Slutterish auras/animations with ambient occlusions enabled.

Would this be caused by graphics card, my cpu or both? My frames are usually great infact that are always great when I notice the slutterish movement of animations. Its similar to the way citizens in certain zones appear to be experiencing rubber band lag as they walk around. (which I always assumed was server lag as my connection quality is nearly always perfect)

I have all of my other settings on max other than the view distance and FSAA.

I'm running a system with:
GTX 280
2gb ddr3
intel wolfdale core 2 duo dual core at 3.0 ghz.

I don't always notice this issue infact I usually won't notice it at all unless I'm at a mission door waiting on the rest of the team and were just standing around.

This is a Coh only related issue and only pops up when I have ambient occlusions enabled. All other ultra mode settings do not cause the issue. I was planning on buying a gtx 480 or waiting until the 485 and 490 no doubt come out suddenly.

But if its cpu related I guess my only real option would be to buy a quad core or overclock my cpu to 4.0 ghz. And I doubt either of those would really help the issue.

Could it also possibly be improved upon by buying a nice ssd drive? I'm thinking I won't get much more than a year out of my current hard drive as I've been using it atleast 3 years now and they usually don't last me much longer before they start to degrade.

hmm.. no replies? really?

I think I meant to type the word "sluggish" Can't seem to edit the main title of the first post though.

Why not post the output from running CoH Helper and HiJackThis. It'll give us more than vague information and guesswork to ponder over.

And no, you can't edit the title of your post. You can however PM either theOcho or Avatea and ask them to change it for you. If you explain the mistake you made, they will likely not have a problem with changing it for you. Of course, they've likely gone home for the weekend so it would probably be Monday at the earliest before anything was done.

Also, the citizen rubberbanding you see is not server lag but network lag. It's likely not related to the other problem since altering AO wouldn't change network properties. To see how good your network connection is in game type "/netgraph 1" to turn it off type "/netgraph 0". The netgraph will appear in the lower right corner of your screen. What you are looking for are short green spikes. Yellow spikes are heavy network traffic or high ping rate. Red spikes are dropped packets.

Yeah I've always used netgraph and it doesn't matter how much activity is in the zone I still see rubberbanding citizens usually only in skyway city though. Network quality is low cut green grass as I like to describe it. The rubberbanding citizens in skyway has been an issue for well over a year.

I'll look into posting the reports that were requested above.