I only got into MMOs a few months ago, and Nexuiz was pretty much the first I played. Since then, however, I've tried out some others and realized just how much it lags! Lag is constant, even with the graphics turned to bare minimum. Is there anyway I can fix this? I play on servers with as low a ping as possible, and still it slideshows, etcetera - Enemy Territory doesn't ever do this.

I'm trying to love Nexuiz, but it's getting hard.

well, it helps if you just set the max rate to an extremely high number. the net code is supposed to be improved in 2.2.4 iirc.

I'm thinking about upgrading my connection to a 3 mbps connection, but with my 768 Kbps connection I'll get the occasional lag...

I really doubt 768 kbps would be a bottleneck in Nexuiz.

GunHammer, see if you can change any settings for your video card in your BIOS settings. I think Intel integrated graphics let you change some settings in the BIOS.

one sec, one sec, do you use zonealarm at all? the firewall.

I had constant lags with that till i turned it off, cause it was 'updating' it's self or some crap every time i played or it was downloading something anyway and this made me get lags constantly. I turned it off during play ...and still do and everything's fine.

know it's a long shot but if you have it then this probbaly is your problem if not, you need to describe in a bit more detail the problems

but since it's happening with all games..

GunHammer wrote:I only got into MMOs a few months ago, and Nexuiz was pretty much the first I played. Since then, however, I've tried out some others and realized just how much it lags! Lag is constant, even with the graphics turned to bare minimum. Is there anyway I can fix this? I play on servers with as low a ping as possible, and still it slideshows, etcetera - Enemy Territory does this.

I'm trying to love Nexuiz, but it's getting hard.

this really does sound like the zonealarm problem i posted above!

k0jak wrote:

GunHammer wrote:I only got into MMOs a few months ago, and Nexuiz was pretty much the first I played. Since then, however, I've tried out some others and realized just how much it lags! Lag is constant, even with the graphics turned to bare minimum. Is there anyway I can fix this? I play on servers with as low a ping as possible, and still it slideshows, etcetera - Enemy Territory does this.

I'm trying to love Nexuiz, but it's getting hard.

this really does sound like the zonealarm problem i posted above!

Maybe!

I get lags in other games too, not just nexuiz. Mabie it's a firewall problem. I'll uninstall all my extra firewalls, linux has a built in firewall anyway...

[TSA] Psychiccyberfreak wrote:I get lags in other games too, not just nexuiz. Mabie it's a firewall problem. I'll uninstall all my extra firewalls, linux has a built in firewall anyway...

Usually "linux firewalls" are just gui's to access iptables.

I just removed firestarter which I believe is a standalone firewall iirc...
didn't get the chance to test it yet, but I don't think it'll do anything...

Eh, my bad - that was a typo. What I meant to say was that ET *doesn't* do this. Sorry for the confusion. Nexuiz is the only online game that lags for me.

No, I don't use zonealarm - I do have Norton Internet Security's firewall, though. Windows XP's firewall is off. I'm playing on a wireless internet connection as well, if that helps. (But again, all the other games work at decent FPS rates.)

"well, it helps if you just set the max rate to an extremely high number. the net code is supposed to be improved in 2.2.4 iirc. "

Not sure what you mean here. What 'max rate' are you referring to?

Well first of all i think a few numbers would help.. Make Nexuiz display the fps (frames per second) you can find it in the menu Options/Effects its called Show FPS. Thats mostly for your self so you monitor that value. For example some graphics drivers force vsync which can cause bad fps.
Then please open the ingame console by pressing shift-escape and enter tdem demo1 that will try to run that demo as fast as possible and report the line it outputs in the console after its finished.
Thats because when people report about lag its still had to say what exactly they mean.

Then please look at the scoreboard when playing by pressing tab and watch the values for Ping and PL (packetloss) if none are displayed they are too low (GOOD) otherwise PL should be small (best 0) and ping should also be low (not over 100).

