Quake3World

This is something Ive been wondering but when i play on MP servers I ALWAYS have the highest ping out of anyone. Everyone has like 30-50 when im bordering 200. I really don't think it's my internet since I have DSL cable. I was thinking it may be because of my ram. Would playing Q4 with 512mb of ram be why the game plays so slow?

seems to me you need to tweak your internet connection.

Does every server in the game browser have the same high ping? Have you tried playing on servers closer to your area?

Have you changed the rate setting in the game?

Every server I have anywhere from 120-200 ping. I don't know how to change rate setting.

do you live in the middle of nowhere? i lived in las cruces, new mexico for a couple years, and the no matter what speed dsl i got, the latency was NEVER under 100. heck, i was thrilled when i got 100, lol. moved out to tucson and kept same dsl (qwest) and poof, 30 pings, now i'm on cable and get 40-50.

the main problem with las cruces is that everything was routed thru alb. regardless of where it was going -- there was nothing you could do about it. so if you live somewhere with not a lot around, and have a phone company that does some iffy routing, there just isn't a whole lot you can do

No I don't live in the middle of nowhere. Am on the east coast in Maryland. If my connection was always this bad I wouldn't be asking, but I played UT2004 with like 20 ping tops. Then a buddy of mine suggested that it might be since I have the bare minimum amount of ram needed to play the game that it might be why its so laggy.

Well, 512 MB is really the bare minimum for Q4. 1024 MB or perhaps 786 is highly recommended. Little RAM wouldn't give you a high ping though; it would cause framedrops and stuttering gameplay because the game writes to the pagefile (virtual memory) very often.

Yea I have stuttering gameplay too. I had to turn the graphics on the lowest they could go, and turn off shadows and bump mapping to get it to stop suttering the gameplay. I dunno wtf is up with the ping though. =/

Quake4 doesn't have the best netcode. What are you computer specs?

it's a Gateway Intel Pentium 4. That's all i know. My mom got me this computer so I don't know what graphics or soundcard it has.

Krazy_K wrote:it's a Gateway Intel Pentium 4. That's all i know. My mom got me this computer so I don't know what graphics or soundcard it has.

There a number on the front?

If not you can run Faronics System profiler and get the whole low down on your computer:
http://www.faronics.com/html/SysProfiler.asp

But don't post the thing, there is stuff in there you don't want others to know.

I don't see a number on the front of my computer. I used that link you gave me and it gave me like 50pages of info about my comp but i have no idea what it all meant.

shiznit wrote:Quake4 doesn't have the best netcode. What are you computer specs?

sadly, i agree with this. i only have 512 meg, so rule that out as a ping issue, i ping under 50 pretty smoothly, but it FEELS like a ping of 100 :/ the 30fps in most battles for me doesn't help, but still

Well I wanna get this fixed because when I play tourney servers I get so pissed when everyone I fight lands every single rail gun shot and I can't hit them once because the game stutters when im trying to aim.

Trying to become decent at 1v1 but I don't think it's possible with 200+ ping and everyone else is about 50. So I wanna figure what I need to do to fix this shit. :icon33:

quake 4 requires like 2 MB of RAM

It requires 512 mb of ram.

Krazy_K wrote:Trying to become decent at 1v1 but I don't think it's possible with 200+ ping and everyone else is about 50. So I wanna figure what I need to do to fix this shit. :icon33:

Give our server a shot, its in New York so hopefully you should have a ping thats playable: 3nD of D4y5 66.55.158.34:28004

K thnx

I'm a bit slow on the uptake but what is 'ping' and how does it effect play. mine is about 250 but it plays smothly

Ping is the time delay (in milliseconds) between you (the client) and the online game (the server).

The higher your ping (time delay), the harder it is to land shots.

BTW Krazy, ping is dependant on the quality of your connection to the server. Rarely is it dependant on how fast you're running the game. If you're getting more than 10 frames per second, then it's fairly safe to say it's not the performance of the game that is causing the high ping.

Krazy_K wrote:I don't see a number on the front of my computer. I used that link you gave me and it gave me like 50pages of info about my comp but i have no idea what it all meant.

You can use the dxdiag tool that comes with windows to check your basic specs. Just click on 'run' in the start menu, type dxdiag. In the display tab, you can see what chipset your video card has got, and also how much RAM.

Capt.Oldschool wrote:quake 4 requires like 2 MB of RAM

Anyway it's 786 MB or more, what you need to run Q4 without excessive use of virtual memory.