I have spent many hours trying to trouble shoot this issue across multiple individuals systems. My conclusion is that its not a simple one fix do this solution that works for everyone.

What works for one person doesn't work for another. The delta variable being video card brands, video card series, video drivers, Motherborad Northbridge, pixel shaders, and the grand daddy of them all HD access times, virtual memory and paging issues.


JetStar, Syloc, and myself did a three way comparison since were all west coast, have about the same ping times, and have similar systems, similar HD speeds, and similar ISP bandwidth. We all used the same settings, Jet and I went through and even did the Performance settings for the CPU, Memory, Virtual Memory, and the Page File. After doing all of this, we still had three separate outcomes and FPS results. There is no rhyme or reason to why one of us (me), has shitastic fps in sieges, and those two are playable. Its not my system, its not my settings, its not a fragmented HD, its not a crappy system or video card. Yet for some reason I get the shaft if there are over 100ish people in rendering distance in active combat.


Here are some things we did find out though, that may help some of you.

First thing I always do after I load into Darkfall is go to the Task Manager and go to the Processes tab and hit User Name button and bring all the "ADMIN" or "USER" run programs to the top. I kill any resource hogs that I don't need running, like the firewall, virus scan, ad-watch, and so forth. Secondly I highlight the DFO.exe and right click it to bring up the exe menu. I then select Set Priority, and you have really two choices here. Either select "High Priority" or "Real Time Priority" the choice is yours. I haven't noticed to much of a difference between them.

DFO doesn't really take up that much of a typical dual core systems CPU resources. Even running under siege scenario, the CPU was only using about 55% of its resources under DFO's heaviest load. All three of us have L2 cache in excess of 1mb, and a Northbridge that supports similar through put.

DFO doesn't really take up that much of your typical RAM setup as long as you have more then 2 gigs. If your running 2 gigs, you probably are going to have to get another stick or upgrade to dual 2 gig sticks. This resource issue directly effects system index/paging and your system will start using the HD for memory and hose your FPS. DFO is sucking up about 980,000 kb on launch, and under peek usage after running for several hours never eclipsed 1,365,000Kb of RAM usage. The problem for those with 2 gigs of ram is going to be using the HD to page/index Memory, which will cripple you and turn it into a slide show no matter what in most cases.

Middle to Low end ATI cards seem to be having the most problem under the heaviest loads. The N-Vid cards seem to be preforming a little better in the middle dollar range for DFO. It seems that a 8800 GT non SLI in a PCI express slot with 256mb and a minimum of 24 pipelines is enough to not tax out the video card as long as your putting your settings down to the minimums. Anything less then that and your asking for a serious rendering choke point in your Video card processing capability. All three of us have cards in excess of this minimum, and none of us were seeing the Video card as the choke point. Under the heaviest of loads during the KGB siege from Hyperzerg in our city my Video Card never eclipsed 70% resource usage. I have an EVGA 8800 GTX SLI 512MB w/ 48 pipelines and factory overclocked and know the issue isn't the card.

The biggest issue seems to be HD access time and the page/index file and access issues. This seems to be causing the vast majority of "Virtual Memory Errors" that occur during crash's under the heaviest loads during a siege. Some of that we can fix on our side with settings, and with a decent HD setup, but the majority of the issue is on DFO's side and the way in which it access's game information off your HD.

My suggestion, and I know this sucks and isn't feasible for everyone is to get a second small capacity HD around 20gigs with High RPM's and access time and go RAID setup and get the game off the System HD and into its own HD environment with higher RPM's and lower access times in milliseconds.

The second side of this problem doesn't have anything to do with us, its how the client works and how its accessing information off the HD and what its putting into the page file buffer for later use. This has been an issue for a long time with high system demand games, they push it to the user side and people who don't have high middle to high end rig's get left with a crappy game experience in a twitch style game.

Finally, I did some homework and did some traceroute and ping tests back to the servers in Germany. Holy crap are there some serious problems here. If your West of the major interchange in Philly, Chicago, and St. Louis, packets seem to do a lot more bouncing around. Hell one time I had packets that decided to go EAST of Germany and come in via the Pacific UnderSea Fibre trunk.

When I get home tonight I will post all the settings Jet/Syloc and I used in detail to help. I think if we use this as a baseline we can trouble shoot individuals system issues easier knowing we have all done the basics.

Don't make me have'ta Troll ya Bro!