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Gan Ning
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Posted - 2004.02.15 01:37:00 -
[1]
A lot of complaints about lag, a lot is justified as the servers do seem to choke out if more than 50 ships populate in one area in certain regions.
However not all lag is server side, and that's what i want to talk about today.
Since launch i've been running the lamest computer setup you can imagine, please don't cringe but I have happily been able to play C&C generals, homeworld, EVE and other 3D based games with this setup.
AMD 1ghz Duron
684mb mixed mismatched cheap sdram
32mb geforce 2
Soundblaster 16
5400 rpm Maxtor Drive
Broadband over a slow wireless network
I kid you not.
You would think performance would be atrocious, but it all runs perfectly well.
The key is not in you actual hardware but other things which I will underline;
Disk Fragmentation
Uninstalling, installing, deleting, moving programs and big files will fragment hard disks. As many of you know, a fragmented drive means longer access times and occasionally a system can hang accessing a drive. Solution is to Defrag your harddrive using Windows Defragmenter every few days, performance increase noticeably.
Virtual memory
Whilst it is recommended by Windows, enabling or leaving it on by default means Windows will happily write stuff to the drive that it could instead put in memory. If you have a slow drive (5200rpm) reading and writing to the HD is very slow much slower than accessing pure memory. On my system I've switched Virtual memory off. I advise you have quite a lot of memory on your system before sttempting this. Screw it up and you'll have problems for a long time. But get it right and you're have much faster gameplay.
Background Programs
Kazza, WinmX they are a blessing and a curse. File sharing programs will saturate your bandwidth at every opportunity. Meaning less bandwidth for EVE. Close all filesharing programs, don't minimise them, terminate them completely.
Also have a little look in your system tray, i bet theres a plethora of programs you don't need. All these programs, be it Norton Antivirus, MSN Messenger or MS Office all take up cpu time and memory. Close them all before you start EVE. All the little things add up.
You may need to remove some shortcuts form your start up Menu.
Your Connection
Playing via a router, behind a firewall shouldn't affect gameplay too badly but you can place your machines ip outside the Firewall in whats called the DMZ zone. You can access your Routers settings usually via your web browser, 192.168.2.1. Again don't change anything if you don't know what you're doing.
I've found resetting my router and cable modem from time to time seems to help performance when packets start getting lost.
Don't download some file whilst playing EVE it will affect performance.
Drivers
Always make sure you have the latest sound and graphics card drivers installed. I havent had a Blue screen of Death for over a year.
Overclock
Sqeezed an extra 100mhz out of my AMD. Whoopie Do!
But seriously the point is a lot of performance comes down to the client, make sure your system is running optimally. And btw i have ordered the parts for a new watercooled 3.2ghz system, which I will with haste overclock it to 4hz. 
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.15 01:41:00 -
[2]
The new Catalyst 4.2 did WONDERS for my EVE Performance......really took the lag off of the GUI (having many windows up at the same time)
__________
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DigitalCommunist
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Posted - 2004.02.15 02:23:00 -
[3]
p3 550mhz, 327mb sdram pc 100
yeah and you thought you had a crappy system ;)
disable EVE sound, and don't run anything like media player it kills performance, so does IE,
try and go for full screen when you can, although it kills multitasking
_____________________________________
Perpetually driven, your end is our beginning.
"Can I be a consultant for EVE II?" - WhiteDwarf |
Psuedo Angel
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Posted - 2004.02.15 02:50:00 -
[4]
 Quote:
Playing via a router, behind a firewall shouldn't affect gameplay too badly but you can place your machines ip outside the Firewall in whats called the DMZ zone.
definitely not recommended unless you're running another firewall.
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Mijstor Jedann
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Posted - 2004.02.15 02:53:00 -
[5]
Question, for those that have these new 4.2 driver's in....
Any bad experiences so far?
the thought of a smooth-running GUI is exciting 
and for those that have new drivers could you please list what OS you are running- thx
____________________
"Amarr alone, delivered herself."
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Carmen Electra
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Posted - 2004.02.15 03:03:00 -
[6]
4.2s have really been a miracle, before, GUI windows would lag my system like crazy, they no longer seem to affect it nearly as much.
AA seems smoother too, overal performance boost. Now all they need to fix is the Z-Buffer 
__________
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Demos Q'algryph
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Posted - 2004.02.15 03:03:00 -
[7]
Running 1600-1200 with 2 sample multisampling full screen with the new 4.2 catalyst drivers on a 9700 pro, make a remarkable difference.
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j0sephine
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Posted - 2004.02.15 04:33:00 -
[8]
"Question, for those that have these new 4.2 driver's in....
Any bad experiences so far?"
Yes, Eve refused to run with them on Radeon 9000 and WinXP. --;
(back to 4.1 for the time being...)
