BF2 Newbie tech help

BlitzKrieg

I'm not a newb to the battlefield series, but because of crappy net connection, i never invested in battlefield 2 until yesterday (new house, new 4mb broadband).


Anyway firstly i love the game, but can someone tell me if this is normal:


-it takes ages to load a map, not the actually loading but the verifying with the client takes absolutly forever.
-Once i am in a game for the first 5-10 minutes its impossible to play cause the whole thing stutters and framerate and everything goes to sh*t


anyway i'm hoping a tweak here and there can iron this out.

If its my specs here they are:

2.99 Ghz pentium 4 processor

768 ram

over 40 gig free on hard drive

radeon 9600 256 pro graphics card.

Zillah

Battlefield has sloppy sloppy code. No matter how good your PC is, the maps will take far too long to load.

Enough RAM will prevent the loading lag. I only have 512 but it only lasts for 10/15 seconds for me. Although I do have a 3.2 and a brute of a Radeon.

Sinister

do you have a firewall (not the windows one, this should always be on) running when you are playing, this can cause you problems, stuttering drift etc, i have zone alarm and need to turn it off when playing and those symptoms disappear, some other games wont even connect when its on.
anyone else i know that had this problem turned theirs off and hey presto, its fixed.

Silverfish

If its stuttering for the first few minutes, it sounds like punkbuster updating.

I found manually updating before playing helped with that:

Step 1: Download This

Step 2: Put the .exe in the pb folder of BF2, (C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 2\pb).

Step 3: Run the .exe then select BF2 from the drop down menu and choose check for updates. (any updates will download in front of your very eyes in the pb folder)


"Check for Updates" needs to be done every time you want to play BF2. To make things simple, make a shourtcut on your desktop to "pbsetup" OR the "pb" folder itself for quicker access to the exe.


For the map loading times, more ram really is all that helps there, only loaded fast for me after put an extra gig in.


Also, shut down any processes running that you don't need.

Ponster

I have a 2.2Ghz AMD with 2Gb of Ram and map load takes 45 seconds and 30 seconds to verify the data.

How long is it taking you?

BlitzKrieg

about 4-5 minutes.

currently trying some tweaking.

d22ontour

Emptying the dmp and logo caches folders in documents/bf2 won't do any harm either.You should have at least a gig of ram to play bf2 me thinks.I did play it on other machine with half a gig but could only handle 16 player maps with major loading times.

BlitzKrieg

the thing is...after the first 2 minutes of stuttering crap and unplayable pain...the game smoothens out and plays perfectly, i have no problems regardless of what i do (well i havnt been commander yet).


So far i have cleared out all my background programs, only necessary programs are running when i play.

-i've done the Punkbuster setup.

And its improved a small bit, the loading times been cut down a good chunk (now about 2-3 minutes in total).

but the framerate at the start is still a pain.

I have some money left over so i might get some more ram.

Silverfish

Yeah to be honest the ram seems to be where its at with BF2, seems a minimum of 1 gig is required ( I would however recommend two if you have the money to sling about. Or, if you can steal it from someone else's pc, like I did.)

Ponster

AFAIK, RAM is the only way to fix the stuttering at the start of a round.

RAM also helps for the data verify part but try this :





The following is from another forum


It used to take me 3-4 minutes but my problem was not memory, it was the speed of the HD the game was installed to. Even though it was a newer HD, Windows was running it in PIO Access mode so I was getting 4.3 Meg / sec transfer speed. Once I got it switched to Ultra DMA Mode 4, I got 44 Megs / sec transfer and now verify in about 35 seconds. Download a program called HDTach and let it benchmark your hard drive speeds.

HDTach download

If you get a low speed (I had about 3.5mb on my BF2 drive, then do the following)

1) How to check...

If you are running XP, go to device manager and expand 'IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers' Right click on 'Primary channel' and choose properties. (Primary is usually the channel you HD's are connected to)

Click on the 'Advanced Settings' tab, this will show the devices connected to that channel, and their current speeds. Virtually all modern hard drives should be running in Ultra DMA mode 5. Maxtor's on the right chipsets run Mode 6, and most CDrom drives run Mode 2. Any HD's running in PIO mode will seriously affect loading times, as this is the slowest speed possible.

2) How to fix...
XP will slow down the speed of devices if it receives errors while using the device, until it gets to PIO mode. This could be due to faulty cables, device or drivers.

First thing to try is simply change the the transfer mode to 'DMA if available' and reboot. If that does not fix it, uninstall the controller and reboot. XP should reinstall it and reset the fastest transfer speeds. You could also try both the MS drivers and the chipset manufacturers. (I had to install the NVidia drivers on my NF4 chipset, to fix IDE problems. I have also had them cause problems on my NF2 chipset system, so try both)

If it deteriorates or this doesn't fix it, check to make sure you are using 80pin cables, and that any transfer/DMA settings are correct in the BIOS.

BlitzKrieg

sadly i just benchmarked my hard drive its pretty hight up, swinging between 60 and 30...


not on the tech side...according to my BFHQ i should be a corporal by now...but it wont promote me...:( is there a time limit between level ups, cause i did rank up just a few hours before that...

see http://www.bf2stats.nl/player/76182406/


confusing stuff

KdjaCL

Next time you login it should give you your goodies.



kdjac

BlitzKrieg

hmmm...mysterious.


Firstly cheers Kdjac, logged back in, shot one more person and it announced my promotion.


But even more mysterious, is that i booted up a 64 man server and i didnt have a single stutter or delay problem, level loaded, evaluate was about under a minute, and then it didnt stutter at all during the game.

Cant figure out why, i didnt change anything between games.

Though the textures did look a bit funny, so i assumed my computer had knocked me back to low settings, but when i checked everything was still on medium.

so wierd.

BlitzKrieg

Oh and does anyone know how to make a correction to your account?

Mine says i'm from america despite setting it to Ireland...how do i change it back?

d22ontour

You can't.

Have to make a new account.

We love you gamespy.

Rly.

BlitzKrieg

f*ck that, i already spent ages on this one.

d22ontour

I am going on earlier patches and peeps i know picking brit flags instead of Irish flags but maybe EA fixed it ....

Nah i doubt it .