Freezing and stuttering in PR

[BloodBane611]

I'm running dell (don't give me crap about it, I'm not a fan either), and I recently bought a new GeForce 8400. So I thought I'd turn my graphics all the way up, since this card is powerful enough to run PR all the way up no sweat. Most of the time its good, maybe a few freeze frames here and there, but for the most part running very well. Played for about an hour on Fools Road with no noticeable framerate issues.

So yesterday I join battlecenter playing al basrah. Spawn at main, walk out the door of the barracks building, and I freeze up. Couldn't even bring up task manager behind it to see what my mem and cpu usage was. I've also had some random stutters on other maps, and quinling was definitely a bit of an issue.

So on all high I get freezing and some stuttering, on all low I get maybe the occasional stutter but basically it all works. On medium I get a noticeable amount of stutter, too much to play with.

So here are my specs:
GeForce 8400-got the newest drivers installed
2 mB ddr2 sdram 667 mhz
AMD X2 dual core 5000+ (2.60 ghz)
32 bit vista
Have not partitioned my HD, but run diskeeper and it is not fragmented

I just bought another stick of ram identical to the two I have, but haven't received and installed it yet. Any other ideas would be helpful, I'm kinda at my wits end here.

[unrealalex]

Erm I hate to break it to you but 8400 is a very, very, VERY crappy card. I'm amazed you say it runs well, what resolution do you play on?

[BloodBane611]

Yeah, I realize the 8400 is a pretty crappy card. But I've heard from several people that they can run BF2, and PR, on full with it. I've been playing it on full resolution, too lazy to check what that is.

Realistically the 8400 should not have trouble running this card. I'm not an idiot, I did my homework, and I have run maps with little to no lag on full. Even ran a full round of Fools Road very, very nicely. So I'm thinking the problem is something deeper than that.

[ConscriptVirus]

also, with Vista, you'll need more RAM than juts 2gb so stick in some more.

[BloodBane611]

Yeah, I got 1 more gb stick coming in. We'll see how it goes.

[BloodBane611]

So today I ran 0.6 SP with 80 bots, highest graphics on full resolution. So I'm thinking that this must either be a problem with utilization of something that SP does not use, or a network/connection error. Any ideas?

[nicoliani]

I had the same problem. It just freezes with the sound looping, and it is a heavy duty to bring up the task manager to close PR. Happened twice on Fools Road.

[BloodBane611]

It doesn't seem very map related, happens generally at the start of a round and not always at the same time or on the same maps.

Frickin mystery.

[nicoliani]

I will try with the hard-drive repair (scandisc) to see if it has anything to do with that.

[BloodBane611]

So I fixed it. Not entirely sure what fixed it, but I got the latest drivers and played with my video settings. Right now I am mostly adjusting for good framerates, but anyhow:
Terrain-Medium
Effects-High
Geometry-High
Texture-Medium
Lighting-Medium
Dynamic Shadows-Low
Dynamic Light-Low
Anti-Aliasing-Off
Texture Filtering-High
View Distance-100%

I'm pretty sure I can bring some of those up, just gotta do some more testing with them. I was running higher than that and getting a good framerate on Fools Road, which is probably the most GPU intensive map, although its close with quinling.