I12 Info: Reduced client performance
By
Blue Rabbit,
Posted on: 2008-05-23 09:12 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
At the launch of issue 12 I bought a new pc.
My old setup was the following;
P4 @ 2409 MHZ
2x512gb ram
Leadtek Geforce 6600GT 128mb (standard drivers that came with the install disc.)
asus p4pe motherboard
I ran the game on medium settings.
My new setup is the following;
AMD Quad Core Phenom @ 2.21 GHZ
2x 1024GB Ram
MSI Geforce N9800GTX T2D 512mb (first 174.74 now 175.16 drivers)
ASRock ALiveNF5-eSATA2+ Motherboard
Running everything on the highest.
I'm encountering driver crashes every now and then, it doesnt seem to happen at specific moments, and I cant reproduce the crash, it just happens at random moments.
I have tried the above solutions but they dont seem to help.
Is there a known issue with city of heroes and nvidea drivers 175.16 or could there be an internal problem in my pc?
I did not have the problem with the 174.74 drivers, however, these drivers have a fan problem that sets the fan speed of my card to only 9% and doesnt let me change it, and thus causes it to overheat under stress, this problem was fixed with the 175.16 drivers, so going back to the old drivers is unfortunatly no option for me.
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Third party apps such as Hero Stats and CoHLCD appear to be incompatible with changes made with Issue 12. These apps appear to be having problems and sucking up large amounts of memory, and thus starving the client of memory. This then causes the client to perform poorly.
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Does this count the Videot Map Overlay?
Considering all the Vidiotmaps Overlay does is substitute the static map files that come with the game, I'd go ahead and hazard a guess that, no, it doesn't, as this doesn't consume anymore memory than the game itself would... but who the heck knows how things work in that world of yours... 
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At the launch of issue 12 I bought a new pc.
My old setup was the following;
P4 @ 2409 MHZ
2x512gb ram
Leadtek Geforce 6600GT 128mb (standard drivers that came with the install disc.)
asus p4pe motherboard
I ran the game on medium settings.
My new setup is the following;
AMD Quad Core Phenom @ 2.21 GHZ
2x 1024GB Ram
MSI Geforce N9800GTX T2D 512mb (first 174.74 now 175.16 drivers)
ASRock ALiveNF5-eSATA2+ Motherboard
Running everything on the highest.
I'm encountering driver crashes every now and then, it doesnt seem to happen at specific moments, and I cant reproduce the crash, it just happens at random moments.
I have tried the above solutions but they dont seem to help.
Is there a known issue with city of heroes and nvidea drivers 175.16 or could there be an internal problem in my pc?
I did not have the problem with the 174.74 drivers, however, these drivers have a fan problem that sets the fan speed of my card to only 9% and doesnt let me change it, and thus causes it to overheat under stress, this problem was fixed with the 175.16 drivers, so going back to the old drivers is unfortunately no option for me.
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So what you're saying is 'everything' changed, when you bought a new PC. motherboard / chipset drivers. Graphics drivers (whilst staying the same revision are now being utilised on a different card), sound drivers, etc, etc.
I would go through each set of drivers you installed with the new system one at a time, making sure you have the most up to date drivers for all chipsets available in your new system. Then do what GR is saying about safe mode.
As it's intermittant you may not notice some differences for a while.
Another option is to make sure your system does not automatically overclock your processor or graphics card running speeds. Your board manuals will advise about this, if they do and give you options to remove the overclocking.
Hope that helps.
rpgguy,
I would hazard a guess that your issue is completely unrelated to my opening post. That post refers to issues with unchanged PCs that worked fine with I11 but not I12, and the specific symptoms I mentioned. As far as I am aware driver crashes are not related at all.
I would suggest you try completely removing your graphics card driver and installing the latest release driver from scratch as a first trouble-shooting step.
First thing I'd do is lower your RAM timings a bit. If it's locking up at random then it's more likely to be RAM related than video card related. If in the past you weren't able to run the game for long periods due to the aforementioned fan issue, the RAM probably wouldn't have had time to error out and cause problems.
Failing that, run it in windowed mode until the next driver release.
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rpgguy,
I would hazard a guess that your issue is completely unrelated to my opening post. That post refers to issues with unchanged PCs that worked fine with I11 but not I12, and the specific symptoms I mentioned. As far as I am aware driver crashes are not related at all.
I would suggest you try completely removing your graphics card driver and installing the latest release driver from scratch as a first trouble-shooting step.
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This seems to have worked, I completly removed my drivers, used driver cleaner to remove registry files, then installed the same drivers again, also updated my ethernet card driver (which was out of date) and it seems to be okay again, thank you :-)
Also thank you for your responses Isit_Hotinhere and Maelwys .
