Hyge's Guide to Reducing Lag
From DaveSpace
Ok, first big fleet fight back in the MC and it went well, but there were a few people who didn't seem to know some of the basic lag reducing techniques ... so here's everything I know.
Please add to this as needed :
Contents |
Lose the Effects
CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+E, CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+T turn off Turret and other Effects, makes a massive difference in fleet combat.
Disable Sound
Press ESC and select the 'Sound' tab, choose the Disable sound option. This also yields some benefits to FPS.
Pressing CTRL-ALT-F12 works too.
Clean Overview
Remove all but enemies from your overview. More items on overview = more lag. Many Pilots will have settings to just show BS on their overview or just Cruisers etc. This is a nice discipline to have.
Minimize Overview on Load
When warping into an enemy fleet, minimize your overview completely, open it again when you've loaded. Having overview minimized will make your load time faster
Zoom out!
In RMR some of the GFX were optimized for some objects. Essentially if you zoom out past the viewing threshold some of them wont even bother being drawn (this is a work in progress by the programmers and will see greater benefits as the game evolves). Sometimes this yields a marked FPS improvement, other times it doesn’t.
Close other Apps
Turn off all programs in the background and kill the apps on your system tray (icons near the clock on the bottom right of your screen. Things like 'Creative CD Tray icon' and rubbish you wont need'.
Increase thread priority
Once you have started to run Eve, press CTRL+ALT+DELETE and select Task Manager. In task manager goto 'Processes' tab and right click on eve.exe. Change the Thread priority to 'Above Normal' and accept the warning. (Lots of people argue whether this is effective, I've measured it on my system and Above Average gives a couple of frames per second improvement, your call though)
Modify your Prefs.ini File
Eve uses a Prefs.ini file in your game directory to control some settings that you just don't have available through normal menus. Here's some of the ones I've found useful:
buffersize
The buffersize property tells Eve how RAM the app can hog, it's not very good at auto-detecting this so Edit the file so that your buffersize is around half of your total RAM. I.e. if you have 1,024Mb RAM, then set the value to 512.
desktopHeight + desktopWidth
In prefs.ini change the desktopHeight and desktopWidth settings to match your normal desktop settings. I.e. if you're running in 1152x864, then you should match up these values
XP Load Balancing: Foreground Application
WindowsXP has an option to allow you to specify how much time to devote to applications, this can be accessed by idiots like us:
- Right Click on 'My Computer' and select 'Properties'
- click on the 'Advanced' tab
- Under performance select 'Settings'
- clock on the 'Advanced' tab
- Under the 'Processor Scheduling' ensure that your machine is set to 'Adjust for Best Performance of Programs'.
Damage Messages
CCP recently added the ability to turn Damage messages off. Turn them off in fleet, this can help reduce the lag you'll feel when you're ship/machine is being hit by 100 people at the same time. Do this from the Escape menu in Eve.
Turn off Logging
This option will prevent your machine from creating a local log file of what's going on. Turning this option off can help reduce the lag you experience in fleet.
All of these the above are things I do on my Eve client, in the order of effectiveness I have found them. ALL machines are different however. Some need a lot of love and care and some are beasts that will chew through FPS like you wouldn't believe. Ever wonder why you get podded all the time whilst others always get away? These changes will help your machine run Eve faster, making you a more responsive PVPer.
Try all of these changes out for yourself and see what the difference is. Use the in-game FPS monitor (CTRL+ALT+F - I think, it's on the Shortcuts menu when you press ESC), to see the effect on your own machine. Also test your FPS in both 'Windowed' and 'Full Screen' modes, some people get faster results Full Screen, personally I get better results in Windowed.
Any more suggestions are welcome, we should put together a big list of the changes that work, more of us will survive in combat that way!