Easy Lag Fixes

Getting Started
simple ways to improve your game's speed
 * Let's skip the introdutctions and get straight to the point here, if you're looking at this guide, then you want to do these following things...
 * (A) Speed up your PING, or internet connection to the vindictus servers.
 * (B) Speed up the FPS of the overall game.
 * (C) Find out what might be causing problems in your computer.

First off...

The thing all gamers should do is defragment your harddrive, if you are unfamillar with this term, then you should be a bit worried. Defragging is essential to protect your computer's speed and quality, and if you are a gamer this is a must. To find the defragment option follow these steps.

Start > Program Files > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter

Do this about once every two weeks to ensure that your computer is running at the best it possibly can. Also, in the same file, System Tools, look for a program called Disk Cleanup, and run that. For another option to clean your disks, you can download CCleaner. In the following Link: (CCLEANER WEBSITE)

Another essential part of keeping your computer healthy is to update your graphics drivers. You can find what type of graphics card you have by going to control panel, it should be shown pretty plainly depending on the OS. If you have a OS such as Vista etc. you might have to go into the additional options tab to find it.

All of this is to improve your computer's speed while running games, but you have to ALSO improve your router's ability to run your games faster.

Working With Graphic Settings
How to make FPS improve A common error most people make while playing games is that everything should be run at the absolute highest settings, or else you'll be missing something, when in fact, if you remove some settings, it wont even be noticeable in the long run.

Simple Setting Changes
 * Set water quality to lowest
 * Turn shadows off
 * Turn cloth physics off
 * Turn particle quality off
 * Put textures/model detail lowest
 * Turn off Direct X9 and replace it for Direct X8 - Do not make this change if you're using a 64bit operating system, DX8

More Advanced Setting Changes
You can find your graphic card's options and control panel by going to your actual control panel and going to additional settings, or going to your computer, and opening the file containing the driver's media. Or simply right-clicking on the desktop.

Start > Computer > Program Files > Nvidia > Control Panel

Something like that. I used nvidia as an example... Here's some options that you can set to make your games run faster using the control panel on your drivers After changing the options make sure to hit apply after of so it's good.
 * Turn off Anisotropic Filtering
 * Set the display preformance to Single Display
 * Turn off Anti-Aliasing
 * Anything that has the option for preformance, turn to High-Preformance.
 * Right click your Battery Symbol on your toolbar (If using a Laptop) and choose the High Preformance option.

Major/Desperate Graphics Changes
Vindictus is a source engine game, alot of the graphics settings you can change are not actually shown in the options menu

To change these you can modify your config_material.txt gamefile, some example configs are further information can be found here (Custom Configs)

Fixing your Internal Network
The First thing you need to check when latency is an issue with online games is your internal network, if you experience fluctuating delay (fine one minute complete crap the next) or rubberbanding (teleporting back and forth when performing actions) you should check out the following.


 * Use an ethernet cable/wired connection to your modem/router instead of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is notorious for packet loss issues regardless of signal strength, packet loss = rubberbanding problems.
 * Close P2P programs running on your network, such as utorrent and skype, P2P applications open large amounts of sockets purely for passive listening and eat up alot of your computers available bandwidth.
 * Flush your computers DNS cache, on windows you would do this by pressing the windows key and R at the same time then typing ipconfig /flushdns and hitting enter. This makes your computer rebuild the stored DNS cache and usually solves minor HTTP connectivity and latency discrepancies.
 * Close "update checker" applications eg google updates, adobe update etc, you would open task manager (ctrl+shift+escape) then go to the processes tab and close them there.
 * Perform a "Cold Start" of your modem. This means disconnecting your modem from the power source for 5-15minutes then reconnecting it. The purpose of a cold start is to flush the routers RAM and NAT table which can cause routing issues especially if you run P2P programs like utorrent or if the modem is getting old.

Improving your Connectivity to the Server
The First thing you need to understand about online connectivity is that ping is almost completely separate from download and upload speed, the ONLY time your ping will be affected by those factors is if your internet throughput does not meet the minimum requirements of the game. Vindictus requires a 24KB/S connection to host yourself and a 64KB/S connection to host a party of 4. This is upload speed, not download speed and 99.9% of ISPs provide this. Ping itself is determined by the physical distance between A (you) and B(the host/server) this means if you live in Australia and you are playing on the American East server you will have at least 150ping to royal raids and other American hosts.

What you can do to improve your ping is very limited and more than often pointless because it all revolves around routing changes, most of this is only useful for players connecting internationally.
 * Purcahse or use a free VPN service. A VPN allows you to bypass alot of internal/cluttered routing and skip from A to B faster, a scenario where this would be useful is if your ping fluctuates alot when connected to the same host or if your ISP throttles P2P traffic(comcast, iinet), it may help to stabalise it.
 * Change your DNS server to a public DNS server such as googles (4.4.4.4) instructions on how to do so can be found (here). This may improve ping due to a different routing table been used.
 * Add your computers local IP address to your routers DMZ. More Information can be found (here). Doing this creates a security risk on your PC however and is not recommended unless you know what you're doing/want to take the risk.

If you're still having latency connectivity issues after all of this i suggest performing a (ping test) against the server location you're connecting to and checking for packet loss/high ping. If you're on a wired connection and you get a test showing packet loss it means there is a bad routing hop between you and the server (assuming the rest of your internet is fine and its not an issue on your end) a VPN may help resolve this problem. To confirm the problem isn't related to you, I would recommend checking your ISPs service status page (google it) and looking for issues in your area or planned/ongoing maintainance.

=Hope This Helped=

This is pretty much all the information I know of how to speed up internet connectivity at the time, I'll be updating frequently and with quality information, I am part of the Antrapenuers Guild, which can be found at:

Antrapenuers Youtube page

My Email is arrownin@gmail.com, Peace off.

--Arrownin 23:00, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Connection Fix Re-write by --Solicie (talk) 17:02, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Guild: Lion Heart, NA East