High FSP but Choppy Movement and Performance [LOTRO]

Hello everyone.

I was wondering if some of you technical gurus would be so kind as to lend a hand?

I have a very annoying problem when playing LOTRO. I know this game screams problems when it comes to graphics and performance - but it's just so damn fun to play

First off, I'm using XP on a T61p, 2gb of RAM, 2.4ghz / Nvidia Quadro FX 570 type.

The thing is, in all resolutions except the absolutely lowest ones, I experience a very choppy performance, no matter what "graphics settings" I choose within the game. The fact that there is almost no difference in choppiness between "Very High" graphic settings and "Low" tells me that this is no ordinary problem. I'm an experienced gamer and I know when I'm suffering from low FPS, choppiness related to bad ping etc., this bugger isn't it!

My framerate is around 20-30 at highest resolution, but even with resolution lowered and frames going up to 40-60 - the same choppiness occurs.

Even when I use the lowest resolutions and movement becomes smoother, I can feel the choppiness "underneath", if you know what I mean, just evened out by less strain on the system.

Now, so far I've fiddled around with the graphics settings within the game, disabling and enabling almost everything. The only thing that seems to have a noticeable difference to this choppiness is if I turn Anti Aliasing on, which makes the choppiness worse to a considerable degree.

Besides fiddling around within the graphic settings within LOTRO, I've done the following:

1. Uninstalled the LENOVO display drivers, using both 3dGURU Driver Sweeper and CCcleaner as mentioned in this post: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=209796

2. Installed the laptop2go driver mentioned in the above post with the modified INF to try out the semi-GeForce setting - no change.

3. Installed both the nvidia_wxp_omega_16693_7z.exe and nvidia_omega_xp2k_216921.exe - but to no avail.

That's what I've tried so far. Now, regarding what programs I've installed that *possibly* (though I strongly doubt it) might be having some adverse effect: Diskeeper, RMClock, ESET Antivirus and ZoneAlarm. Can´t think of anything else.
It seems my computer doesn't go above 70 degrees Celcius (from Europe - Iceland) so I doubt this is an overheating issue.
I've attached my DxDiag for further reference.
I truly hope someone has either experienced this and found a solution, or is just that goddamn smart!

Thanks a lot, for firstly reading this, secondly trying to help

Regards,
Preacher

 

do you have a lot of processes runnning ? maybe a bit too much of bloatware installed ? you could check that in the taskmanager.

another thing you may want to check is if you have some bad driver installed. there is a free software called dpc latency checker. you should download that, and see how high your spikes are. if they are above 500 you might wanna check if you have a bad driver installed by switching off one device after the other and see which device is the culprit. Microsoft says it it should not be higher than 100-120 for winxp, in Vista it might be a little higher, but definitly not above 400-500. If it´s higher you might have a bad driver installed.

DPC = Deferred Procedure Calls have been introduced by microsoft some years ago ( win2k or win xp dunno that) and it´s about how the cpu is handling the assignments ( don´t know any other word for it right now), and if you have a bad driver it will produce a really high latency, and all other processor assignments have to wait. you might wanna check if that is a problem of your computer

 

Hi, and thanks for helping

First off, I avoid bloatware like the devil and try my best to minimize processess running.

But just to be sure I got the program you mentioned and ran it. I'm mostly in the 50 - 150ish range, with the occational spike going 250 - 350 max. So I doubt that's the issue, don't you agree?

*edit* Oh yeah, btw, most of the spikes are probably from Diskeeper, which runs only when the system is inactive (has throttle) and disables when an active program is going on, so most of the spikes most likely vanish during gaming.

 

Not Solved

 

Good to hear you got it solved. It´s always a pain when things are not working as they should, and there is no obvious reason for it.

 

Lol, it's not solved. The thing is it only worked when in windowed mode. I decided to install SetPoint, see if this was an issue because of a missing driver for the hardware. When I did that, the choppiness returned. I tried every mouse, acceleration setting within SetPoint, (os controlled, setpoint controlled acceleration), nothing. I then tried uninstalling SetPoint - only to find that now it's always choppy, with or without enhance pointer precision option off.

So .. I'm back to square one Does ANYONE have a clue what this might be?

 

So it works without setpoint? What happens if you give realtime priority to the game process?

Oh and that DPC latency thing, I noticed on my t61p when i have the abg thinkpad wireless enabled and its idle that i have around 2000us latency... but when I use the connection, it suddenly goes down for a split second.