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Third party apps such as Hero Stats and CoHLCD appear to be incompatible with changes made with Issue 12. These apps appear to be having problems and sucking up large amounts of memory, and thus starving the client of memory. This then causes the client to perform poorly.
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There have been two recent updates to HeroStats: the first one fixed the memory problem/lag (and scanned the game) the second one allowed CoH LCD to work again.
I have both running now with no lag - thanks to Cryonic for pointing them out 
I had the same performance problems even though i'm not running herostats/lcd and lowering all settings to minimum had no effect.
After a little playing around i worked out that xfire also causes these symptoms (i now switch it off when playing CoX)
I've had problems since the patch. Seems a bit strange but I've only noticed it while fighting enemies. Moving around in the city or inside missions never "rubberbands". But as I enter a fight powers seems to take up a second to activate and the same goes for some effects like knockback etc.
I've closed down HeroStats - no difference.
Ran the game in safe mode - no difference.
Been running netstat for a while now and the Ping constantly moves from around 140 up to allmost 400. And what I mean is that it really goes up and down, starting at 140 then quickly runs up to 300 - 400, stops there for a short while then quickly drops to 140:ish again, like a pendelum kinda.
No other changes made - only the patch. I've had this computer for three years now (old - yes!) so it's the same old. Game is still playable but this is very annoying.
I'm having this ping problem also, though I am not using netstat or herostats, nor have I ever used said programs.
Bouncing from a steady 50 to a stuttery 300+ in periodic spikes, relatively constant at about once every 40 seconds or so.
Combat or power activation induces a more regular period
of spiking, every 5 seconds or thereabouts, with each power activation assuring a spike.
While the game remains essentially playable, it is a bit jarring as prior to the patch I also hadn't experienced this issue.
Thanks for the fix, so when is the game engine going to be fixed to allow those who have been running with High Qualty stuff prior to Issue 12 to do it again?
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I've had problems since the patch. Seems a bit strange but I've only noticed it while fighting enemies. Moving around in the city or inside missions never "rubberbands". But as I enter a fight powers seems to take up a second to activate and the same goes for some effects like knockback etc.
I've closed down HeroStats - no difference.
Ran the game in safe mode - no difference.
Been running netstat for a while now and the Ping constantly moves from around 140 up to allmost 400. And what I mean is that it really goes up and down, starting at 140 then quickly runs up to 300 - 400, stops there for a short while then quickly drops to 140:ish again, like a pendelum kinda.
No other changes made - only the patch. I've had this computer for three years now (old - yes!) so it's the same old. Game is still playable but this is very annoying.
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Having the exact same problem. It's a right pain in the proverbial. At first thought it was my connection and router, but they all check out. I also notice I can't finish a tracert to eu.plaync.com or the servers. Perhaps someone needs to turn DMZ on the routers over there...
Problems seems to be gone now... got a ping that seems steady around 160-170, which isn't the best but much better than before.
Ive discovered a problem, using the new drivers for geforce 8 or 9 series cards causing problems in coh.
Pre update the drivers were fine but upon updating it removed a lot of the lag, im thinking this has to do with the bloom and water effects update earlier but it is causing the game to lockup every so often and just freeze so the entire computer needs to be rebooted, im not sure if its a client issue or a driver issue but either way it was fine before i updated, ive reverted the drivers back and tried to reinstall but no difference.
Also in general the entire server performance has dropped. lost connection to mapserver is common now in missions for most people with decent connections, and last night just as we were about to start the first terra volta respec tf, i was sked by a higher member of team and everyone in teams computer just crashed and needed resetting, windows keys wouldnt work or anything.
Finally i think just about everyone has had the problem when using wentworths, taking ages to load then when it finally loads it says lost connection to mapserver.
Either way theres definately more reliability issues than what has been listed currently.
Also the powers lag is happening a lot, more so on certain maps i found out, a few members of our team on one arachnos mission were waiting 3 seconds per attack click before they actually fire, they just had a red ring around the attacks then they eventually fired, it was barely playable, several team members left because of it.
I'm posting this as a central thread to gather together what we have learned so far this week with regards some players experiencing poor graphics/client performance since patching to Issue 12. We have identified two potential causes for the issues witnessed, which are detailed below. Before reporting a problem with reduced client performance please read through the below and try the suggested solutions.
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[Problem] Some players are experiencing extremely poor client performance after patching to Issue 12 that they did not experience before the issue.
[Symptoms] Extremely slow alt-tabbing, inability to steer with the mouse, reduced frame rates.
[Causes] There are currently two known potential causes:
[Solutions] Pretty simple for both issues:
In most cases it appears that the issue is caused by Water Effects being set to High. Resetting this setting to Low or None has successfully resolved the problem for many.