Then it might be that some of your drivers cause some input lag. Try gl_finish 1 in the console and see if that helps. 0 is the default. If its not helping you might want to get it back.

The tdem demo1 routine resulted in a minimum of 8fps, average of 17. I tried the gl_finish trick and it helped by a grand 1 FPS. (The average was 18.)

Are these normal framerates and I'm just being ignorantly picky?

Well that depends on your graphics card and settings.. Did you already tell which system you have?

I wrote a bit about my results in timedemo here: http://forums.alientrap.local/viewtopic.php?p=16480#16480

I just removed firestarter which I believe is a standalone firewall iirc...

No, FIrestarter is just a nice, simple frontend to iptables. Why would anyone make a "standalone" firewall in Linux anyway when the kernel contains one of the most sophisticated, robust and customizable network stacks of any OS? I mean, yeah, Windows needs its extra three gazillion firewalls because of, well, because of Windows. But let's not get crazy here; just because Microsoft can't design operating systems that work securely on a network doesn't mean that other people haven't been doing it since the eighties and nineties :D

GunHammer wrote:The tdem demo1 routine resulted in a minimum of 8fps, average of 17. I tried the gl_finish trick and it helped by a grand 1 FPS. (The average was 18.)

Are these normal framerates and I'm just being ignorantly picky?

17 is pretty low for an average FPS.

What is your PC's specs?

It's on a laptop, which I assume is the problem. Gig of RAM, 256 meg shared integrated graphics card. I've optimized my XP as far as I can and run Nexuiz on High priority. Oh, yeah - dual core processor, with each core at 1.6 Ghz.

Well integrated laptop chips are never that good for gaming. Well you can try to lower effects and see if that makes it playable.

Open the ingame console and type
exec low.cfg
vid_restart
that will disable most effects, lower memory usage by lowering texture resolution but it will also look way less good then with default settings.
If you want to go further you can download that file: http://esteel.planetnexuiz.de/nexuiz/misc/n_lo.cfg put it into Nexuiz/data and type in the ingame console:
exec n_lo.cfg
vid_restart
That will disable almost anything i found to be there to disable. And yeah i play like this

Oh and btw gl_finish 1 WILL NOT improve fps and i think it was just a fluctuation that it gave you 18 fps.. gl_finish 1 will just help to remove INPUT lag when you have some bad drivers. It should NOT be needed but that was before we knew that you had bad fps and before we knew that your 'lag' is probably just because of that.

GunHammer wrote:It's on a laptop, which I assume is the problem. Gig of RAM, 256 meg shared integrated graphics card. I've optimized my XP as far as I can and run Nexuiz on High priority. Oh, yeah - dual core processor, with each core at 1.6 Ghz.

Like Esteel has said, the bottleneck is in all likelihood the integrated graphics card. Do you know which chipset it is? I'm not that familiar with upgrading laptop video, but I'm sure even a low-end Nvidia would increase peformance substantially. You'll generally want to average 30 fps at the least in order to have playability in a game such as this.

Well, unless Mr. GunHammer is an outstanding hardware tech genius, he can just forget about upgrading his video adapt0r.

However I'd be interested which video chipset is built in. There are more and more onboard chips that aren't that bad...

Btw. setting Nexuiz on high Priority in the task manager is some very bad idea. Better try to adress Nexuiz to only one of the two cores there. If you are lucky, you will get a quite nice boost

GunHammer wrote:It's on a laptop, which I assume is the problem. Gig of RAM, 256 meg shared integrated graphics card. I've optimized my XP as far as I can and run Nexuiz on High priority. Oh, yeah - dual core processor, with each core at 1.6 Ghz.

Disable powermanagement while playing. on my dc machine its the diffrance between ~10 fps and ~100 fps (in the most extreame cases).

Urmel... wrote:However I'd be interested which video chipset is built in. There are more and more onboard chips that aren't that bad...

