Hello

When I try and play COD4 MP it's very laggy, no matter what the ping of the server or how many players are in the game. Even on the menu the mouse jumps around the screen. I have turned down all gfx settings to minimum to no avail. I have minimal background programs running. SP is great, I can run it clean on decent settings but MP is a no go.

relevant PC specs:
E6600
7600GT
2GB RAM

I run it through Steam. (That's where I bought it.) Never had this problem with HL2, which runs fine online on Steam.

Did a speakeasy speed test and my connection is around 580 d/l and 280 u/l. That should be enough, shouldn't it? Is Steam the problem? I would think my PC should be able to handle this. Thanks for any help

Have you checked your processor load when steam is running?

Your system is more than capable of running this game.

Perhaps try updating your graphics and sound card drivers? Just an idea.

I'd say it is probably steam that is causing it though.

Thanks for the response.

I made Steam run in offline mode and so far MP has been fine. I haven't tried going back to online mode to check if that was indeed the problem because I'm having too much fun to mess with it.

This is an update for users that may read this with similar problems:

I ran into slowdowns again the other night, so offline in steam wasn't the problem. I NOW believe the problem is PunkBuster, and I got it working again by manually updating Punkbuster via their website and the pbsetup utility.

This has now happened a few times where I join a server and its choppy, and the solution I've come to is choppiness= Punkbuster needs to be updated. If I close CoD4, update PB, restart, open CoD4 MP, it's fine. Don't know why restarting works but when I update PB and run CoD4 its still choppy. (And just restarting w/out updating doesn't work).

I still am not positive what the deal is as that seems to be a rather odd solution, but as I said earlier if you are reading this and having similar problems try the above.

I was thinking PunkBuster as I read through the replies but what do I know, I don't play CoD4

It's probably that memory leak bug they've been talking about:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] emory-leak


Restarting probably works because it frees all the memory leaked by PB

I had a feeling PB would be the issue. I hate PB. It causes more issues than it does good.

Glad to see you've got your problem under control.