Mouse lag

[Acaila]

I experience about a 500 ms delay from moving my mouse to when it displays, accompanied with the speed up, speed down feeling of mouse lag. This only occurs when on Hossin and in the dense tree areas of Forseral and Amerish. It is mainly related to the trees. The problem is PlanetSide specific, doesn't happen in another games or applications. It is a delay in IO, not in any way related to FPS, bandwidth usage or CPU usage.

My system:
CPU: P4 3.0 800MHz FSB
Mobo: Asus P4P800 Deluxe, BIOS v1010
RAM: Kingston PC3200 DDR
GFX card: Geforce FX5600 (driver version 52.16)
Using onboard sound.
HDD: IBM 60GB
Connection: 512/128 ADSL, ethernet modem.
OS: XP SP1
Mouse: Logitech MX300 using MS generic drivers, PS2.

What I have tried to get rid of it:
Various mouse drivers, the MS generic drivers work the best.
Various GFX drivers, including the older detonator drivers such as 43.03.
Various chipset drivers.
Altering win32 priority settings in the registry to put the mouse and keyboard input at a higher priority.
DirectX8.1 and DirectX9.
Increasing the mouse sample rate and input buffer size.
Altering BIOS settings, though I haven't tried turning off HT.

The problem originated when I built this PC. It is very frustrating, low FPS is preferable, atleast I can still kill people with low FPS. Funny how with an upgrade, I traded my poor FPS for an even worse problem. Atleast it only happens on Hossin and a little mildly (the dense forest areas) on parts of Forseral and Amerish.

[Rbstr]

hmm, it probably has nothing to do with the mouse, turn your PS settings down

[Acaila]

Tried, improved a bit but still unplayable in those swamps on Hossin. Thanks for the help.

[martyr]

planetside does not support hyperthreading. you'll see improved performance by disabling it, though i doubt it will solve the tree-lag problem.

[Acaila]

I have no real performance problems, my FPS never goes below 30, ever. But I will give it a go, who knows, may help, cheers.

[Ait'al]

How much ram do you have? You have the type but now the amount.

Did you turn down the right settings? What would seem to be the most obvious ones to adjust by there names arent always the most affective or the most critical ones. Which ones did you adjust?

I dont know if this is a problem now with larger cards, but, did the ammount of ram used get turned down on the Graphics cards settings? If you know which one i mean. Check and see. Maybe it got turned down and it doesnt have enough to run all the graphics and its overloading the system and dropping your fps through the ram or processor. You could try turning it up if you dont know what it has been to see if it alleviates the problem. And is your harddrive light flickering alot? Or alot more than it used to?

[Acaila]

I have 1024MB of RAM.

I turned down all settings, including resolution. The only setting I didn't turn down was viewing distance as through trial and error, it didn't have any effect on the problem. Everything else is off if I am on Hossin. Reserved texture memory is at 256MB, Pre-Cache Textures is set to all.

My GFX card has 256MB, I use various reg tweaks to maximise quality/performance by getting at all the options nVidia no longer lets you play with. Though when I changed drivers I gave it a run just using the standard GFX card options accessible through control panel. The full RAM of my GFX card is able to be used, though PS never uses all of it since they took adv textures out. It made no difference unfortunately. My AGP apeture size is set to 128MB. There is no need to have it higher as PS doesn't use all the available RAM on my card.

The problem is not FPS, I get mouse lag on Hossin in those cursed swamps whilst running 100 FPS. My HDD doesn't work that hard in PS, I barely use my pagefile at all while playing it. However, it is definately related to GFX as altering the GFX settings, most particularly lowering the resolution, helped.

My old system was a P4 2.0 with 1024MB DDR333. I never got mouse lag with it though I had FPS problems galore. I am using the same GFX card now that I had back then.

[Phaelon]

Have you tried a different mouse with it? Have you tried just a generic 2 button PS/2 mouse with it? or a generic 2 button USB mouse with it?

Having problems just in the hossin swamp is a bit strange. If you have the time, force Planetside to do a thorough file search of all of its files to verify integrity and CRCs.

I have a few questions about what you said, did you install Direct x 9.0 first? and Then try 8.1?

Did you try any Video drivers BEFORE the 50 series? Because you should have used a 49 series or below with Direct x 8.1.

[martyr]

actually, i get the same lag in the acan swamps, i didn't before; it must have come up in the last two patches (i was there last night for the first time in weeks)

it's not mouse lag, it's not video lag, it's not network lag.

i don't know what it is, but it made flying my mosquito through that area very stressful: i flew in leaps; short bursts of speed interspersed in a lag-standstill. (my hud reads constant speed the whole time, of course)

two 2.4ghz xeons (HT off) 2gb ram, geforcefx 5900

[Rbstr]

Yeah i've noticed a jerky thing in the swamy areas before, but it seemd to go away, or may be i just have been avoiding hossin

[Acaila]

Originally Posted by Phaelon

Have you tried a different mouse with it? Have you tried just a generic 2 button PS/2 mouse with it? or a generic 2 button USB mouse with it?

Having problems just in the hossin swamp is a bit strange. If you have the time, force Planetside to do a thorough file search of all of its files to verify integrity and CRCs.

I have a few questions about what you said, did you install Direct x 9.0 first? and Then try 8.1?

Did you try any Video drivers BEFORE the 50 series? Because you should have used a 49 series or below with Direct x 8.1.

Q1: Haven't tried that, I don't have another mouse besides an old serial.

Q2. Tried that, came up all clear.

Q3: Installed 8.1, then installed 9, DirectX doesn't unistall very easily and down grading is hard. Used the appropriate drivers for the directX version, though after that failed, I test earlier/later drivers.

Q4. Yes.

[Sokko]

In my past experience, this has been partially caused by the graphics card rendering too many frames in advance, though my main cause of mouse lag has been low FPS in certain areas. While turning the "pre-rendered frames" setting to 1 does help with mouse lag, you may experience a decrease in performance. Usually this option is buried somewhere in your graphics card settings and may not be worded exactly that way.

[cloudj110589]

i had the same problem with mouse lag, and i changed my video settings to "High Performance" and no more problems

[Acaila]

Originally Posted by Sokko

In my past experience, this has been partially caused by the graphics card rendering too many frames in advance, though my main cause of mouse lag has been low FPS in certain areas. While turning the "pre-rendered frames" setting to 1 does help with mouse lag, you may experience a decrease in performance. Usually this option is buried somewhere in your graphics card settings and may not be worded exactly that way.

Ahh right, that makes a bit of sense. I will have a dig in the registry and see if I can find the option you're talking about and fuck around with it. Cheers.