Can't use TC over 512 without choppy gameplay.

[Shyzar]

I'm on my second patrol with a porpoise based at pearl and I can't use TC over 512 without very choppy gameplay which makes anything above 512 actually slower than 512. When I first got ordered to go to honshu, I used highest TC, got there in about a minute or two. When coming back, couldn't go past 512, took 45 minutes to get back to pearl. Is there any way to fix this?My machine is Intel P4 2.93 GHZ, 1GB RAM, Nvidia 7600 GT OC.

[Go4It]

One doesn't play the game in TC, TC is used just to get you somewhere fast, when in action one plays in realtime. I sometimes use 6000+ TC when in safe water, 1024 when not sure if enemies in area an 64 TC when in enemies water. Most of the time when I use TC is at night or submerged. When the game seems to lag under TC it means there's something out there.

[Shyzar]

no, I didn't mean play the game in TC, I meant about using it during transit (pearl to honshu, pearl to marshalls etc.) But nomatter where I am its choppy, does convoy or task force sightings on the nav map cause it to get choppy?

[mookiemookie]

If there's ships in the general area, like a port or if you're near a task force or convoy it can cause your TC to get choppy. (The game engine has to calculate all the ships, speeds, waypoints, etc)

The same thing was happening to me back in SH3, and I upgraded from 1 gb of RAM to 2 gb, and it makes a huge difference. It's a relatively cheap upgrade, and you get a lot of bang for the buck out of it.

[Shyzar]

The same thing was happening to me back in SH3, and I upgraded from 1 gb of RAM to 2 gb, and it makes a huge difference. It's a relatively cheap upgrade, and you get a lot of bang for the buck out of it.
Ya, i was planning to upgrade, but my PC only has two RAM slots, so I was thinking of getting two 2GB, but i'll have to get it off ebay or newegg and rely on the postal service to get it to me (bad experiances with USPS in the past). Does anyone have a reccomendation to wether I should get 2 1GB or 2 2GB?

[SteamWake]

Often if you go into high TC shortly after loading the game it is indeed choppy.

Be a little patient and usually it will subside.

[Go4It]

You'd have to read your mother board manual to see if it can handle 4 gigs. On some MB you can use 4 gigs but it may not all show up. Also you have to set the timing right, most MB need to have a 2t timing when using 4 gigs ( SLOWER but the more memory makes up for it ) as with 2 gigs you can use 1t with GOOD memory. Plus your OS will dictate how much you can use.. XP home can handle 4 gig but some mother boards may not.

[Fearless]

Just increase your virtual Ram to about 8Gb. That should help.

[NefariousKoel]

Two 1GB sticks is more than enough unless you're using Vista. Your board might not support 2GB sticks.

[Cap'n Crabs]

Hold on fellas, I'm getting the same thing. This is not the usual chop we've all experienced.
I've been playing since the game came out. This is different from the usual "heavy traffic" chop, as there is no traffic around. I would normally only get this beyond 4000+ TC or if there actually were heavy shipping traffic in port.
This is non stop.

This just started for me yesterday. I've been trying several mods, some manual, some using JSGME. I've tried disabling the mods, etc... no effect. Re-ran the 1.2 update, no effect.

Checked FPS and only getting 12 - 17 on camera. Used to be, I was getting mid to upper 30's.
Now when going to TC on the map, it's major ratchet fest 256 +. Mouse gets real laggy.
Looks like I might be doing a re-install again. The last time I re-installed, I told the uninstaller I wanted to keep my save game files, this time everything is going.
Dang, had a good career going too. :nope:

Shyzar, have you been playing with any mods ?

[Cap'n Crabs]

:up: Woo Hoo, working again. I think I found the problem. After the 1.2 patch, some files are reset, as we all know.
I was poking around cfg files, I remembered there was a fix mentioned last month, in the "main.cfg", that last section...

[DEVELOPING]
DevDebugEnable=Yes
DevEditEnable=Yes
MiniDump=Yes

Change the "yes" to "no". The patch must have re-enabled them. I did that and my frames came back and now I only experience the normal chop. hehe ;)

[tycho102]

:up: Woo Hoo, working again. I think I found the problem. After the 1.2 patch, some files are reset, as we all know.
I was poking around cfg files, I remembered there was a fix mentioned last month, in the "main.cfg", that last section...

[DEVELOPING]
DevDebugEnable=Yes
DevEditEnable=Yes
MiniDump=Yes

Change the "yes" to "no". The patch must have re-enabled them. I did that and my frames came back and now I only experience the normal chop. hehe ;)
Oh! I'll have to take a look at that one. Good call!

http://tron-chaser.net/images1/ani_cluelight.gif

[SUBMAN1]

Just increase your virtual Ram to about 8Gb. That should help.

Hardly, since XP can barely use over 3 GB addressed. Anything over 3 GB can only be used to store the kernel, so theoretically, if you have 1 GB in your kernel (soemthing that is impossible), then you could get XP to use a full 4 GB. You must also subtract your system memory from this number.

THis doesn't address the issue that virtual memory is slow and shouldn't be used if at all possible since that could be what is causing his issue in the first place - it is going to the swap drive to store data that it no longer has space for in system memory.

ANytime a program needs to go into virtual memory = a very bad thing since its a performance killer.

-S

PS. If you have 3 GB of RAM or over, you may even consider turning off virtual memory for a perf increase. Some software doesn't like to run without detecting virtual memory though, so a tiny one (a MB or two) would solve that issue.

