Diablo II choppy/stalling performance

I have a Pentium II 400 with 128MB of RAM and a TNT2 Ultra card, and the performance is ultra-poor. The stuttering/choppiness is pretty bad, mostly during fights where there are multiple enemies on the screen. I'm not able to play after Duriel, because the stall before Tal Rasha's chamber allows Duriel to kill me before I can fight.
I've run down all the options I can think of (and all of Blizzard's).
Anybody know what's going on here?

[Ion Silverbolt]

Updating the driver might help, but the performance in Diablo 2 with that card is generally pretty bad. Here's some thing that might help..

1. Download and install the latest Detonator drivers from www.nvidia.com (http://www.nvidia.com)

2. Turn the CD music off. This might be causing the lag when entering Duriels chamber.

3. Try running the Diablo video test again and select DirectDraw mode. It doesn't look bad in Direct Draw and it should perform a lot better then Direct3D with that card.

Post back and let us know how you're doing. If you're still having problems with anything, there are plenty of other things you can try.

Keep in touch. http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/smile.gif

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©2000 Ionic Computer Services.

[Canis Lupus]

Sometimes the stuttering and choppiness may be a hard drive issue. How much free HD space have you got? Diablo 2 is a BIG resource hog, and it's gonna steal all the amount of juice it can get.

Also, what other programs have you got running while you're playing the game? Sometimes programs like ICQ and other background proggies can cause your hard drive to work overtime. Try to play with as little programs running at the same time.

You might also want to do a complete scandisk/defrag of your system, because it speeds up your system a bit.

And Diablo 2 has been known to have inherent offline lag... It's a problem that Blizz needs to address anyway...

Post back if you continue to have problems.

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"What you really want, you can never have. So if you really, REALLY want something, try to want it a little less... coz you're never, EVER gonna have it."

[pakenney38]

For the most part, I've been defragging every day. Still nothing there. I have 1GB of hard drive space left on a 6.1GB hard drive. I've tried all the recommendations at Blizzard's tech support page, and they've let me know that others are having the same issues. The drivers are the current official detonator 3 (6.18). I generally close all of the TSRs I have on (so nothing runs in the background while I play). I am already running the game in Direct Draw mode, and I also have Blended shadows off and lighting at low. Having the music on or off doesn't seem to make a difference. The next step I'm taking sometime later is to put the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE chain. Right now, it's chained with the HD on the primary IDE.

[Ion Silverbolt]

Changing the cache size for the CD-ROM in the system icon in the control panel may help with the CD some.

Alas, some users have only been able to reduce CD lag by applying the noCD patch from www.gamecopyworld.com (http://www.gamecopyworld.com)

Unless things have changed though, I don't think this fixed patch allows you to play on battle.net. So back up your previous .exe file somewhere in case you need it later.

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©2000 Ionic Computer Services.

<FONT COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE="1" FACE="Verdana, Arial">[This message has been edited by Ion Silverbolt on September 27, 2000 @ 08:17 PM]</font>

Stalling performance:
Actually for me a new CD-ROM drive dit it. I couldn´t play for more than 10 minutes without the game crashing/freezing. It was bad in Act II, worse in Act III. Obviously the items I was carrying had something to do with it (esp. weapons with additional fire/poison/cold damage).
The game still stops occasionally, but unlike before it continues after a second or so.
I had a noname 52x drive, which must have been defective. Now I have a noname 56x drive, and the game works with tolerable stalling and rare crashes.

[pakenney38]

Dudes, I am really trying to get at the point that this has very little to do with the CD-ROM. I'm not getting CD-ROM lag. I'm saying that the game slows down in heavy battles or at Duriel, when it slows down to a crawl, in which case the game seems to have frozen for a moment in time. When the hard drive gets done churrning its information, instantly I'm back at full speed. So- my problem is that my game slows down into a choppy kind of state where the hard drive is then reading like crazy. If the hard drive has to read enough then the game seems to slow down to a freeze. I never crash.
The other guy who mentioned his problem... I think that's a separate problem. You should probably start another topic to avoid confusion.
My game is a full installation, which means that the only thing reading from the CD should be the music right? Isn't that the only thing that's not loaded on the hard drive in a full install?

