Recent Lag Issues On US West Server

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*ahem*...

nguyen811 wrote: »

Come on dude! I always have 150+ fps. My screen freezes cause of lagging, not lowing fps

Let's go right back to the basics.

The screen (also known as a monitor) is the component of your computer that gives visual output. It receives data via some sort of cable (such as a VGA cable) and displays this data as pixels. This data is sent to the screen from the GPU (graphics processing unit), which is another component of your computer. Screens have a specification known as a refresh rate, which determines how many times per second the image displayed on the screen is refreshed. Most screens available on the market these days have a refresh rate of 60 Hz. Since Hz is the reciprocal of seconds, 60 Hz means 60 times per second.

People often talk of their screen 'freezing', which usually means that the image displayed on the screen fails to change when it should. In your case, it means that a certain image from CrossFire will stay displayed on the screen longer than it should. However, in your case, the screen is not at all 'freezing'. What a ridiculous notion! The screen is doing exactly what it should - displaying the data it receives via the cable at a certain refresh rate.

People often talk of 'FPS' (frames per second) without knowing the true implications of it. FPS is a measure of how many frames something (in this case CrossFire) can produce per second. This means that if you have 150 FPS, CrossFire is capable of producing 150 visual representations of the game in one second. However, just because CrossFire produces 150 per second, this does not mean the screen will display all of these 150 in one second. Remember that refresh rate we talked about before? Yes, the screen can only refresh 60 times per second (for most screens at least), therefore you will only get 60 visual representations of the game outputting via your screen per second, no matter how high the FPS.

So, if CrossFire is running at 150 FPS, this means it is producing 150 visual representations of the game state per second, and the screen will be displaying 60 of them. This leaves absolutely no scope whatsoever for the screen to appear to 'freeze'. If your screen is 'freezing', it must be due to sharp drops in FPS which result in not enough visual representations of the game state reaching the screen per second, causing the 'freezing' effect.

Now, this notion of ping affecting FPS is ridiculous! The ping determines how long it takes data to travel to the server and back. So a ping of 200 means it takes 200 milliseconds for data to travel from your computer to the CrossFire server and back to your computer. This means that any objects within the game that are updated via the internet (i.e. players, bullets, grenades) will be 200 ms behind the representation the server has. This causes the phenomenon we all know and love - lag.

Now, I would like to know what ping has to do with FPS. Since you seem to be an expert, could you please tell me?

Ok lag is fixed now.

Thanks for speedy resolution.... :P