Advice on fixing lag

Lashers

I know many of you are having a lag free experience.  However, I am dealing with some regular stutters.  Worse is when I enter a town.  The larger the town the worse it is.  Combe really gets me in sort of a slide show at times.  It is not horrible, but I would love to have less ticky gameplay like I had in WoW.  I understand the graphics in WoW are much simpilar than LoTR, but I purchased and installed a new video card to help the problem.  I ran the auto configuration in game and it set me at very high, but I ended up still experiencing some lag.  I set the quality down to just high and still have it.

I have cable internet and my new card is a radeon 1950 pro 256.  Do any of you have some advice on what I can try that will help eliminate the lag and give me a WoW like smooth gameplay experience?  I want to play LoTR so bad but the freedom to move and interact and be in towns without lag is THE most important part of an MMO for me and I really want to eliminate it.

 

Thanks for any advice

Grindalyx

On the officials a person suggested going to troulbe shooting and turning the FPS down from infinite to 50 or 30 since the human eye can't see more than 25 FPS anyway. Also turning the game engine done to medium. I was running the game on medium setting before i did this and was able to turn the game up to high setting after i adjusted the game engine and the FPS. I am not sure if it will help you or not, cause it could just be the server load causing latancy. But is has helped me to make the adjustments.

Lashers

Great advice Grynd!  I will give that a try tonight.

augustgrace

Part of your problem is your graphics card.  For some reason at this time the game appears to have a problem with the x1900 and x1950 cards.  Many people have posted on the main lotro forums about this, but so far I haven't seen a solution.  You might try using omega drivers instead of the ati drivers.  Probably the best thing you can do is make a report to lotro support.  The more people that complain about this issue, the quicker they'll get around to fixing it.

Kslash

Well, the reason why you are lagging is because at a certain point of time (e.g. 1-2 hours) Your memory space on the computer is being taken up by the game and so it causes your client to lag and stutter like hell taking 5 minutes to move once.

To eliminate this you have to set your settings to suit your computer... its best to do the automatic setup that you can choose in the options. There used to be a method to reduce the problem by changing the settings and finding these options. Make sure you do these:

EngineSpeed=VeryHigh (depending on your system set this to VeryHigh for high speed dual core processors, and fast graphics cards, otherwise set it to High or Medium)

MaximumFrameRate=60 ( depending on your system set this to 60 for high speed dual core processors, and fast graphics cards, otherwise set it to 50 or 40).

AllowFakeFullScreen=False

SyncToRefresh=True

fiontar

Are you just getting stutter when first entering a town? Or are you having problems the entire time you are there?



There are so many textures that I do get stutter when entering towns, but it's very smooth once I get past the initial jerkiness.



Here are the things I have found that have a positive impact on lessening jerkiness... (I have the Radeon X1900XT, so we have very similar video cards).



*Under the Troubleshooting tab in the game's options menu, turn the engine speed down one notch (I have yet to see what difference it makes visually in game, but it definitely makes a difference with the stutter). Update: I tried lowering Engine Speed to Medium, it's even better than setting it to High. Also, at medium, I did find lowering the FPS to 60 seemed to have a benefit.



*Under the Graphics tab, you can get better FPS by turning off AA, but I've found the frame rate good at 2X and 2X hasn't had much of an impact on stuttering for me.



*Advanced Graphics Tab*



Everything is at the default recommended settings, except those noted below:



*Land Scape Draw Distance = High



*Texture Filtering = Anisotropic 1 (This is to prevent the game from trying to apply another method over your video card configuration, the game seems to not over-ride your video card Anisotropic settings). Update: The game now saves this information correctly. After the patch, it read 4x in the options interface, which is what I have it set for now in my video card utility program, so I assume the game now accepts over-ride settings from the video card setup.



*High Quality Lighting = Off (Made a difference for me and little to no difference in game image quality. You can experiment with trying to turn this back on later).



*Landscape Shadows = Medium (made a big difference for me and still looks superb imo).



*Blob Shadows = Check



*Stencil Shadows = High (You can turn this down more and see if it has an impact, I found this a good middle ground between quality and performance).



*Environmental Stencil Shadowing = Check (you can turn this off for further tweaking experimentation later if you wish).



*Player Mesh Combining = Off (Had a positive effect for me, another that can be experimented with).



**Glow Mapping** = OFF (I found this had a good impact on performance and personally I find the game looks better with it off).



*Over Birght Bloom Filter = Off



**Blur Filter Quality = Medium



**Texture Cache Size = 0.0 Update: Original recommendation was completely in error, set this to Zero! Makes a massive difference with texture load stuttering!



**Player Crowd Quality = .5 or lower. (This setting is important for tweaking performance where there are a lot of players, after all the other tweaks are in place, if you still have performance issues in populated areas, this is a setting to experiment with).



**Video Card Settings**



This part is ATi Specific, but NVidia players can try similar tweaking.



*Open the ATI Catalyst Control Center. At the lower left is a button to toggle between advanced and basic mode, toggle it to advanced (the button will then read Basic).



*Under Anti-Aliasing uncheck let application decide, set it to 2x and check temporal anti-aliasing. (I'm not positive if the game completely over-rides this, but it may allow the temporal to effect the game).



*Under Adaptive Anti-aliasing check Enable and set to Quality. (As above hard to know if the game over-rides this).



*Under Anisotropic Filtering Uncheck "let application decide". Set to 4X and check High Quality. (The game does not over-ride these settings, assuming you set it to Aniso in game as detailed above. Even though the slider in game says 1, the settings here effect quality. This is another one you can experiment with later, but I found performance and quality excellent at this setting).



*Mip Map Detail Level = Quality (All the way to the right).



Give these settings a shot. I'm running at 1680x1050 WS at these settings and the game is smooth/beautiful and the stuttering has been greatly minimized. I still have some small hitching as a bunch of new textures load, but it's a lot less disruptive and less common than before I tweaked things. Update: With these same settings, hitching in Michel Delving and other problem areas seems to have improved with the most recent patch. Bree still has noticable hitching, but it's still much better with these tweaks than with out.





***Important Note***



Many recommend setting the FakeFullScreen=False in the .ini file. Update: Stability problems with this set to false seem to have disappeared for me with one of the recent patches and it does seem to have some impact on hitching, so I now recommend setting this to False in your .ini file.



***Purely Personal Tweak***



I find the game looks more vibrant if you turn the contrast up a bit in game and then make minor tweaking to brightness/gamma. My personal settings are Contrast 1.29 Brightness 0.98 Gamma 0.97, but these setting will depend on your monitor calibration and personal preference. I mention it though because for me, a little tweaking here made the game look a lot better, with the default settings too drab.



***On the Fly in game tweaks***



I've found that turning off names and turning off the display of the quest tracker also lessen jerkiness. I find the game much more immersive with names turned off anyways. You can hit the "N" key to toggle this in real time. The biggest impact of having these off for me is in high density areas, but I leave them off as much as possible for the added immersion. Update: Turning off the Quest Tracker seems to have aided with hitching as well for me.



***Completely unproven tweak***



This one is completely unproven. I've had other games with tweakable UIs have the same problem with hitching if some of the UI element's bounding boxes overlaped. So, you can make the UI elements draggable by toggling "alt+" and arranging things so nothing overlaps. I like to customize my layout anyway, so I figured I'd be careful of overlap just in case.