DeSync Issues and work arounds.

I was experiencing the same thing as the OP and I couldn't play the game for more than about 20-30 minutes before something broke that forced me to restart PS2:

• The OP's Flickering Green Screen o' Doom
• FPS drops down to <1FPS for several seconds at a time and then back again
• random "You are in a restricted area" warnings
• other players warping all over the place/standing frozen in place/flying or running backwards, vehicles spinning like a top, etc
• frequent game lockups and CTDs,
• and my personal favorite, getting no red hit indicators and doing zero damage to others despite unloading full mags into them but still being able to receive damage from anyone myself.

Here's my rig:

OS: Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit SP1

CPU: Intel i5 3570K OC'd @4.567GHz

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V

RAM: 8 GB Crucial Ballistix R/G Tracer DDR3 1866MHz 9-9-9-27-2T

HDD/SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD

Video Card: MSI Nvidia 680 GTX Twin Frozr 4GB

Video Driver: NVIDIA ForceWare 310.90

Audio: Modded Creative X-Fi Titanium HD

At the time GU2 was released I was using Nvidia 306.23 drivers. I updated them to the 310.90 and my FPS drops went away. I still had all the other issues tho.

Now GU2 contained many game "op-tuh-my-zay-shuns" to help out lower end rigs, and it dawned on me that PS2 might be doing some BIOS queries to try and determine how fast the client PC is in order to do some performance tweaks "behind the scenes." I was using the ASUS AI Suite II to OC my CPU from w/in Windows. But I don't know how it does its OC'ing. I also don't know much about how my ASUS board's UEFI BIOS differs architecturally from a traditional BIOS. So it got me thinking that maybe, just maybe, my rig was running at a speed that was different than what PS2 thought it was running at and it was causing some sort of sync issue w/ the server. This thread seems to support my hypothesis.

I had already tried numerous things to try to solve my issues without success (Win7 updates, deleting PS2 ini/xml files so they game would recreate them, Directx reinstall, SOE Launcher Validation, etc) so in light of all this, here's what I did:

1. I disabled the AI Suite II overclocking and manually set the same OC in the BIOS
2. I uninstalled PS2, deleted its install directory, rebooted, and then installed it in a different directory location.

I'm not sure which step fixed what problem(s), but I do know that after doing the above all of my issues went away. I've been problem-free for about 2 weeks now..

And welcome back to the battlefield, soldier.

Locking my my clock speed and ratio in BIOs at max once again did nothing yesterday and today I was going to test the 4th option provided by BenYeeHua but neuteredmode is back so that is not happening.

Er...
What?
Fixed or not fixed?

I played after downloading the patch, running my CPU at stock speed and I saw everything in the video happen when I was at the crown, people warping all over the place and the mini-map going nuts.

So I restarted the PC and Overclocked my CPU to what it says in my signature and I had no more issues.

Not fixed and new patch unfixed the hit registration problem.

Sorry I stand corrected apparently it this hit registration problem is different because aside from the first appearance that happened within 4 minutes have played twice since for near an hour until it become complete neutermode with a random low occurrence of hit registration failures. Also as of 55 minutes(over 3 times normal appearance time) I am completely free of desync with my system BIOs and clock settings reverted to normal.

Sadly, doing this same thing did not resolve the issue on my Asus P5K-VM motherboard with an Intel Core2 Q8200 (as well as all the other work-arounds, I should add).

I only get this issue when my ISP is throttling the living daylights out of our (as in all of their subscribers) service during "prime time". Regardless of the size of a battle, it never happens after 1am EST.

See, I was getting it constantly, and it clearly is an issue with the interaction of the game post-GU2 and my hardware. Testing last night shows the issue is still active.

ISP throttling is a much less easy thing to fix. I feel for you.

Just a quick bump to say that yesterday's patch did not fix the problem (re-enabling my dynamic overclock still caused the same desync problem), but the fix (that worked for me) is still effective.

Sadly I'm waiting for an official fix for this one. Been out of the action for 3 weeks, but I don't know enough about tech to start screwing around in my bios or overclocking etc. Not going to risk frying my pc because a company ****** up the game. It was fine before Feb 2. I'll just have to mess with one of the many other f2p games until Sony gets their **** straight.

If they could just figure out what is causing frame rates to be limited by network communication that would be great. Honestly, I'd rather be disconnected from the game with a message stating, "Network connection too slow to play at this time" than to have the game lock up and crash. It's entirely futile to speak with my ISP about anything, so imagine what they say when they are told that a game/program crashes in any manner - "Not our problem, we're just an ISP. We can't crash a program"...

