This is for anyone to try an answer. I observed this on both Windows and now again on FreeBSD.

Every second, there is bit of client side latency and a few frames get skipped. Tweaking all the graphic options form high to low have no effect on it at all. Has any one else seen this or heard of it?

Is there something that the client does every second that could cause this?

Were both running on the same machine? What are the hardware specs? That sounds a lot like something being swapped from memory to disk or from the video card to RAM on a regular basis.

I deliberately left the specs out to see if anyone had encountered similar experience.

AMD Athlon 2400+ (2Ghz), 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon 9000 (128MB), 2x 1.5Gb swap files on separate disks (that go unused). FreeBSD 6.2p5

IIRC when I ran VO on Windows, this problem may have only manifested near big stations.

Full dmesg:
http://gehenna.autocthonia.net/mephisto.dmesg.txt

Is it consistently a one-second period or thereabouts? Not much variation in delay? I don't even have a conjecture at this point. But /toggleframerategraph (I think you need to also enable /fps to see the graph) might be interesting to check out.

Like clockwork.

http://gehenna.autocthonia.net/~zyl/vodumps/

hires is maxed out everything at 1440x900
lores is everything turned off at 800x600

Found it!

Did some poking around on discovered something polling on my system at about a 1 second interval. gnome-netstatus-app was the culprit. I guess I can assume that on Windows I had something (a bit less intensive since it was never as severe) doing something similar.

With it disabled, it's smooth as silk. No hiccups. I still want my FreeBSD native port though. =P

Feel free to look at the screens anyway to see how intrusive this thing was.

im experienceing similar probems but till i read this i dint think to tyr a frame rate graph.


notice the one time there it went off the chart

EDIT oh yea system specs

amd athalon 2700xp 1gb ram geforce 440mx 128mb

oh and a convoy jumping in KILLS the frame rate



also i tried both 16 mb settings and 128mb settings and found no noticable difference in the framerates

LNH, you and i need to have a flechette-vult duel sometime... it's been way too long since I tried one of those. XD

sure soon as i get this issue sorted out, its made combat to be a major pain in the ass. on a related note im considering upgrading video cards. any thoughts on how this will work for vo?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814141026

I know its not PCI E, id have to pugrade my motherbord cpu and ram to go to pci e and i simpley aint got the bread right now.

Slightly better than what I have, and I can run VO with no issues full settings and 4xAA. You might also have an I/O bottleneck(Cache everything on startup if you have the RAM) or a CPU bottleneck(get a better CPU :(

edit: A pack of spamrags I'm trying to kill firing swarms drops my FPS quite a bit, but it's still easily playable. Everything else is butter.

think a gig of ram would allow me to cach everything?
also id be suprised to se that a cpu thats DOUBLE the minimum requirements wouldent be enough

well preloading dosent seem to help the game is basically unplayable like this even at bare minimum settings. till i can afford a new graphics card ill just have to find something else to do, unless anybody else has any suggestions

try enabling vsync in the Options->Video menu. See if that smooths things out.

fixed it, part of the problem was texture compression, it gave me a higher peak fps but any littel thing would make my framerate have a seizure. also switching to dx8 from 9 added on an extra 100 or so fps at 128mb settings compared to bare minimum settings on dx9.

Yeah, a lot of old nvidia cards don't do so well with dx9. Switching to dx8 on a GeForce 5600 doubles my framerate, woo.

Ah yeah. the geforce 5x00 cards don't do dx9 shaders very fast. Switching to ps1.x in the Video Options would effectively do the same thing (Or disable shaders altogether [or just glow effect]) if they are enabled.

shaders werent on neither was glow effect, i was running with settings so low it looked like the inside of a disco ball

Heh, well, I'm glad switching to dx8 seems to have fixed it for you, but I really am concerned about the time when we remove the dx8 version from the game.

Now that it has been mentioned, I recall having the exact same problem on this DX8.1 era ATI Radeon 9000. At the time it was suggested by incarnate that it might be a bug in VO's DX9 driver. Might that still be the case? And might this affect all pre-DX9 cards when using the DX9 driver? And if so, is there a way to probe for DirectX hardware compatibility and default to DX8 for cards that need it?