What exactly causes LAG?

[mandugi23]

I've recently played BF2 demo and it lagged whenever there's explosion nearby( i think it's suppose to happen though) and whenever im on the ship or when i zoom in on the map zoom out when i'm the commander.

i've looked at the memory usage for BF2 and it is always around 500000k about .5 gig of ram wheather it's during the lag period or not.

my average ping on multiplayer servers are around 50-90

since i have 1 g of ram, shouldnt i experience no lag at all?

what exactly is causing the lag? the shortage of memory? slow video card?
slow internet?

or is it all of the above. if so, what is #1 factor that causes lag.

thanks


my system spec-

HT P4 3.2g , 1g kingston value ram, 6600GT 128MB, syncmaster 710N, abit IC7-G motherboard

[Dark Nova]

if this only happens in multiplayer than yes its your internet connection, could be your connection, connections of others in the server, might be the source(company) server.

if this happens on single player also, than its your computer, is battlefleid2 the only game that lags?

[mandugi23]

well i didnt try many games but i can run counter strike source smoothly.
i have verizon dsl.
great idea !
im gonna try single player BF2 and see what happens

[mandugi23]

hmm it lags whenever i do that zoom thingy in and out on the map when im the commander. it's not as bad as the multiplayer but it still lags.

but definitely performs much better than multiplayer overall.

so what do you think is causing it?

memory shortage?

oh and i checked my ping when im on multiplayer server and it's 55-90

[Dark Nova]

it could be your memory usage, when playing battlefeild2 push Ctrl-Alt-Del then go in performance to see how memory is in use.

it could also be another program that is a ressource hogger, that could explain abit, it would explain why ur not getting any lag in cs, because it dosent take much resource, but battlefeild2 takes about 700MB of ram + your other programs running, it could slow you down

[mandugi23]

it says it's using 500mb for battlefield and other stuff about 200mb

so that's 700mb memory usage but then i have 1g of ram... which means it's not being overused...

or is 700mb memory usage on a 1g ram too much?

[Dark Nova]

did you check under physical ram in the task manager?, battlefeild2 takes more then 500MB of ram, more like700-800MB for all the features. even if you have 1GB you may still see lag with 1GB in BF2

[mandugi23]

under physical memory

it says the total physical memory i have is 1g

total Physical memory avaialbe is .25 g

System Cache is .15g

not sure what all this means though

[Stuey]

I agree that your memory usage sounds odd. My RAM usage is at about 40-50% under normal conditions. I have a RAM monitor up on my second monitor and when I play BF2, my ram usage is at 99% of 1 gig. When I quit the game, my ram usage drops down to 25%.

From this I too concluded that BF2 clears up as many system resources as posible and then consumes about 70% of a gig of ram. If you have more than 1 gig, of course it'll consume more but for your purposes and mine, we'll just assume it neesd 700 Mb of RAM.

It should not be lagging when you play single player. It makes sense that in commander mode there is some lag due to the scope of the commander's view, but there shouldn't be lag when you're just playing bots.

I have a very similar system and am on a cable network. On that note, when I first moved into my apartment, my internet connection was capped at 256 kbps download and 256 kbps upload and I was able to play almost as smoothly as I play now on a 5 Mbps connection.

Since we have similar systems, I can only assume that the game settings may need to be readjusted.

Also, I'd imagine that you cannot rely on ctrl-alt-del to check your ram usage mid-game since the game has to free up some resources to allow you to return to the Windows environment.

[ztx]

How about your graphics card? Does it meet BF2 requirements? Maybe try to lower a few things, if thats the case.

[sgtspector]

It can't hurt to free up as much as possible before launching the game. I use a program called enditall2 to automatically close opens programs and processes (anything listed in task manager). You can chse what to close and what not to close and it will even suggest that you do not close system processes so as not to crash your system. It was freeware when i got it but i think it went shareware. You can probably still find the freeware version by googling it. There are others that do the same but this one has always worked great for me.

[mandugi23]

i ordered another gig of ram which makes total 2 gig of ram....so i'll find out if it's the shortage of ram that's causing the lag or not.

i'll let you guys know if it runs any better

thanks for all replies