[Avatar]

I have noticed that if I play a patrol, all the way through w/out saving, or maybe once, as I'm heading back to base, that the frame rate gets more choppy. This may have something to do with the ships I've sunk and their liferafts and the world ships in general. I know this is dangerous to not save often, but sometimes I forget.
Do others experience this?

[SUBMAN1]

I have noticed that if I play a patrol, all the way through w/out saving, or maybe once, as I'm heading back to base, that the frame rate gets more choppy. This may have something to do with the ships I've sunk and their liferafts and the world ships in general. I know this is dangerous to not save often, but sometimes I forget.
Do others experience this?
Simple solution - sink the life rafts! :p i wonder if you get some tonnage for it?

[Shyzar]

DevDebugEnable=Yes
DevEditEnable=Yes
MiniDump=Yes

Change the "yes" to "no". The patch must have re-enabled them. I did that and my frames came back and now I only experience the normal chop. hehe ;)
thanks, that helped quite a bit.

[Cap'n Crabs]

No problem, just glad someone else figured it out awhile ago. :up:

[NefariousKoel]

I got some unique 3D choppiness when I was using TC of about 128/256x approaching Singapore while it was in allied hands still.

I saved my game, went to main menu, reloaded. All was back to normal.

First time I've seen that. :hmm:

[Cap'n Crabs]

Oh I still get chopiness when around a busy port or heavy traffic. The chops I had been getting was out in the middle of nowhere with nothing around. 256 TC was extremely choppy.

Heck, going from western Australia to Pearl, took, oh... about 2 hours of my life.
It was quite painful. :dead:

[NefariousKoel]

I didn't get chopiness at ports until after that incident approaching Singapore.. and there was less vessels there than other ports I've been to.

Oddly, my choppiness continued after that. My FPS in 3D absolutely topped off at 20 even though it used to be in the 30s and 40s before this incident. :hmm:

I'm gonna play around with some settings. Is there any way to easily flush the video cache? My saves seem to keep this issue with them.

[Aludan]

:up: Woo Hoo, working again. I think I found the problem. After the 1.2 patch, some files are reset, as we all know.
I was poking around cfg files, I remembered there was a fix mentioned last month, in the "main.cfg", that last section...

[DEVELOPING]
DevDebugEnable=Yes
DevEditEnable=Yes
MiniDump=Yes

Change the "yes" to "no". The patch must have re-enabled them. I did that and my frames came back and now I only experience the normal chop. hehe ;)Hi all :) (1st post)

I know it's quite an old thread but i must say it's what helped me a lot with my problems of 'choppy performance' (high framerate but constant '~50ms stops' second after second)

I didn't find the solution on official forum until i've hit this thread - i was almost going to give up and just reading more and more threads like this with word 'choppy' hehe :D

Thank you :)

[ReallyDedPoet]

Welcome:up: Aludan

Glad you got it fixed.


RDP

[Lt. Staumeier]

NEVER and I repeat: NEVER completely disable Virtual Memory if you run Windows XP. No matter if you have 16 Gb (and windows would support it) RAM or 2 Gb RAM; NEVER turn off Virtual Memory. XP is specifically designed to continously use virtual memory, wether there are RAM free or not. Disabling Virtual Memory will result in quite an impact on Read/write, opening windows and new programs. Although if you have extremely little RAM (like 512 Mb), you're gonna run into RAM overflow and it's going to use the virtual memory as RAM, and THAT'S slow.

But, to summarize;

No matter how much RAM you have, leave at least 1-2 Gb of virtual memory for Windows to use or you're gonna get hit by a performance loss of no tomorrow. The performance loss is subtle too, but gets steadily worse the longer you keep working.

Not to brag at all, just to back up what I'm saying:
I've worked as a computer hardware/software technician within the Swedish police a long time now. I know the ins and outs of XP so much I wanna puke at it (I run Linux at home, can't bother with XP :P). Windows needs its Virtual Memory. Make it happy and give it some. 1-2 Gb of harddrive space isn't really much of a sacrifice when it comes to upping performance. Oh and btw: XP will never recognize more than 3 Gb of RAM unless you have a motherboard that is cleverly designed on the IRQs, and then you will only ever get 4 Gb. In comparison Ubuntulinux supports up to 16 Gb of RAM (however you're ever going to fit that in the machine..that's your problem :D)

[RENEGADE-623]

I will normally get choppiness when done a patrol and enroute back to pearl or home base. i save and restart machine but still get chopiness during time compression larger than 512. however, one i return to port, and set out on new mission, the choppiness goes away and it back to normal when im enroute on new patrol. i think it has something to do with amojn t of ships you sink during patrol maybe? that is my only guess since when i reach port finally and embark on new mission the choppiness isnt there anymore.

[PepsiCan]

Oh and btw: XP will never recognize more than 3 Gb of RAM unless you have a motherboard that is cleverly designed on the IRQs, and then you will only ever get 4 Gb. In comparison Ubuntulinux supports up to 16 Gb of RAM (however you're ever going to fit that in the machine..that's your problem :D)

That's true for Windows XP 32 bit. However, the 64 bit version of Windows XP has the same memory support as Windows Vista 64-bit. And that goes into the thousands I believe.

But then again, 64 bit Windows XP was never really popular so my point is mute to an extend.

As a rule of thumb, make virtual memory (disk swap space) twice the size of RAM and you should indeed see good performance.

[seaniam81]

Simple solution - sink the life rafts! :p i wonder if you get some tonnage for it?

First; its agains the geneva convention to sink a life boat :down:
and second, it's listed in the captains log as one ton:lol: