Very strange lag issue

[Babeski 10]

My PC Specs, its a laptop:

Intel core 2 duo T9600 2.80 Ghz

4GB DDR3

Model: M570TU

Nvidia Geforce 9800m GTX 1GB

Vista 64bit

Gday all,

Now this is strange when i play, im ingame very smooth for the area ive started in (30-60 FPS) untill two things happen,

1: i run away from the starting area (ANY MISSION) untill im about 400m away (roughly) and then my game begins to lag down to 11-15 fps, this happens especially when im in forests. OR,

2: There is a fire fight that breaks out and (i believe) particles appear (especially around blown up vehicles OR explosions) and i begin to lag alot, i dont if my computer is straining becuase of the effects but it is very strange.

Strangly sometimes i try to flush and it doesnt become smoother (fps doesnt rise or anything), HOWEVER when i go into the map screen and look around for a few seconds and exit the map screen back into game, its running surprisingly smoother again, this normally happens when im not in a firefight.

Ive done tests on my computer and my ram usage never reaches above 3GBs and my CPU is never over 80%. If anyone has any knowledge on why this is happening please give me feed back

[Master gamawa 0]

I didn't know, a laptop that can play Arma 2, existed...

[randir14 10]

I have a problem that sounds similar to yours, but it only started happening with the beta builds. When I play online it will sometimes randomly slow down a ton then clear up by itself. Nothing I can see triggers it, it can happen in big fights or it can happen in total peace when I'm in the woods by myself.

[Babeski 10]

I have a problem that sounds similar to yours, but it only started happening with the beta builds. When I play online it will sometimes randomly slow down a ton then clear up by itself. Nothing I can see triggers it, it can happen in big fights or it can happen in total peace when I'm in the woods by myself.

Yes!!! same when it comes to multiplayer, but i sometimes get this issue when im surrounded by objects aswell (such as forest/city)

[Babeski 10]

bump bumpity bump bump HELP! PLEEASE

[dogz 10]

Arma 2 flogs the HD like no other game I have played...

I am betting your laptop has a slow HD when you run away from the initial position in the game... your pc is loading all the new information you are about to interact with, it is most likely the speed of this transfer from disk that causes the slowdown.

[Babeski 10]

your saying its the speed of my harddrive, is it the datatransfer between the motherboard and harddrive or the actual harddrive itself, becuase i could believe this.

[InFireBaptize 0]

same problem, doesn't happen a lot. but all of a sudden the game pause, fps drops rapidly from 30 to 1 and then back to 30. I don't see any graphical problems when this happens, so it must be windows <> page-file issue, or something in code/script trying to check for something! could be CPU, Hard-drive, there is something fishy going on!

[i69 10]

Hmmm, and what about the notebook CPU saving system... When a system is in iddle of performance (i mean there isn't too much graphical expectings), notebook CPU's going low, for examp. from 1.6GHz to 0,9GHz. This is normal for notebooks and solving this is to hard...

[zOMGREI 10]

your saying its the speed of my harddrive, is it the datatransfer between the motherboard and harddrive or the actual harddrive itself, becuase i could believe this.

There will be some performance loss with a 5400 RPM drive, I had to upgrade from a 7200 RPM drive to a 10K drive to get rid of some of the hitching I was getting.

That said, it sounds like this is some of your issue (since alt-tabbing back into the game causes it to reload everything in the area), but the slowdown due to particles and forests sounds like the video card. Check your drivers, since performance was improved some for nvidia cards with drivers released after ArmA 2. Also, I would try running with shadows on Very High, if you're not already. IIRC, all shadow settings below Very High are shunted off to the CPU for rendering, which is really slow.

[MarvinTheMartian 10]

@i69

Solving that isn't too hard. I believe it's called speed stepping. The processor will step down in speed if it's not being used. Look in the BIOS for your laptop to see if you can disable speed stepping. i.e. to always make it run at it's highest speed.

Not sure at all if it will solve your problem, But i have an Intel i7 @ 3.6GHz and i have to disable Hyperthreading for ArmA2. It's entirely possible that spped stepping (if enabled) also screws ArmA2 up.

[i69 10]

Ya, for me its hard, i don't have any option in BIOS to disable speed-step and hyperthr. :confused:

[zOMGREI 10]

Ya, for me its hard, i don't have any option in BIOS to disable speed-step and hyperthr. :confused:

Alternatively you can go to Power Options in the control panel and change the profile to "Always On", but if you use the battery on a regular basis this isn't exactly practical. I've never seen a laptop with no option to disable speedstep in the BIOS, especially for a desktop replacement like what you have. It may not have been where you thought it was, unless you went through every menu.

[no use for a name 0]

also note that your proc doesn't support hyperthreading, so there's no option. Speedstepping shouldn't be the problem (but who knows right). I have it enabled on my system (desktop, not laptop) and it works as it should...

In your bios look for a C2/C2E Support option or something similar...that's also the same as speedstep

[Babeski 10]

I dont have any options for speed-stepping, hyperthreading or c2/c2e support whateva it is,

it startles me when i play games that use the unreal 3 engine that i can run perfectally, can run Dawn of war 2 surprisingly well or even mass effect runs awesome on this Laptop, but it hates Arma 2......im going to have to wait till i can buy a new Rig or something, then itll all be good.