[Canis Lupus]

Hmmm, ok, might wanna check one more time at Blizzard's solution list before we go on:
http://www.blizzard.com/support/diablo2/problems/perform.shtml#index

I know you said you already followed these, but it can't hurt to check them again.

You might wanna copy d2char.mpq as well as d2music.mpq onto your D2 game folder and see what happens. If you are playing single player, you might also want to "pause" the game (by hitting ESC) before those big battles and before Duriel, just to see how long the HD is churcning before it settles down.

Have you tried separating your HD and CD and putting them on their own separate IDE cables? If they are on the same ribbon, then its fastest speed is the maximum transfer of the slowest device on that ribbon, which is the CD.

Give us some more details if this does not solve your problem ... what HD model, CD model, mobo model, etc...

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"What you really want, you can never have. So if you really, REALLY want something, try to want it a little less... coz you're never, EVER gonna have it."

[Ion Silverbolt]

Try this program.. www.memturbo.com/productinfo.htm (http://www.memturbo.com/productinfo.htm)

It might help free up some memory while you're playing and prevent as much hard drive access.

<FONT COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE="1" FACE="Verdana, Arial">[This message has been edited by Ion Silverbolt on September 28, 2000 @ 10:58 AM]</font>

[pakenney38]

Okay - first of all, I'm not going to try the memturbo idea, because the system shouldn't have any problems that need to be solved by memturbo. If anything, I'll use memturbo as a last resort.
I've run a scandisk operation, and it repaired some errors, but I haven't been able to get back to the game yet to see if that helped anything. I'm going to buy some DMA cables this weekend and get the CD-ROM off the primary chain. Someone else I know mentioned this to me as well.
I have a another test system up and running next door in the dorm. This guy is getting some minor choppies right now, but he's still in the first episode. I never had any problems there myself until I faced Andariel.
I let you know what happens from here, and I'll go down Blizzard's checklist one last time. I should have another post ready sometime tonight.

[Ion Silverbolt]

I suggested memturbo because it may help free some memory up. Diablo tends to go to the swap file a lot.

Which reminds me, do you have your computer set up as a network server? Since you have 128 megs, set it to network server and that should help some as well. The setting is under the performance tab in the system icon of the control panel. (Start--&gt;Settings--&gt;Control Panel---&gt;System--&gt;Performance Tab.

Disable your video caching and shadowing in CMOS too as well. This will free up some memory and having these enabled does nothing for Windows. This will free up your processors cache where it would better be suited for file access rather than un-needed BIOS calls.

The CD on the other chain should help some. Keep us updated.

[pakenney38]

I will definitely switch the cacheables of in CMOS then. I'm already set to network server, and I have my Virtual Memory set to 300 min and max. Is that an okay setting? This was the recommendation from Blizzard.

[Canis Lupus]

Yes, that setting is just about right...

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"What you really want, you can never have. So if you really, REALLY want something, try to want it a little less... coz you're never, EVER gonna have it."

[pakenney38]

Hello everyone. I put the CD-ROM on the secondary IDE chain yesterday, and it seems to help mildly. I don't know - maybe I can get past Duriel like this. It seems that the game is still very stuttery while loading from the hard drive, which is a good indication to me that later on in the game I will have problems with single-player lag. I'm going to load up an old character and see if I can get him to Duriel, or somewhere close. If I can get heavy lag in the desert, for instance, I'll know that Blizzard just needs to address a bug in the game, in which case, a gamer's complaint group needs to be formed to either get Blizzard to fix Diablo 2, or get Blizzard shut down, so they can't create any more games that have problems like this they can't fix.
At this point, a lot of the people I've seen with this problem are using Nvidia products. I might try to go back to the earliest Detonator driver I can find.

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yes

[Ion Silverbolt]

Actually I have heard the 5.XX series of drivers seem to run with less hard drive access in Diablo 2. Seems strange but if you're wanting to try older drivers, check here:

5.XX series (http://zoiah.m3dzone.com/HTML/reference/detonator/5.html).