Same here, I've tried everything that doesn't have anything to do with over/underclocking or changing my BIOS around simply because this game ran perfectly before SOE broke it for me. Changing my OS to accommodate for the failures of the game dev's isn't acceptable... especially after 3 weeks of this **** and a 40+ page thread about it having been posted a while ago.

I'm surprised that this has yet to be fixed since the game is absolutely unplayable for me and many others...

Just gonna keep playing dat PoE I guess... I gotta get my FPS fix somewhere though : /

Bump.

I work on a small game, and we had similar issues trying to convert the engine over to a multi-threaded approach (in reality all we did was move the networking, rendering, and sound threads out of the main).

Our only issue was that when we used the performance counter (you ask windows for the cycle time of a processor, and by deducing how many cycles have past, and what the # of cycles is, you can tell how much time has passed). Back in the olden days when you had a single core, there was only one counter, and it was always right (not to mention in those days dynamic clock rates weren't about).

Nowadays we have more than one core, each core has its own counter, and each core is dynamically clocked to save power/heat/etc. This causes huge issues and is the #1 problem when creating an efficient multi-threaded engine/game. You can't realistically poll the clock speed every game update (tick), and you can't account for minuté clock variances due to BIOS, chipset, or OS - so you end up having to use the primary core for all timing issues, but that still gives you issues when another core dynamically boosts itself.

Lets say a tick is 1/20th of a second (usually is). Your game client is updating this often, doing all of its logic, etc. The main logic thread is usually on the first core, or the core used for timing. If this main thread then makes a call to the rendering thread, and that thread is on a core that's boosted, you end up with the call on the rendering thread being done faster than it should. I should make it clear that this is an extremely dumbed down version of what likely happens, but it gets the gist of what goes on across.

To fix all of this you usually have to do ridiculous timing checks or add in redundancies everywhere, and therein lies the issue usually - by the time you add these, you've added 20%~ or so overhead to all your workload.

Then you take into the account that this is just the client trying not to trip over its own feet and stay in sync.

I PM'd one of the devs about this and stated in a thread a while ago prior to the GU02, but I got no reply as to whether this was the actual issue, but it sounds very much like it is.

And those of you who have locked your frequencies, etc - remember to turn off features like Cool 'n' Quiet, energy saving modes, features that increase the performance of one core and lower another. ANYTHING that could affect your processor or any of its core's clock rate should be disabled.

Try not to blame the developers. It's not easy (in the slightest) creating a game of this scale, and trying to accommodate all the hardware setups and the various itterations of them, and the different technologies that different vendors use, is one of the largest issues with PC gaming. They'll get it sorted at some point, but they're not going to be able to realistically test all machines ever. Not to mention that just because something works in beta, doesn't mean it'll work on release - a lot of companies disable safety features in the engine before going live so hackers can't use beta as a means to test hacks for release.

If you're not willing to try to solve the issue (which in turn helps them know where it lies), then you really shouldn't be complaining, honestly.

Here is what I have done so far...

1. Format and Reinstall my OS with the latest drivers for my specs.

2. Install a fresh downloaded copy using the Launcher, plus DirectX and all that to run it.

3. Unparking my CPU using said means, tweaking my bios step-by-step to achieve the maximum performance from my hardware, this took a while.

4. Step by step meddling with registry values, to maximize the performance of my network adapter and Operating system. This took a while too. - I highly recommend not doing this. I was just taking it one step ahead to counter the latency issues to see if this helped.
I can't say it did but I'm leaving the settings as they are since it took such a long time to "get there."

5. Run a few programs such as MSi Afterburner and tweaked the living sh** out of my graphic card settings, turning off anti-aliasing and such.

6. Called my ISP and asked them if I could have a static IP address to bypass some of the throttling rules to make absolutely sure that it was either server-side or clientside that I was dealing with. This seemed to have impacted the performance most, after testing for a week.


-

To sum up, I've done way too much stuff to make a game run smooth. I should just buy the PS4 and dump this PC world.
Can't say its worth it, but as a tech geek, It sure is fun to be honest and I've learned more, trying to make this game work, than I would at a full semester, majoring in Computer Engineering...

Yup, TSC.
And Intel has fix it with constant TSC.

i had this problem i updated my video card and it worked fine after that.

Morpholine provided the tip that fixed my issue: Go into the BIOS and change the Overclocking option from Auto to Manual. Instant fix (for me at least)!

Apparently, still having this problem in GU04.

So bump.