Lag Troubles.

LittleKey

Most games I have run with an unfair amount of lag, it seems (especially Crysis, of course.) If someone could tell me why I get so much lag, or how to fix it, that would be great. I think it is mostly due to my horrendous Hard drive space, but I don't know if that's the only reason or even how much it affects performance. Here are my specs, and a picture of my Hard drive. How much would a good new Hard Drive be anyway?

Bios: Phoenix-award BIOS v6.00PG

Processor- AMD Athlon (tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4600+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs)

Memory- 2048 mb ram

Page file- 450 mb used, 3489 mb available

DirectX version- DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

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Display

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Name- NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT

Manufacturer- NVIDIA

Chip type- GeForce 7800 GT

DAC type- integrated RAMDAC

Approx. total memory- 256 mb

Current display mode- 1280x1024 (32 bit) (60Hz)

Moniter- plug and play moniter

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Primesghost

Your video card should work though it's only at the minimum required level. You should either clean up some space on your hard drive or get a new one (you can get a decent sized SATA drive for under a hundred dollars from Newegg). What I would do is to put the new drive in as a secondary drive and copy any files you can onto it. Only have your installed programs and system files on the main drive. Since you've used up quite a bit of space on your system drive go ahead and run a defrag after you clean it up a bit. Also, I see a few things in your system tray that maintain active Internet connections. Shut down your McAfee and Spy Sweeper as well as any other programs you don't need running before playing.

Cycophant

Everything I've heard says that anywhere from 15-25% of free space is needed on a hard drive to be "optimal". No idea on the source of this, but either way, it looks like you're fine. Especially since a good chunk of it is your swap file anyway. I'd be more concerned about how long it's been since you've run a defrag, as that'll be a bigger performance hit.

Now when you say lag, do you mean just poor performance in game, or do you mean lag as everyone else knows it, which is related on online play only? Because if it's the latter, it's a connection issue of some variety. Computer performance is too high these days to really affect your internet speed.

If you meant the former, it could be related to your video card (not bad by any means, but it's nothing special). 2 gigs of RAM is good, but more couldn't hurt either. Especially if you're talking about games like Crysis, that are going to tax pretty much any machine for the foreseeable future.

falsedef

You need to describe relevant information. What kind of lag and for what games? What vid card drivers?

Harddrives typically have little to do with game speeds, other than the initial loading of files or when being used as virtual memory (which doesn't look like the issue here).

LittleKey

I need 15% to even run a defrag. But last time I did, something weird happened. I don't remember what it was exactly, but I'll run another one and say what it is.

Iroh

The amount of hard drive space free is pretty well irrelevant. Your immediate concern should be upgrading to a beefier graphics card, since the 7800GT is nearly two-generations-old tech at this point. Crysis in particular really isn't worth trying to tackle with anything less than an 8-series Nvidia card.

TechBoy

Choppy framerate is NOT the same thing as lag. Lag applies only to online games and the sluggishness that a poor connection can induce in-game.

Hard drive space also has very little to do with low framerates. Your specs are similar to mine, so you should know that our systems are basically 2 years behind the technology curve. That means that while we can still run most everything at High to Medium settings, simply waltzing into the Video Options of current games and setting everything to MAX will lead to choppy framerates.

Every game is different and has different levels of graphical demand. If you don't feel like a game is running as well as it should be, first, update your video card drivers, and then second, tweak the video settings within the game. Every game is different so there are no hard fast settings that you can just apply to all games. However, if you find that you wish a game could be running better my experience has been that turning down Antialiasing, Shadows (especially if there's an option for Soft Shadows), and Shaders (sometimes called Lighting or Particles) tend to have the highest benefit. Every game is different though so you do just have to go through and try them all to see how much they affect performance.

EDIT:

Iroh wrote: »

The amount of hard drive space free is pretty well irrelevant. Your immediate concern should be upgrading to a beefier graphics card, since the 7800GT is nearly two-generations-old tech at this point. Crysis in particular really isn't worth trying to tackle with anything less than an 8-series Nvidia card.

The 7 series is one generation old and plenty capable of running Crysis smoothly at Medium-ish settings. The 8 series doesn't exactly make mincemeat of Crysis either. Upgrading really isn't necessary at this point unless the OP just has a wad of cash burning a hole in his/her pocket.

Iroh

TechBoy wrote: »

Iroh wrote: »

The amount of hard drive space free is pretty well irrelevant. Your immediate concern should be upgrading to a beefier graphics card, since the 7800GT is nearly two-generations-old tech at this point. Crysis in particular really isn't worth trying to tackle with anything less than an 8-series Nvidia card.

The 7 series is one generation old and plenty capable of running Crysis smoothly at Medium-ish settings. The 8 series doesn't exactly make mincemeat of Crysis either. Upgrading really isn't necessary at this point unless the OP just has a wad of cash burning a hole in his/her pocket.

That largely depends on what you consider a generation. All I'm saying is that the 7800 is old news, and if they OP wants to fix the issue, he's going to have to upgrade. The 8800GT just hit and runs at or under 200 dollars, and will run Crysis as well or better than anything else available.

LittleKey

I deleted all of my steam games to try it out, and I ran a defrag, and that brought my free space up to 23% instead of 11%. And it helped, too. I can run Crysis on medium with what seems to be an okay framerate now. I haven't really tried it, but it seemed to help a little bit. I'm just wondering if theres any other way to make it better without getting a new graphics card, because I don't have the money. Whatever helps would be useful.