I guess his CPU is a Core Duo T2300(E), so his chipset is most likely an intel 945GM, the same as in my notebook (the GPU of that is called GMA950). That chipset is not really fast, but it seems to be playable on low.cfg (however i haven't tried optimizing Nexuiz on that chipset...).

It's a 2050 chipset, actually. Thing is, although Nexuiz has a horrible framerate, I can run Enemy Territory (and the more graphically intensive True Combat mod for it) on mid-to-high graphics levels at great framerates. So I don't think it's my computer as much as Nexuiz. Maybe like Kadaver said, Nexuiz just isn't optimized for my chipset, while the others are...

Urmel, why is putting it to high bad? And how can I make it run on one core only?

tZork, how do I fully disable power management?

Thanks, everybody, for continuing to help me out. Other forum communities would have told me to buy a new computer and left me for dead by now.

GunHammer wrote:Urmel, why is putting it to high bad? And how can I make it run on one core only?

Uh, if I had an english OS, I could help you a lil better

Start Nexuiz in windowed mode. Then open the task manager, choose "processes" or sumfing, rightclick "nexuiz.exe" and then choose that setting below the "priority" stuff. now disable one of the two cores - done. Close the task manager and play
Unfortunately you can't save this setting iirc and have to redo that every time you start nexuiz (or at least once a reboot).

As tZork already mentioned, it's possible to get the game running up to 10 times better (blame M$ for their shitty advanced power management - this only happens with Windose )

Going to one core didn't make a difference at all; Esteel, I tried your n_lo.cfg and ironically enough I run mine even lower - 640x480 res, lowest textures, .1 particles. =P

I'm interested in this power management thing. Is it just turning it to 'always on' and putting all the hard drive, standby, monitor options to 'never'?

GunHammer wrote:Going to one core didn't make a difference at all; Esteel, I tried your n_lo.cfg and ironically enough I run mine even lower - 640x480 res, lowest textures, .1 particles. =P

I'm interested in this power management thing. Is it just turning it to 'always on' and putting all the hard drive, standby, monitor options to 'never'?

Laways on should do it, yeh. The thing is windows powermanagement arcitecture thinks teh sysload is ~50% when running a singlethread app (like nexuiz) and therefore assumes its safe to throttle down the cpu speed. Setting powermanagement to always on should prevent this; however since its a lappy there may be some extra powermanagement system. Try wunning nexuiz in windowd mode and run some cpu requency monitor too, that should tell you it its throttling down during play.

Regarding this powermanagement stuff and only using one core.. nvidia graphic drivers have an option called 'thread optimization' if you disable it it SHOULD have the same positive effect as disabling powermanagment or using only one core. Maybe those intel drivers have a similar option.

An other thing to try is to disable the GLSL 2.0 shaders. Those are opengl 2.0 pixel shaders which ET does NOT use because its too old and those pixel shaders are really slow on some cards and i guess even more on buildin chips.

Hey btw, "always on" doesn't fix anything on my machine, never had anything else

Maybe because I upgraded the CPU without reinstalling windows you never know...

Urmel... wrote:Hey btw, "always on" doesn't fix anything on my machine, never had anything else

Maybe because I upgraded the CPU without reinstalling windows you never know...

If you went from single to dual core; verly likely yes. You are dealing with a os that gets nervouse problems form a change of mice.. you thing riping its brains out and slaping a new one in will go unpunished? (you can fix the mess it creates, but in my case i found it quicker to just reinstall)

In my case disabeling thread optimization and using dualcore optimizer dosnet help 100%, i still need to kill power management in windows to get decent preformance in nexuiz. May be a amd/mobo thing tho.

Many graphics drivers has settings for "image quality" usualy some slider that go from "Fast" to "High quality". If you can locate somethign like taht try setting it all the way to "fast" My intel grafix equpied machine died a few months ago so i cant give a better descript where that option is, but im fairly sure i seen it on that one too.

And some lappy do have uppgradable/exchangeable gpu, but thats preddy rare.