Praetoria unplayable laggy

I'll certainly try both of those things later today, but that fact remains that if it were merely a CPU problem, then reinstalling Windows would not fix it, for however brief. This would also impact other games, like SC2 or ME2, but it does not.

As others have said the Celeron processor is probably proving to be a bottleneck, your graphics are now more than adequate for UM. The memory upgrade probably didn't make as much of a difference as you would hope - Win XP SP3 is the 32 bit version (64 bit is at SP2)
this means an addressable range of 4Gb - knock off 1Gb for your graphics memory and a bit more for the various other bits of hardware requiring space in the memory map leaves probably only about 2.5-2.75Gb available to be used for system memory any installed over this will not be used (You could configure it as a RAM disk which depending on the controller may allow you to use it for storage)

You should check your memory is configured in pairs of the same size and speed (ideally they should be fully matched but generally size and speed will suffice).
Also I tend to find the big lag spikes in CoX correspond to disk paging which is part of why more memory is benificial (provided your OS will allow you to use it).
As you don't have the option to increase it you should take steps to ensure it is used as efficiently as possible - so clear your internet cache, delete temp files, close any unnecessary applications and defrag your disk.
If you have access to a faster drive install CoH to that.

Also is your net connection via ethernet or are you using wireless, the latter can increase lag perceived.

ok, you added more ram, upgraded your video card, and reinstalled windows. worked great for 3 days then boom, massive loss of FPS. I assume you checked it with /showfps 1 in game, and that you downloaded and installed the latest video drivers from nVidia and installed them and never installed the drivers that were shipped with the card.

So I have to ask, what did you install on day 3 after you reinstalled windows?

From what you describe there is something running on your system that is chewing up CPU time causing you to have low FPS.

Do you use any 3rd party game programs for things like badge traking? or Hero Stats?
don't start them or shut them down if you do and try playing.

Start your task manager check your CPU usage while just standing still in Preatoria. If you CPU is pegged at 100% use the process tab and see what's using it all. my rig only uses 10% of my CPU your should be somewhere between 25 and 50% just standing around.

Use msconfig and disable everything in the startup tab and any non microsoft service in the services tab and try again.

you may also want to look in the nVidia control panel and make sure any option that can allow the application to control it is set to allow the application to control it (should be set that way by default)

after all that you still have crap performance in Preatoria your looking at an issue with your RAM, CPU or motherboard. Possibly your Hard drive. by issue I'm talking about something is broken, failed or failing.

I also noticed your report states that you OS drive is Drive H: or atleast you have windows installed on drive H:. Windows doesn't really like this, next time you reinstall make sure windows is on drive C:

I had a weird performance issue recently, which was entirely fixed by disabling the Resident Shield component of AVG.

I'm afraid that my issue (FPS was generally fine, but firing any powers caused horrible, unplayable lag) doesn't share many symptoms with yours, but as you don't seem to be having any joy finding a solution I thought it wouldn't hurt to try.

Well you still haven't posted the results of your /showfps 1 and /netgraph 1. But I'll tell you something else to do anyway. Turn off FSAA completely.

Dude. I do not want to be rude, at all! So please don't be mad.....but it seems you are just dismissing at least half the advice ppl are giving you. You keep saying you know about computers...then did it not occur to you that the Celeron is simply not good enough, period! Maybe the 3 days after install that it worked was a fluke, and so maybe it will never run good on your computer. Ever! Celerons suck, no offense! Some computers just don't react well to some games, or some games after a major update. Or, try another clean install, and this time install NOTHING except CoH! No windows updates , nothing! No programs of any kind! If it is a computer that came with alot of preloaded software, and that is on your recovery disk, uninstall all the stuff you can. If it works again like last time...change nothing!! If after 3 days or so it takes a crap again, then trust me when I say, it is a hardware issue. And by that I mean something is faulty or overheating. If you change NOTHING and CoH suddenly works bad, then it has nothing to do with any software, and you have a hardware issue plain and simple. If it continues to work, leave it alone and keep playing, or install things one by one. Play a couple days before installing the next program.