6.XX series (http://zoiah.m3dzone.com/HTML/reference/detonator/6.html).

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©2000 Ionic Computer Services.

[uh...ok]

Heh on a side note, I don't think you (or anyone) can shut Blizzard down simply cause it won't run for a certain amount of computers. ;P

As for your problem, the symptoms do seem to indicate a problem with the video card. (someone insert "Duh" here) All I can think of is just wait for a fix to it from either Blizzard or Nvidia. Or as Ion suggests, try using the old drivers and see if they work better.

-uh...ok

[pakenney38]

No, Blizzard can't literally be shut down, but issues that are reported to various professional and governmental organizations will be heard and considered. This is simply because, from what I've seen on the 'net, and the personal testing I've done, "a certain amount" of computers has equated to "quite a few."

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yes

[pakenney38]

I've now tried various versions of the Detonator drivers, and with the upgrade to 7.17 and Direct X 8.0, caching delays are about half of what they used to be. This makes the game playable. HOWEVER, there still should not be ANY caching delays of any kind. I've seen this game run on a system that was fairly equivalent to mine almost perfectly, and I expect the same performance, so I will continue my experiment to help others out there with caching delays figure out exactly what is occuring to produce the problem.
I used Norton Systemworks over the past few weeks to help clean up some Windows issues and defrag while optimizing the swap file. This helped greatly, so I now use Systemworks on a regular basis.
I will be graduating from college in the summer when I receive my new computer as a graduation present. My research will continue between that system and the current system if Blizzard does not discover the solution by then.

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Reality is a railgun.

Originally posted by pakenney38_1:
I have a Pentium II 400 with 128MB of RAM and a TNT2 Ultra card, and the performance is ultra-poor. The stuttering/choppiness is pretty bad, mostly during fights where there are multiple enemies on the screen. I'm not able to play after Duriel, because the stall before Tal Rasha's chamber allows Duriel to kill me before I can fight.
I've run down all the options I can think of (and all of Blizzard's).
Anybody know what's going on here?

The omly tip that is not been posted on the
Blizzard that helps prevents stuttering
on single and the server (on multi-player)
games is not to press the default map
button ,although no solution has been found
for some peoples pausing of the game.
Make sure all settingsare at the lowest.

Regards

shane (nemesiz101@hotmail.com)

[pakenney38]

I really tend to agree that the requirements for the game are way understated, although as soon as you put a Pentium III of any kind into a machine, the game runs way better. I'm just somewhat sick of playing the game when it's choppy as all (censored for your enjoyment). I originally posted thinking that there would be more people who could compile some solutions to problems that have been appearing all over the globe.
This is pretty much the crappiest piece of game software that I have ever seen simply due to the fact that it doesn't run in Single Player mode playably on five out of the six machines I've played it on. The only machine that gave consistently smooth gameplay contained a Pentium III 450, and this was the only significant difference between this machine and the other five.
Blizzard really screwed up royally here by assuming somewhere along the line that compatibility in some hardware wouldn't become a problem. Blizzard... this message is for you... take a hint from Id. They've been doing it right for 10 years, and have never failed to produce a product that I can make run well on any system I test it on.

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Reality is a railgun.

[pakenney38]

Well, myself and some other guys at the dorm have all done some extensive play-testing now, and we've come to three things that stop slowdown dead:
1. Run vidtest over and over and over. Some times you can luck out and get the game to run smoothly- even in Direct3D. Thanks to the guy who mentioned this in a more recent post.
2. We feel that the RAM requirements were understated. We've had a hard time scrounging up enough RAM to test, but we think that you can put 160MB of RAM in a Pentium II machine with a decent video card and eliminate slowdown entirely. I'm receiving some new RAM today, at which point we can test this theory.
3. Put a Pentium III in a machine and get substantially better results. I have seen some Pent III machines slow down, but most don't.

So that's what I have for now - I'll update on the RAM as soon as it arrives.

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Reality is a railgun.