After Hotfix 12/5 I`m experiencing weird freezes (0 FPS) that last from 5 up to 10 secs every minute or so with increasing frequency the longer I manage to endure the game. I have not found anything obvious that would cause them,since they happen whether I`m stationary in the warpgate or in battle. Changing the graphics settings does nothing for the freezes,standart settings (all low except quality and textures on med,draw distance just above 3k,resolution @1280x1024) still give the same framerate (30-160 depending on situation) with no noticeable drops before or after the freezes. Sound also freezes with all current sounds during the freeze playing out on a loop or continuously depending on the original source. Since the patch I have noticed the load on cpu core 0 is always between 99.3% and 100%,even on the loading screens. System: Windows 7 64 bit AMD FX-4350 OC`d to 4.5 Ghz GTX 460 SE 1GB 256bit OC`d to 800Mhz core 1715 memory 8GB DDR3 1600 no OC
Do not OC the FX-4350 they use 4 cores now and I think the video / card / buss can not handle the data input. I have a GTX-470 and run it high except for texture = medium flora= off for hit detection to work and shadow= off and lighting = low the rest is high. This works great for me. Make sure you turn off shader cache in the video driver, other wise you get hitching. Long Freezes are caused by the server.
Thank you for the answer, I tried turning shader cache off, but it had no effect.I doubt the GPU is to blame at those settings,core load is almost never past 40%. The freezing happens on both EU servers and often results in my death,also I dont get the yellow/red marker on the top left when it happens,but serverside or client/server connection problem is not out of the question. I am reluctant to drop my OC just for this game,but I guess I`ll try that too tomorrow. I uninstalled the game and installed it from scratch trough steam and now every time i try to either alt-tab or alt-enter i get a crash followed by G12 error,though I`m not sure if the issue is new since I haven't used that feature in the last few months. It is kinda of disappointing attempting to fix a problem just to create new ones in the process :S
There is something buggy on the EU servers, the USA servers work good most of the time but not all the time. Steam has some bug also your not the only one. The reason I suggest to drop the over clock is someone else had the same problem. Because the game use to run fine for him also. Until the last update when they went to using 4 cores. The GTX-460/470 crash when they run out of memory. Try the new 344.80 hot fix driver also, it works great, it unload my cores a lot.
@user101 TY for helping if you can think of anything else I could try pls post! So far: Dropping OC did nothing but lower my avg FPS by about 5,and the issue only appeared after the latest hotfix that should`ve done nothing but add "Support for holiday sales and promotions",so whatever patch has added the 4 core support was running fine until a week ago. GPU memory peaked @ 727MB, most of the time bellow 700MB. I still doubt the issue is GPU related. Trying other servers is out of the question ATM since I`m rather attached to my characters and I would never spend money on a product that does not work. After i restored my OC i tried fiddling with a bunch of settings in an attempt to resolve at least the G12 issue so I would be able to monitor my system without having to exit the game or have an overly intrusive overlay,but it appears the error is here to stay,however manually giving all .exe files in the planetside folder administrative rights seems to have caused the freezes to appear less frequently,though I`m not 100% sure if that is actually true since I haven`t had a longer playsession yet. Searching trough the interwebs I found out similar issues are sometimes observed in other games due to I/O overload,but that is usually the case only with older,slower laptop drives with lower amount of cache, mine is a 1TB sata 6 with 64MB cache,and the next thing I`ll try is to defragment it.
Update: Defragmenting did nothing as expected. It was suggested to me to try forcing the game in 32 bit mode and this is what I did. The somehow fiddly process of forcing the game to run the 32 bit client instead of the 64 bit didn't really give me much hope,and after the initial loading i was greeted with my first ever crash to the desktop,but i still persisted. 2nd run was promising,about 10 mins b4 another crash occurred and then I tried the workaround from here, and it actually worked. So far I`ve played for about 2 hours on the 32 bit client and not only did I not experience any crashes or freezes since i lowered my DDR speed to 1333,but the G12 error on alt-tab is also gone.On top of that I`m enjoying about 50% less CPU usage and performance boost across the board with min FPS increased by 6 and average values increased by 17. The gameplay feels smoother all around and even the steam overlay actually works. Will try again the 64 bit version tomorrow just to see if the lowered DDR speeds make any difference, but as far as I`m concerned the 64 bit version is not even worth touching when there is a much better performing option already available. The one thing I really wish for now is a version selector on the launcher,since the whole procedure of forcing the 32 bit client every time i want to play is a bit annoying. Thanks everyone for helping me find this workaround and gain the ability to play again.
Update 2: The lower DDR frequency seems to have solved both the freezes and the G12 error in the 64 bit client,with occasional minor freezes every ~60 mins lasting for about half a sec or less still present. The memory showed no errors during 2 full passes of memtest86 and overnight(~8 hours) blend test on prime 95 with the original 1600 clock. For future reference - is there a time limit to editing my messages on this forum since the option is not present for my previous post?
