Huge Lag on the NavMap
 

Intel Dual Core Chip
1GB DDR2 RAM
ATI X1800 GTO 256MB Video / 500W PowerSupply

I'm getting huge amounts of lag while traveling on the Nav map screen. Even at low to NO TC. Also the waves have a silver looking crest too them while standing on the deck.

Anyone else ran into this? Would another GB of ram fix it? :o

I would say that the extra gig will help. Also, How far out on the map are you? The closer I get to my little circle of a sub, the smoother it is for me.

The water deal you are having, what options do you have checked? Water glare or 3D water?

I'm getting no lag whatsoever on the nav map screen until about 512x time compression, unless there's a convoy in the area or I'm within 30nm of a friendly harbor, and I run the game at below minimun specs with a 1.8Ghz, 512 MB RAM and a 9800 Pro (RAM is below). Your problem must be something else. I noticed a major speed increase in loading times and in general when I replaced my pretty old and finally damaged HD with a new one. Really such a speed increase that I previously thought could only be achieved with additional RAM, so check out the status of your HD - it is often the neglected component. Maybe also try a defrag, albeit this often brings only minor performance increases from what I can tell.

Also check if you have a lot of background programs running while playing the game. You might want to disable those via the taskmanager or utilities available on the net, like "enditall". Further more, there are some pretty aggressive virus scanners around which will basicly check every single file that is called up by the system. My ISP provided me with one of those, and it brought my overall system speed down by what felt like 50%. I got rid of it in a heartbeat, lol.

True also.

I am using an old hard drive. The MB has a SATA port, I'll give that a go.

TY

If your hard drive is swapping files like RAM the another stick of RAM should help you.

The game uses about 1.1 to 1.2 Gigs of RAM when running on my machine with gfx turned all the way up. You are definitely using virtual memory if you only have 1 Gig.

I have just one stick but once the game loads the hard drive hardly does anything at all

Definetly an extra Gig will help, just recently purchased another gig, not a fix all, but definetly a welcome diffrence, still get lag but only in 4000 compression settings, and of course whats happening around your sub.Check your virtual memoery settings, whatever recommend size is, double it,that may help.Sound drivers and video drivers may be problem as well. Research drivers your using and see what others are saying about those particular drivers.Google can be your best friend, also this forum:D Have about 200 hours gametime and probly spent 50 hours researching forum and google :tweak XP and others and this is my result
System spec
Win XP
Intel 3.6 Ghz
2Gb OCZ DDR ram
7600 GS BFG Video card 93.71 Driver tweaked driver
Samsung 19" LCD monitor
80 GB HD
AsusPv5PE-VM MB use onboard sound, found that using PCI sound card,driver caused probs IE too many crashes
Do not use free antivirus, firewall programs thay do a reasonable job, but you get what you pay for. Heh! learned the hard way.
you really have to play with your video card settings and SH4 graphic/ sound settings to get the best performance/graphics/ sound depending on your PC specs.

Really luv this game, the potential is there for greater gamelpaly and yeah! I do love the eye candy:cool:
Anyhow after doing all this,Post Processing On get a respectable 24FPS on bridge, 36 inside sub, and 72 on world map up to reasonable compression time. Warp speed will cause you lags no matter what you do . Fantastic grahics and very rare CTD with this setup :D.

What's the best amount of RAM to get? the max your computer can handle or just enough for SH4?

At 512Gig the swap file might be slowing you down. Also the graphics update hit is heaviest on the map while near bases with large numbers of radar contacts. To test this watch the HD light during play or bring up the Task Manager Performance tab and play for a little while in a game already loaded, then switch out to the Task Manager and see if the Page File history jumps up and down by a large amount.

On my system with 2G of RAM and 512Vram, I have no swapping at all and once the game is fully loaded, I have no HD activity.
-Pv-

Waht's Vram?

Vram:
Graphics card memory.
IE 128MB, 256MB, 512MB

just for case, check the map. I had the problems with lag too (in SH3), and it was caused by the loooong line I made with ruler (some 7000 miles). then I just removed it and everything was OK.