If we work together, maybe things will be less troublesome in Trade...
Ok, we all know Trade is having some probs.
Here's what I noticed over the course of a week.
The first day, I was playing between 3-4AM MST. I had no real problems when zoning into Trade, or out of Trade.
The second day, I was playing around 11AM. I zoned into Trade from ICC, but didn't have any real problems. The Trade Statue was packed with people! My my, the idea that too many folks near the whompa or grid terminal doesn't seem to hold true. What was unique (actually similar) about all the folks in Trade near the statue is that they were almost all members of 95th Rifles, which if you may notice, most members of the 95th Rifles where similar armor/equipment (hence, almost all the same textures are used).
Day three, around 10AM. I zoned into Trade via the whompa from ICC again. LAG LAG LAG! Or what appeared to be lag. I kept an eye on my ping, and it stayed around 90-100 green. Ok, so my connection isn't being bogged down, and the server is playing nice, so what gives? The difference I saw was that there were a ton of folks near the Trade Statue, which is no different from Day two, except for one thing. All the folks near the Trade Statue were mostly low level characters, a couple yalms and kodiaks, even a Manta (ooooo, pretty).
So what I have been able to ascertain from this is that, at least in my experience in this example, is that it was the overwhelming number of different textures needed for all the different armor/equipment that was being loaded (Day three).
The ping was good/green, and never changed. My theory is that this is a flaw in the memory management for textures being used. To support this, I always have a small monitor running in the background that will tell me how much system memory is being used vs. how much video memory is being used. What I noticed from my logs for day two and day three is that my video memory usage didn't change by a significant amount, but, the system memory jumped in usage by about 1326 kilobytes. This indicates to me that the graphics engine isn't taking full capability of the video card, and that somewhere in the engine where the determination of which type of memory is to be used for textures, the engine is being told to store some textures in the system memory, which is a bad programming mistake, especially in DirectX. The problem with this is that even if the textures are stored in the system memory, there is a lot of overhead that is performed because pointers and handles are going to be flung back and forth between the video card, northbridge, CPU, and the system memory. This wastes a lot of clock cycles! A properly designed engine shouldn't have this problem (but let's not forget who designed the engine).
The system I have running is the following:
1> Athlon XP 1800+
2> Corsair XMS PC2700 333MHz Memory
3> Asus A7V333 running the latest BIOS/VIA Drivers
4> Gainward Ti4200 128MB 4x AGP
5> Maxtor 80GB 7200 RPM ATA133 HD
6> Creative Labs 52x CDROM
7> CMEDIA 8738 6-Channel 5.1 Onboard Sound
8> Gigabit LAN NIC by 3COM
9> Creative Labs 5.1 Surround Sound Speakers
My system isn't exactly a speed demon when compared to a hardcore UT2003 system, but it is not average (at least for another 2 minutes when another advancement in technology is made).
Hope this overkill analysis/idea helps! (Of course, the odds of Cz using this info to improve the graphics engine is lower than my chance of never having to file income tax again!)
-Soulmartyr
