I know this may sound alittle.... b-wordy, but i wanted to bring this to the attention of any Devs that currently look at these forums. When Vanguard went free to play, i was ecstatic. Its the closest i can get to Everquest Nostalgia without having to return to EQ (which just isnt the same anymore.) The rig in my signature below is current, and a huge improvement from my previous system that I'd played this game on years ago. My biggest gripe, and the reason i uninstalled, is this clients poor poor poor performance. I realise this is a version of the Unreal 2 engine and is a bit dated. I have tried alot of the INI tweaks, RamDisk Cache, and sysconfig.bat to improve performance, only to be slammed with load hitching and stuttering while moving around in game. If anyone has found something that fixes this, I'm all ears. But at this point i spent more time in the INI trying to tweak this game to run at a steady 60FPS and failed miserably. The last resort and only option i have yet to try (and can't afford to) is to run this game off of an SSD. Other games i have run great without an SSD though, and i'm convinced this shouldn't be a requirement for smooth gameplay in a years old engine. Now, i realise this isn't specific to Vanguard, as most MMOs have a bottleneck depending on the engine, settings, and objects rendered on the screen at one time. I guess just after spending so much to upgrade to a decent gaming rig, i feel a little let down by the un-optimized state most MMOs are in. Again, if anyone knows of a way to improve performance on this game other then the usual INI tweaks, Ramdisk and sysconfig.bat methods, please let me know! I've noticed it is usually HDD thrashing and streaming textures that cause the stuttering. Would turning of Superfetch or other background file transfer services decrease streaming hitches? Thanks yall, help would be appreciated but at this point I may just have to pass
In my experience, running VG off an SSD is once of the best ways to improve performance. It is extremely HDD intensive due to the sheer size of most of the assets. Changing to an SSD completely resolved client-side hitching for me (except while chunking, understandably). There seem to be some server-side performance issues at the moment around latency, which hopefully wil lbe resolved shortly.
Khabarakh@Seradon wrote: I wish I could say the same in my case, but even with a Samsung SSD, newest drivers for it, and every optimization option tweak I've been able to find online to make a SSD run better, I still get constant hitches, at least around Khal. I'm wondering if it could possibly be a latency issue, but it seems that many others with a SSD don't experience the same problem, so I'm at a loss. I guess the SSD could be faulty, but it hasn't given me problems with anything else. Other than that, the game runs great on my new rig.
Seillan_Moonside wrote: Sounds odd to me. I have Samsung 830 256GB and after first time all places I have tested have been hitching free. First time hitches because game compiles new shaders when you visit some new place first time. Next visits to same place should be silky smooth with that SSD (unless you change video drivers which might cause game to recompile shaders).
Well, I'm not able to get an SSD at the moment, but i did try out UltimateDefrag and spent 24 hours moving all my most accessed data in a contiguous format on the outer rim of the disk. Its helped a bit, the hitching isn't as terrible, but its still there. Low framerates as well (30's-40's, 60FPS if I'm in a field by myself though) Gonna give it another shot. Maybe in the near future i can grab a small, fast SSD to run my MMOs and other HDD intensive games off of.
FelisDomesticus wrote: On further inspection/testing, it doesn't seem to be as bad as I thought. I think most of the hitching did in fact happen during my first visit, so you're right about that. After the initial visit of an area, it seems to run much smoother, overall.
Seillan_Moonside wrote: After formatting my Mechanical drive, this is my experience as well. The games been much easier to play and not nearly as irritatingly "stuttery". I still hope they find a way to optimize the HDD activity in the near future.
