FEAR LAGS, any solutions?

[tiger102]

Hi, Fear Combat lags whenever i use a shotgun, pistol, and other weapons sometimes. Whenever there is a fight between me and someone else i experience lag, epically with the shotgun. For whatever reason, turning off the sound card fixes the problem, i believe so. but then playing FEAR without sound isn't that great, you can't tell where the fighting is at.

Steps that i took to fix this problem are, like i said, disabling the sound, which somewhat fixed the problem. Decreasing quality from high to medium, didn't fix the problem, this is for both graphics and computer. Playing on low, did, but than the game looks ugly. Also when playing on either high or medium or low, i made sure that soft shadows were off, some said that this can decrease performance a lot so i turned it off. The resolution that i play on is 1024 X 768. I also updated my video card and sound card drivers.

By the way, the FEAR that i am playing is the muliplayer version only, there is no single player in it. its the only you can get from jointhefear.com for free.

my computer specs are:
pentium 4 3.4ghz 800 fbs
2 gb of ram at 533 mhz
160 sata segata
ATI x850 XT video card, 256 mb

if anyone knows of a solution please help.

 

[BigL]

Huh, same thing happens to me. I have a brand new system - x2 3800 2gigs of ram 7600gt.... all latest drivers installed, just installed the logitech mouse drivers because it seemed like mouse lag. What sound card are you using, onboard? I think this might be what's causing it now that you say sound, I have onboard and a pro audio sound card (m-audio) so later I'll see if it happens/doesn't happen with the sound card/onboard and also see if medium sound settings fixes it as opposed to high. BF2142 lags in the same manner and I'm guessing it's from using the shitty onboard sound, i'll see how that goes with my m-audio card too later.

 

[tiger102]

I believe the sound card that i have called realtek high definition audio and its onboard. One solutions that was given in another forum said you just need to update your directx to the latest and it should fix it. I did that and i believe it changes things a bit, but not sure, like i can't tell the difference, i feel it did fix it, but not 100% sure. Try updating your directx drivers and see what happens, maybe you might see the difference better than me. If it fixes the problem please respond back.

 

[BigL]

Well, I'm not sure what fixed it... but I updated to the latest release of Directx, have all the latest drivers installed, it's a fresh install, optimized windows using a guide and only have 17-18 processes on a boot up, have AA and AF turned off (notice big performance gain) since it's a 7600gt and I run everything at 1280x960... it's not the onboard sound because I was using that and it ran fine. I also installed my logitech mouse drivers... defragged my hard drives a few times, etc.... as fine tuned as optimized as I can get and lowered all settings to medium in games at that res and I don't get any mouse lag. Maybe I was just pumping up the settings too high I guess the 7600gt isn't as powerful as I thought it would be : (.

 

[tiger102]

I think maybe the update of directx might of helped. But in your last post, you didn't tell me you were trying to play with high settings for computer and graphics.
You said that it works fine with the onboard card, but not so well with the other sound card is that correct?
Also could you give me the link for the windows optimization guide.

thanks in advance.

 

[BigL]

I think I was wrong... I played Battlefield Vietnam with the onboard sound and I was getting some mouse lag... switched the audio driver over to the m-audio card and the mouse lag went away. I'll definitely use the pro audio card for games from now on the onboard sound was making it annoying to play. Could be a driver issue though... I'm using the latest ones from nvidia for the sound, but there might be drivers direct from the audio chip manuf.... maybe realtek or whoever makes it I know this was the case with my previous motherboard.

I used this one...

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html

Didn't do everything listed but a lot of it was useful.

 

[tiger102]

Could it be since we both have onboard sound card, that they use more of the motherboard or the CPU since they are onboard and not separate. It seems like separate sound cards do the work themselves while onboard sound cards seem to hough bus bandwidth or something. i could be wrong, what you think?

 

[BigL]

I really have no idea, I guess it could be because it's onboard. I used to have problems with BF2142 and punkbuster and someone thought it was the sound card so they reccomended changing the accel. on it for games... try going to Run, dxdiag, and then trying the game with different hardware sound acceleration under the sound 1 tab - no, basic, standard, full. see if you still get lag with standard accel. or maybe basic or even no, but I'm not even sure what these different levels do.

 

[tiger102]

I tried what you said, didn't really work, i even tried with no acceleration and still the same issue, what did work to my suprise is disabling the sound. I was able to play Fear Combat Muliplayer with both computer and graphics high settings with no problems, there was only lag in the begining of the level, but i think that's because it was loading and stuff. and i probably notices like 1 or 2 lag during fight.

but with sound settings on, i notice lag alot more often even when the settings are low, espically in a fight. I don't see any problems when i disable sound and play at high settings.

I don't want to make conclusions yet, hopefully i can ask a friend to lend me there sound card and try it i guess.

If anyone knows of a better solutions please do state it.

by the way is there a store where they lend you hardware, lol, that would be cool for testing.

 

[bfellow]

Onboard sound does use more of your CPU usage. So having a seperate sound card does increase frame rate and decrease "lag" time.

 

[tiger102]

yep, that's what i was thinking, but thanks for confirming it, i though maybe its another problem, but i think its the onboard sound card.

 

[tiger102]

I think i fix the problem, i put the sound on no acceleration, and in the configuration i checked all expect "disable sound" and "disable hardware sound" and now things seem to work fine. I guess it didn't work before because i had "disable hardware sound" checked, which it should of been unchecked. Also in the game, i made the sound to minimum.