Giving City of Heroes a second/third/whatever chance but getting terrible lag. Cause?

I recently redownloaded Coh to give it another shot. Last I played I was using a PoS gateway with absolute **** specs.

Anyways I recently upgraded to a decent gaming computer. It's not "leet" but it should be about to achieve much more than it currently is with CoH.

AMD athlon II x3 450 3.2ghz
ATI 6670 Radeon HD 6670 graphics card
8 gigs ram

With those specs I should probably be able to play with most of the setting on high I would think considering I've played what I THOUGHT were more graphic intense games on higher setting than I am able to do with Coh.

When messing with settings if I go past the Performance setting I basically lag out when changing directions. That makes absolutely no sense that I can't even make it to Recommended with my rig...

So what gives? Am I missing something or does this game require alienware now to play on recommended?

I did a quick search on your graphic card. It's a budget, entry level graphics card that'll work for most games if you keep the settings modest.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385800,00.asp

Yes my computer was a budget build at $450. But it is a very solid build.

According to canyourunit and gamedebate my rig surpasses what would be defined as "recommended" so it does not make sense to me that I lag when I try recommended settings. My graphics card is by no means amazing...but like I said...I have played games with a lot more detail on higher settings than CoH will let me.

Any tweak advice? I know my computer is capable of higher settings than performance. It should be able to play on recommended at the very least.

Quite a few of the video drivers ATI released this year were crap for COH. See if you're using one of them from this list.

Alright I messed with a few things and found some much better results. As for drivers I am using 11.12...and I just crashed for the first time so eh might have to roll back I dunno yet.

Anyways after messing with settings for a while I got up to quality without lagging while playing in 1080p windowed. I tweaked a couple of settings lower and disabled a thing or two but I haven't been lagging at all from what I can see. I'm running AMD System Monitor and it seems nothing is capping it's speed by simple things... but it's pretty obvious that my GPU would be the cause if I do feel a bottleneck.

I'm happy for now though :-)

I'm not all that computer smart so I don't really know what OpenGL is. I can tell you that this gpu can play on quite high settings at 1920x1080 though regardless of what that magazine says

OpenGL is the graphics interface used to render 3D, it was around before DirectX and was made popular by id software with Quake GL and it's successors. IIRC the PS3 uses OpenGL as it's graphics interface.

Personally I don't think your system is all that bad but be aware that AMD graphics drivers are a little iffy with this game, some versions work well, some don't and it's a crap shoot on every version of the driver. I mean they don't fix it and it stays fix. What usually happens is the game will crash frequently if the graphics drivers aren't agreeable.

The HD 6670 isn't that bad, you might be able to enable a hard shadows and reflections at their lowest settings but I would experiment at a lower resolution, 1920x1080 is a bit high for that card with this game and have those UM features on.

/showfps 1 will turn on the fps display along the top right side of the screen. You can reference it while tweaking with the graphics settings.

While I'm not nearly the expert that many that have spoken are, I will make a suggestion that I didn't manage to see. Defragment your drive that has CoH installed on it. Something that simple may just help.

i would definitely recommend the 11.9 over the 11.12

ATI's drivers generally don't handle openGL well. I had the misfortune of playing CoH a while ago on an earlier computer of mine that used an ATI card.

Also, one setting you can often turn down for better performance is particle effects. Has a side benefit of making it easier to see what you're doing in large teams (at the cost of making things like fireball not look as pretty). If I remember right, bloom and depth of field are also good candidates for disabling. Depth of field uses extra processing power to make certain things look blurry.

While not directly related to graphics, make sure you have the NCsoft launcher set to close after launching COH. Many find that it can be a memory hog if you do not do so.

Another issue you are probably having without realizing it is you are attempting to use Ultra mode settings on a rig that says it can handle it, but really can't. I ran into the same problem with my old rig. It was running an Nvidia 8600GS and it told me in the log in screen that I could run Ultra mode settings, and I tried it and found that I couldn't get much past slightly better than default settings before running into lag issues.

Ultra mode is intended for people with extremely high end gaming rigs, it gives mid-range models fits, even if it says you can do it.