Legit Reviews

Okay so I am playing Warcraft III online, with settings maxed out at 1280x1024 and it runs perfectly smooth and fine (even in the biggest of battles). Then, randomly maybe after I play a few games, BAM, I get what I call frame rate reduction. It could happen right at the beginning of the game with nothing going on, and what happens is the game gets really choppy like the frame rate has been quartered. The thing that really sucks about this is when I mouse scroll on the screen it will skip to the corner of the map.. making game play v.difficult. The only way I've found to fix this is to restart my computer. But I wonder why is this happening!? And it's not the internet, it's not like it's laggy, it's the video, frame rate it seems.

I'm no PC expert but I have played alot of on-line games. Since you did not indicate you searched the Warcraft support web site nor the Warcraft fan sites for an answer I can only suggestt two things (Someone here may come up with a silver bullet for your problem) It could be another API is taking up CPU useage and slowing your game. With only 512 memory you don't have any to spare. Increase your memory to 1GB minimum for any "good graphics" on-line game. Secondly, does Warcraft have an optimization option for your video settings (I don't do RPG) even so with a 6600 you may need to decrease your video settings. I have a 6800 256 version and would never play on the max. settings for any new FPS game with the exception of RO-OST.

I play BF2 which is a memory PIG and I use GameXP which turns-off Windows XP functions so the CPU can handle the game better. In GameXP I start the game (in this case BF2) by right clicking and starting it high priority. You can also do this once any game is started by doing "alt/cntl/del" Right click the application and click priorities and set to high. Since you have the same CPU as me....don't touch the "affinity" leave it on both cores. One last trick, I use Ai-booster which is real easy to use to Over-clock my CPU a bit (you can choose 3, 5,8,10%). I never have PC based problems was gaming anymore. Still have bad code problems from BF2 but they are well known and I am sure Warcraft has them also...you just need to research them on the sites I mentioned. Sorry these are not "silver bullet" but try them even if someone finds you a fix.

As my Bell-labs unix coder friends would tell me "it's just in-elegant coding"

yeah actually I did check the blizzard help.. didn't really find what I was looking for, about the best was they said defrag. Warcraft III is an RTS from 2002/3

Do you have the AMD cool n quiet function on and/or the power scheme set to portable/laptop. Its possible that the power saveing functions are kicking in when there is little workload on the CPU and isnt kicking in fast enough when there is demand, and you are seeing this as frame lag.

But I would reccomend putting your RAM upto 1Gig, that could be a major player in the poor playablity when there is system demand. Listen out to see if you can hear your hard drive being accessed alot during this time, if it is, its doing something called paging your RAM which means swapping bits from and to the harddrive and that is really killing performance (of course it could also just be loading the game some )

Dan

see it's weird because it usually works just fine even in the most intense parts of the game with the most action happening. Usually the problem starts at the beginning of the game when a MUCH lesser pc can run it well. For example my old computer, 1ghz 256 ram, onboard video (e-machine) could run it perfectly at the beginning of the game but when the big battles came it would go to screen shot mode >>

were the settings the same on both machines? and did you have a look at the power schemes?

Dan