone thinking the same thing helps

[Yuanji]

which BF2 patch have you installed?