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Mijstor Jedann
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Posted - 2004.02.15 04:49:00 -
[9]
Edited by: Mijstor Jedann on 15/02/2004 04:49:58
wow, thanks for the quick responses ladies and gents!
hmm, in that case I might give it a whirl however if j0sephine happens to read this... was it much of a pain to revert back to the old drivers without any issues?
and sorry to hear that they caused your problems, I run xp aswell I'm sure others have had issues just haven't come accross this particular thread.
well good luck to all and see ya in space
____________________
"Amarr alone, delivered herself."
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Cao Cao
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Posted - 2004.02.15 05:08:00 -
[10]
Good suggestions Gan. I didn't know that bit about virtual memory, I just upgraded to over a gig of DDR SDRAM so I will go and turn off my virtual memory.
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Stomper
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Posted - 2004.02.15 06:11:00 -
[11]
Quote:
"Question, for those that have these new 4.2 driver's in....
Any bad experiences so far?"
Yes, Eve refused to run with them on Radeon 9000 and WinXP. --;
(back to 4.1 for the time being...)
Same here, 8500 & XP 
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dalman
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Posted - 2004.02.15 07:10:00 -
[12]
Edited by: dalman on 15/02/2004 07:18:54
Quote:
Virtual memory
Whilst it is recommended by Windows, enabling or leaving it on by default means Windows will happily write stuff to the drive that it could instead put in memory. If you have a slow drive (5200rpm) reading and writing to the HD is very slow much slower than accessing pure memory. On my system I've switched Virtual memory off. I advise you have quite a lot of memory on your system before sttempting this. Screw it up and you'll have problems for a long time. But get it right and you're have much faster gameplay.
In a discussion on another computer forum a guy that was working with this stuff meant that Windows XP does handle memory in a very good way and strongly recommended NOT to do this.
I myself have 768mb ram and have 512mb virtual memory on both of my hds.
The memory leak problem in EVE is pretty much fixed, but some time ago EVE sometimes ended up using more than your 684mb memory, Gan Ning...
*edit*
And to confirm that the memory leak was fixed: I've had my EVE client running for about 16 hours now, and it's "only" using 254mb.
M.I.A. since 2004-07-30 |
j0sephine
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Posted - 2004.02.15 07:24:00 -
[13]
"hmm, in that case I might give it a whirl however if j0sephine happens to read this... was it much of a pain to revert back to the old drivers without any issues?"
Not really, i just ran the "ATI uninstal utility" from the add/remove programs panel, and after system restart ran the setup program for the 4.1 drivers.. was only annoying to have to set up the display preferences and stuff. ^^;
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crazy
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:00:00 -
[14]
Try not running windowed...run fullscreen. that helps lots to :)
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Joshua Calvert
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:37:00 -
[15]
Gonna try the 4.2 drivers this morning - haven't had an issue but if they help with the horrid GUI then that's good.
LEEEEERRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! |
Joshua Calvert
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:38:00 -
[16]
P.S: My Virtual Mem is currently at 1535MB...I think that's the same total as my RAM.
LEEEEERRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! |
Gan Ning
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:40:00 -
[17]
Quote:
In a discussion on another computer forum a guy that was working with this stuff meant that Windows XP does handle memory in a very good way and strongly recommended NOT to do this.
Yes Dalman I should add very quickly that I'm running EVE on Windows ME not XP, hence my need to turn virtual memory off. I do believe XP handles memory much better, i should point that out so no confusion is caused. If you are running XP you shouldn't need to touch your Virtual Memory settings to get better performance.
But if you have ME or 98 SE and almost a gig of RAM try it out.
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Joshua Calvert
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:46:00 -
[18]
I upgraded from Win 98 SE to Win ME (yes, I know) and discovered it handled memory like a butter-fingered Scottish rugyby player - very poorly.
One tweak that I've seen and used was to open your system.ini file and underneath [386enh] add the following line:
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1
It worked for me but since I upgraded to Windows XP I've never had any memory allocation difficulties.
Try the following website: They offer good tweaks and tricks for maintaining the performance of your machine AND specific games.
http://www.tweaktown.com
LEEEEERRRRRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY! |
Dust Puppy
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:48:00 -
[19]
Quote:
Try not running windowed...run fullscreen. that helps lots to :)
I felt a great improvement in performance in changing from full screen to windowed 
Maybe I¦m just imagining things.
__________
Capacitor research |
Fuujin
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Posted - 2004.02.15 09:56:00 -
[20]
Installed it, now my EVE won't start. Just magical.....
_______________
The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life's questions
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Mephorios
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Posted - 2004.02.15 10:07:00 -
[21]
That, Gan Ning, has got to be the greatest use ever of the damned little smily faces.
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Nexos II
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Posted - 2004.02.15 10:07:00 -
[22]
Haven't got the best computer in the world either i had gf2mx before and a duron1200 but managed to upgrade to a better kt133a mobo and a 2100+ processor and a gf4-ti4200 card and the game works nicely now =) |
Luc Boye
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Posted - 2004.02.15 10:30:00 -
[23]
I'm not that good when it comes to windows performance since I work with linux and solaris, and just play games in win, but here's my 2c euro:
- virtual memory: I would keep this on, however, I don't think that automatic handling of virtual memory is recommended. I set my virtual memory to fixed size. Furthermore, the virtual memory was fragmented as well, imagine it growing and shrinking as it pleases.
