Lag in HL2, BF2, Far Cry...

[BustaRomeo]

I've noticed a rather annoying trend in all the good games I have. I play Battlefield 2 with everything on high except textures on medium, and I use medium software sound. Firstly it takes ages to load, the music crackles when loading starts and nears its end, and once the level has finally loaded it starts lagging so badly! It takes about 10 seconds for my gun to appear, and when I move the mouse it takes a long time to start moving, and it ... lags! If you spin around, it lags. If you jump, it lags. But once the lag is finished it doesn't come back unless you go to a new area on the map.

When you do anything for the first time, it lags. So if I shoot, walk, turn, get in a chopper, anything, for that first time it lags and then it won't come back when I do it a second time. This applies for all the games that I play with high detail. The lag when shooting is the worst in Far Cry, and in Half-Life 2 after the level has loaded the sound and speech are jittery and aren't fluid. But, after a while, it goes away. It also happens when a grenade or something goes off in Couner Strike: Source. I'm going to hazard a guess that it has a lot to do with the fact that I put most things on high and I have just 512mb of DDR333 RAM. I think it's doing a lot of page-file work, and that's why it's lagging. Am I right? What's causing this? It must be a hardware issue because it happens in more than just 1 game that is resource hungry.

Please help.
Thanks.

[DonVito]

Yes it is most likely because of your ram. what happens when you play on lower setting? do you have latest drivers.

[Hi Ho]

I would upgrade your RAM. It would probably help a lot. When I added another 256 MB I noticed a big performance jump in all of my games.

By the way, why are you running a 6800 Ultra on a 300w PSU? That is liable to blow at any time and kill your card and maybe some other things.

[BustaRomeo]

Originally Posted by Hi Ho why are you running a 6800 Ultra on a 300w PSU? That is liable to blow at any time and kill your card and maybe some other things.

Yeah I posted somewhere else about that, don't worry I'm as worried about you about the situation. While on the topic should I just use one instead of two power connectors for the graphics card so that it runs in "safe mode"?

[David M]

You need 1 gig of RAM minimum for the new games and your PSU is not adequate for your 6800 Ultra. I bet the voltage at the card is down to 11.5 volts and your card is slowing itself down to preserve itself. That card burns as many as 100 watts at its peak. Get a high quality 400 watt or better PSU. Get one off the "good" list at: http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=131195

You cannot run that card if you do not have the 6 pin/12 volt PCI graphics connector attached to your card. If you are then stop before you destroy it.

[BustaRomeo]

Originally Posted by David M I bet the voltage at the card is down to 11.5 volts and your card is slowing itself down to preserve itself.

Where can I check?

Originally Posted by David M You cannot run that card if you do not have the 6 pin/12 volt PCI graphics connector attached to your card. If you are then stop before you destroy it.

PCI? I'm on AGP.

[Alaron]

I would not only get more ram, but get the correct speed. A processor with an 800Mhz FSB needs PC3200(DDR400) to run synchronized. Right now you are somewhat crippling performance using slower speed ram. I would buy a gig of high quality DDR400 from Crucial, Corsair, Kingston, or Mushkin.

Also look into a larger PSU, at least 400w. Again, quality is key, look at Thermaltake, Fortron Source, Antec, Enermax, Xclio.


You can check your voltages in your BIOS.

[David M]

OK...my mistake...yours is AGP