Failing all that above, my advice is much simpler than the rest......take it to a repair shop....one where the guys know something about gaming as well, and let them peek at it. Anything could be wrong....anything. And most people can not diagnose problems with motherboards and other things like that. Let some experts look at it. Obviously no one here has the answer, so I would quit hounding people for an answer. Sorry, but I say hounding, because you are being quite critical of some peoples attempts to help, and keep repeating over and over again that it worked for 3 days. Again, maybe a fluke!! And you may never get it going again! Not like this anyways. Go let someone look at at that knows more than you!

Or, stay out of Preatoria, it gets old quick anyways! Been out a few weeks and I, and many others I know are done with the zone. Easier to get to 20 in CoH or CoV and just switch factions after! I subscribe to the belief floating around, that as it is right now, Preatoria is just a big tutorial.

Sorry, but I think this forum cannot help you! Just my opinion. Peace!

Here's the thing, all of the other games you mention you play are not only using different graphical engines, they also may not have as many layers of objects as preatorea does.

personaly I see a performance hit as I move from Paragon, to RI, to Crimoria and to preatorea. The map makers of this game have been adding layer upone layer of objects to make up what you see. This will cause some rigs to have severe amounts of lag in them. thus even if you were getting 60 fps in steel canyone you'll get like 30 in preatorea.

but I can't point you in any direction untill you post what your overal cpu usage is and what are the process using what percentage of that usage.

I've noticed Praetoria will only run at about 30 fps outdoors, especially with quite a few players around, on my GTX 465 and 8Gb of ram with an i3-530. It runs better in missions, but I really don't want to see any rikti invasion, zombie attack or outdoor raid/GM fight there. I don't even have ultra settings maxed out and my AS and AA are both at only 2x.

Any zombie invasion or mothership raid or rikti invasion, when they get really busy, already brings my fps down in Primal Earth from 60 to about 10 and crashes CoH, not my whole computer thankfully.
I'm not sure why it does or gets that low really when my computer is a beast that should chew up and spit out CoH, especially in the older areas.




The only real problem is in populated areas of Praetoria, especially the center of Nova, where I notice black frames creeping in very noticeably.
I also notice a lot of places where the world goes black and I can see through walls to every npc in the mission map or area.


My drivers are fully up to date with Nvidia.



Also, does CoH support Nvidia's new physX?
My graphics card is physX capable but the Ageia option is grayed out, probably because it's the old version before they were bought out that is supported.


CoH definitely is harder on my system than I expected when I should eb able to run Ultra Mode at full tilt at 60 fps with this computer.







Edit:
I am usually sitting at about 200 ping, but the last few days I'll have times where the game practically freezes as my netgraph says over 3k ping.
I'm not sure what changed with the last few days, but CoH has weird spurts of severe instability during which the rest of my computer runs perfectly fine and my graphics still run well in CoH, even if the lag makes it so powers will never activate to be rendered.

The weirdest part is the lag see to affect the server as much as it rubber-bands my character. I know this because the enemies that are attacking me when this happens don't "super spam" their attacks at me when the lag ends. I still have the same amount of health and don't see a graphical "Benny Hill" thing happen.
It's as if the whole mission map/server froze, not just my internet.

Alright, check the cpu usage as requested and the results are very interesting, although not at all what any of you are expecting.

In Praetoria, I get no more that 15% CPU usage. Loading areas takes more for a few seconds, maybe as much as 40%.

In the areas that run well, however, like Pocket D, CPU usage is 90%.

This seems to me to be quite odd.

That does sound weird being that it's exactly the opposite of expected. However I have a possible answer. Some computers when they become overheated will throttle back on the processor to avoid damage to the system. If your system is one of these and it is overheating under the stress of Praetoria then it would not be surprising to see the cpu load and framerate suddenly drop in the high stress zones. And Praetoria should definitely be putting that ancient celeron under some high stress.

Monitor your GPU and CPU temperatures in the different zones.

Again......if it worked when you did a fresh install...then fresh install again!!!! Make sure everything is cool, play a few days, or even a week....if everything stays cool....install other programs one at a time!! And a day or two in between installs! If a program is ruining your preatoria experience, it will be found out this way. And problem solved, or at least diagnosed!