- do like this: turn the virt. memory off, reboot, defragment, reboot, turn it on with fixed size (double of your RAM size, just for good measure).
- Virtual memory is performance killer, if OS needs to write data to your disk instead of keeping it in RAM, it is a sure sign you need more RAM and/or fewer running apps. Virtual memory serves only as a placeholder for apps that are not active, or in case of emergency, but you should not use it normally.
--
2004.12.29 23:33:40combatMining Pollution Cloud hits you, doing 140.0 damage. |
Fuse
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Posted - 2004.02.15 11:32:00 -
[24]
Quote:
Installed it, now my EVE won't start. Just magical.....
EVE is very picky about her video drivers please update them.
0.o It's not you... no wait it is you. |
DeeCo
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Posted - 2004.02.15 13:00:00 -
[25]
Edited by: DeeCo on 15/02/2004 13:28:50
Edited by: DeeCo on 15/02/2004 13:03:58
The biggest Killer to perfomance in EVE is weapons and Mining lasers, the light effects and the beams really impact on performance. Looks like a textured light source, heavy workload for the T+L engines.
To speed your sytems up :-
Run in interlace mode. - adds 5 Fps
Run widescreen - adds - 8Fps
Run at lowest possible resolutions. - adds between 10-40 fps
Set graphics card options ( radeon control panel / geforce control panel) to best perfomance, though you might get badly drawn text,other than that go for a not so high quality, turn off AA, Antiostropic, and Hig Mip map levels.
Force 16bit Z-buffer. - makes things like stations and gates flicker a lot tho.
Switch texture to Block transfer, instead of flip, or auto.
Turn off in eve :-
Trails. - adds 3 fps
Sun Occlusion. - stops CTD in multiple accounts, no real effect on FPS
Update turrets. - 2 FPs
Radar. - 1 Fps
Have the minimum ammount of the UI on screen, close channels that are not needed, like Curse room, lots of people has a negative impact on the perfomance.
- 7-12 fps depending on number of channels open
Turn off scanner and cargo windows - 5 fps.
Right click you NeoComm bar and tell it to "auto hide". - adds 4 fps and gives more screen size.
And remember , EVE was ment to look wonderful on a single monitor, with all the options on max, thats why they added the extra features from DirectX9.0b. So only cards based on this technology will see the improvement.
Ie Radeon 9500+ and Geforce FX series. Not even the Gforce 4 has directX compliant hardware.
With the above I can quite happily run at framerates around 70fps single account at 1280x1024
and dual accounts at 30 fps each at 1024x768, going up to 50 fps when the other is minimised.
Happy roiding,
Ps systems specs :-
Epox A7N8X Nforce 2 mobo
Gainward Goldensample Geforce 4 Ti600, dual output.
Athlon XP 1800+
512mb Micron pc 2100 DDR, single stick (* not even using dual channel, as eve hates running with a gig in it, it likes to CTD a lot, and no the memory is fine)
Soundblaster Audgy Platinum - Just basic drivers only, non of the ****ty extra software.
IBM 80Gig hdd, with eve on its own 3gb partition, as its a real untidy game, leaves loads of files fragmented.
WidowsXp - Pro edition patched to the eyeballs.
1mb adsl connection
Click my sig for stats
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Graffix
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Posted - 2004.02.15 13:47:00 -
[26]
I run two accounts off the same puter both at 16x1200 in windowed mode with everything (including sun occlusion and trails) on and have no problems what so ever, I even surf the net with both clients open with macafee, winamp, and occasionally ill have winmx open too with no probs. I wouldn't have all that open if I expect to fight, but I could and did when I jumped into a pig stye.
Dual logging was quite laggy on my old machine, but since my new dream machine and the 9800 pro it's been a match made in heaven |
Kunming
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Posted - 2004.02.15 18:41:00 -
[27]
Defragmenting and regularly cleaning the cache folder keeps me away from lag... most of the time. But in large fleet battle I still have some lag despite having a T1 connection.
I only hope that CCP sets more nodes up with our subscribtion money!
Intercepting since BETA |
Fuujin
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Posted - 2004.02.15 18:59:00 -
[28]
Fuse: thats the thing, i updated the drivers and now it doesn't run.
_______________
The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life's questions
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Fuujin
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Posted - 2004.02.15 19:15:00 -
[29]
Sorry for the double post.
Uninstalled my video card and put a previous patch on it, now it still keeps freezing. Any suggestions?
_______________
The sword has to be more than a simple weapon; it has to be an answer to life's questions
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Barfolemew
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Posted - 2004.02.15 21:40:00 -
[30]
Run Spybot Search & Destroy (i hate AdAware) to clear all spywares/adwares that may decrease performance.
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