whats the main reasons for "lag"?

Question

one of the worst enemys of gamers is the dreaded "lag",however what actually causes "lag"
i have it down to hardware problems such as poor performing hard drives,and onboard audio
what do you think causes "lag"
your comments will be appreciated
cheers guys !

Answer 1

do you mean lag of the machine itself or lag of the internet connection due to the fact that it is slow and and you require a faster internet connection to be able play with other gamers online....

If you mean the machine itself then you need to clear out temp files using ccleaner ( www.ccleaner.com ), if you have zonealarm then completely closing that down including vsmon.exe, disabling and exiting anti virus software, clearing out prefetch by going to start --> run --> and typing

%prefetch%

delete all the files in there as those are temporary files that are not needed either.
If you use system restore then I normally tend to disable that anyway Also use the disk cleanup utility and clear up the system restore points and any temp files using that as well ( The disk utility normally clears up any files it needs to compress along with maybe one or two other things that ccleaner may or may not miss )

Then after all that run a defrag and then play the game, you can get utilities to alter your tcp/ip settings for your broadband internet connection to enhance it slightly and you can also ( if you have an nvidia card ) at least that im aware of tweak your video card settings, im sure you can do the same for an ATI card, but im sure you already are aware of this.

There is one other thing you can do, which is to disable any services in the background that you do not require ( you will have to search google for this to establish what services you do not require to be running )

Also if you use msconfig and startup control panel you can disable items that startup with the system ( this will free up some ram etc )

Answer 2

Hi Brian, from another Brian.

I mainly play single player game's and occasionally some CS on which I've experienced Lag in the past. I'm not an expert on networks but what I do know is summed up better than I could explain it in a Wikipedia article. As you can see your hardware is not necessarily the main culprit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag

However there's good news on the horizon, the KillerNIC M1, It was reviewed in MicroMart a few weeks ago an got an 8/10 from them even though its a penny shy of 180 quid.

http://www.killernic.com/

If I played on-line a lot I would almost certainly consider investing in one.

I hope you find this helpful.

Answer 3

it is usually caused by the hardware's inability to handle the load of the whole game. most likely culprit here is the video card. games need a lot of video resources and sometimes, older video cards can't really give you that smooth texture and other special effect written into the game, hence the lag.

for mmorpgs though, internet connections and the traffic or the volume of players online play a major role too other than just hardware.

Answer 4

What causes lag depends on what your specific situation. It might be whatever your bottleneck is, whether that be the processor, the RAM, or the video card. And if you are playing online, then your connection could be a definite source of lag.