Video Cards and WZ Experience

[Celtus]

Greetings,

A quick question hopefully, in the WZ, during small battles game
performance seems fine, but during Fort battles, or large party vs large party
I have a hard time, I think it's lag, but hard to tell during the excitement. My
question is this; would I get better performance with a better video card?
I have an Nvidia 6800GS and an ADSL 3M down/ 384 up connection. Am
I experiencing what everyone else is or is my video card not keeping up with
the action ?

Celtus

[DuoMaxwell]

OC your card a bit and see if that helps, the 6800 is a pretty fast card, the 7600GT is a little faster and can get good preformance with headroom to spare for AA and AF, the 6800 should be able to as well. First try dropping down the AA and AF settings or if you're running at a very high res tap it down a notch or 2 and see what that does.

To OC your card use Riva Tuner for windows or NV Clock for linux. Riva Tuner has tons of options but before you OC search around for your model card and see what abouts ppl have been getting on stock speeds and keep an eye on your temps, if you overheat the card you can damage it permanently.

In general once you know where around the card should be ok at bring it close to it and tap it up in 5Hz steps till you hit a point that the card either starts getting too hot even with the fan speed bumped from the usual 60% to 100% or the card becomes unstable for any reason, like starts throwing artifacts on screen or the game keeps crashing. But remember the game will prolly crash if you change speed settings mid game.

Even with all this warning it's ok to OC your card, it's safer then most think to OC parts if you monitor the heat or eliminate it by upgrading your comp's cooling by putting in better airflow fans, replacing thermal grease with a high capacity one, lapping the heatsinks you have already to get the surface as flat as possible or replacing it alltogether with a better, larger, possibly all copper model.

All of this is just a few opions you have at your disposal before you go out and buy a new card.

[Celtus]

DouMaxwell, Thanks for the OC tips ! I will try them. The question remains
will a better performing card or a higher end card, reduce the apparent lag
during large battles?

Thanks, Celtus

[DuoMaxwell]

Possibly, it helped Magnet allot to step up from an FX5200 or was it a FX5500 to a 7600GT, removed most all the lag and most of his crashes too, but the crashes may have been overheat related, I don't remember if his card had decent active cooling or if it was just a passive cooling heatsink. With heatsinks size matters, you want as much surface area as you can to transfer heat away from the card and into the air, adding fans helps this as well by moving the warm air away from the card, but it's better to hane better case exaust then to have better air intake to help remove warm air pockets in the case, good after market coolers exaust the cards warm air out the back of the case so that it can't warm up the cpu, ram, north bridge, mosfets and south bridge.

You'll have to test it out a bit to see what works for you, but I'd avoid overvolting the card if you want it to last, theres been a few graphics cards ocd to over 1Ghz core speed by putting allot more voltage through the card then was intended, ask ppl that did this if the card lasted more then 3 months tops even with high end liquid cooling.

As for the rest of your machine tho, what CPU speed and core? How much ram and how fast? I'm guessing those aren't OCed either, no custom timings on the ram or sped up cpu?

Your line has the bandwidth to play, but what about your ping? try the tests at http://www.dslreports.com/tools

[One]

Originally Posted by Celtus

DouMaxwell, Thanks for the OC tips ! I will try them. The question remains
will a better performing card or a higher end card, reduce the apparent lag
during large battles?

Thanks, Celtus

I don't think that will change something. I'm using 20Mb ADSL line and 8800 GTS video card and got drop FPS too during large battles. There's something in network game code optimizations to do or is just the server.

P.S I saw in the forum that official server is hosted in Sweden, usually in other games my ping is 25-30 on Telia network servers, (Telia is the best network in Sweden), but in RO my ping turn around 80-100 so that mean that is another network. I haven't checked IP.

[Anpu]

I have 512kbps ADSL, all settings on high, and have no lag, maybe once in a day, even in big battles. My graphic card is ati 9250 gamer edition. My comp is "fast" but as u can see connection isn t high, but even with that "unbalance" comp performance/connection speed, no lags, high graphics with all details.

But I also noticed that i m often disconnected from server after update. It didnt happen before. But thats for another topic.
So I think u dont need monster machine, i think graphic card is key of success. My friend has some integrated on board card, and he can just log in. If he move one step, he crashes.

[adrianpf]

I tried several graphic modes and different graphic cards, look this config:

Linux - Geforce 6150 nforce430 ¡¡on-board!! 256mb - Latest Nvidia drivers.
800x600 medium quality (particles on) - Very good performance (35 fps) in battle (25 vs 25)
1024x768 low quality graphics (particles on) - Good performance (20 fps) in battle (25 vs 25)

So, I think that in Linux I got the best results for my low-end graphics card.