# Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour Lag Problems



## preyingrazor (Oct 25, 2008)

I have noticed that during normal gameplay and multiplayer gameplay against several computer AI (5 to 7) the game lags quite a bit. I've got a pretty decent laptop (dxdiag attached):

http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.com/innovation/product/Satellite-A300D-15B/1056619/toshibaShop/false/

Specifications include:
2.1 Ghz AMD Turion X2 Ultra (Dual core)
4 GB 800 MHz DDR2 RAM
HD 3850 with 512 MB dedicated 1.5 GB shared RAM = total 1.9 GB supporting DirectX 10.1 and shader model 4.0
and a completely defragmented hard drive running Win Vista SP2 beta 32bit
(i carried out the experiment on both SP1 and SP2 with similar results)

I ran the canyourunit.com applet and it passes quite proficiently:










I noticed other people having similar problems on various forums; the most pertinent of which is the following:

http://forums.filefront.com/cnc-problems-errors-help/217824-some-help-lag-issues-zero-hour.html

After reading through the thread I tried one of the solutions which was to run in window mode by appending -win at the end of the generals shortcut. Immediately, I noticed everything running much smoother. By the way, I have graphics maxed out and am running the desktop at 1440 x 900 (native resolution of the laptop) and the game at 1152x864. I can't seem to take it any higher. Obviously it doesn't support widescreen resolutions.

I then started a multiplayer game with 7 other AI, all set to the brutal difficulty. After a couple of minutes massive slowdowns began to occur. I had already disabled useless services and antivirus, defender, firewalls, etc.

Opening taskmanager revealed that the process game.dat was using most processor resources and generals.exe very little. I then set the affinity of the more processor intensive game.dat to CPU 0 and generals.exe and ALL other windows processes to CPU 1. This greatly improved the performance. I imagine generals doesn't make very good use of two cores in tandem.

But there is still massive lag right at the beginning and consequent occasional slowdowns , albeit the campaign modes have vastly improved. Graphics are also mega smooth now.

However, there must be other ways to improve game execution.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.


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