And if for no reason after the fresh install, before installing any other programs, you have the same issues....then it is hardware related!!! Something is bad, or going, or overheating of something is happening.

Do this and see what happens, or chase your tail for days.......up to you!

p.s. Like others have said tho....celeron is not a gaming chip, by any means......upgrade your motherboard and chip...even to a slightly older chip....Pentium or Athalon.....nothing else....and you will probably be quite happy!!! Good luck playing any newer games, MMO's anyways, with a celeron!! Also, celerons do not meet minimum requirements of any newer game out there!!! They just cannot handle games!

Well, if it has worked for a few days after installing there's obviously something screwing it up when you've installed/updated components after that, which is now hogging up some data/temporary files pretty badly. Try to think of a list of EVERYTHING that might be running in the background, and shut it down. Also try to switch off windows Aero as much as possible, it's pointless and will only stress your CPU/GPU more for shiny looks.

Other then that the cage on your CPU is plain.. Horrible, as is the bus and pretty much everything, now I know it never uses 100%, but that MIGHT be because it dumps that data and processing prematurely because otherwise it'll either overheat or simply crash itself.(Using an AMD Phenom II ~3.2ghz X4, my cores never reach over 30% CPU usage, but sometimes I still get some lagspikes when using my older GPU to test my rendering engine on )

Another issue might be the speed of your RAM, most DDR RAM is ~400mhz, while this is sufficient for most every day tasks for actual games with a large amount of data to store and handle along with your OS that might not be fast enough, I mean quantity is meaningless on most systems because people tend to either overlook the 32bit limitations or simply ignore the speed of the RAM because they're cheaper.(Note that DDR2 RAM usually starts ~600-700Mhz, I myself use 8gb of ~1333Mhz DDR3 RAM, which does the trick quite well)

Anyways, as a last thing I can say is open your Nvidia control panel, and in the 3D Settings turn EVERYTHING to performance mode, or switch it to application control mode.. Whichever you feel more comfortable with, as well as switching your resolution to ~1024*768 in-game, these things tend to influence your FPS a lot more then you'd think at times.(Using an ATI card myself, haven't used Nvidia since the 6 series So can't be of much help on the settings window.)

Your issue is most likely not a simple one to pinpoint, mostly because the information you hand out is fairly vague, and your responses to people their help seem somewhat short tempered and unwilling to try at times. And out of curiousity, do you have ANY drivers installed for your motherboard AT ALL? This sometimes causes issues as well.

You aren't using windows update to manage device drivers are you?

sounds like your CPU might be being throtled back. might be temprature, might be bios, might be windows. General tab in the system control panel should tell you both max and current clock speed.

only thing I can sugjest would be to monitor temprature, turn off all start up apps and unneeded services (msdonfig works great for this) or do another reinstall with only drivers and no windows updates and add apps and updates one at a time checking game performance after each untill your performance degrades then uninstalling the last installed item.

if after that you still have issues in preatoria, your next step is going to be either replacing the CPU and Mother board as well as ram if needed or taking it to a professinal

Again (oh how I HATE having to repeat this) turning graphics options to minimum makes no difference.

The overheating sounds like a possibility, but I ran it for four hours straight a week ago, followed but 3 hours straight last Sunday, followed by another couple of hours last Monday, all with no issues to lag whatsoever.

Also, I'm not a big gamer. I normally don't play games until they are 5-10 years old and never play MMOs except for this one, and I only started 8 months ago. I will not upgrade either the processor or the motherboard for a while yet. If that is my only recourse, I will simply leave the game. Everything else I want to play runs just fine, and I've already spent $300 on resolving this problem, money which I don't exactly have a lot of.

As for background programs, everything that can be disabled is. No one's answered my questions as to whether they think SecuROM might have something to do with it. I'm also not going to go through the hastle of reinstalling Windows just try to make the game work again. I don't have that kind of endless time and lack of things to do. Again, I will simply drop the game first.

Anyhow, I've already send this to support, and if they can't figure out anything, I will simply let my account expire come October. Or rather cancel it when what I've already paid up comes to an end.

Anyhow thanks for your time, patience, and ideas.