Hey, I've been having problems with Battlefield 2. For some reason, when I actually get into a game server, past all the loading screens, the game plays ridiculously sluggish. For example, the hard drive just goes nuts and it stutters for at least a good 30 seconds at which point I'm totally helpless in game. It looks like the game is caching itself or something, because after that 30 seconds the game runs perfectly on any detail setting I set it at. I've heard people say that BF2 is a memory hog, but I've got a gig of fairly respectable memory, shouldn't that be enough? Is there any way I can eliminate this sluggishness? It is really really annoying to be unable to actually do anything constructive in the game for the first 45 seconds. Here are my specs: 3500+ Venice 1024 MB OCZ Premier regular timing 250 GB SATA Maxtor Gigabyte Geforce 6600GT 128MB Nothing is overclocked, though I do get some artifacts if I play BF2 for a long time. Nothing major though. What can I do to get rid of these ridiculous hard drive stutters? I've defragged recently, closed background apps, cleaned reg. and got rid of spyware.

Some "sluggishness" at the start of a round appears to be common. Myself and those I play with have always attributed it to people joining. However, what you describe appears to be worse that the norm. Since you hard-drive "goes nuts and it stutters" then I doubt it is a memory issue. My best guess is that it coud be a fragmentation issues. There is a LOT of data that has to be loaded to start a new map. If that data is all over the place on your hard drive I would expect some of the issues you described. So, I suggest you defragment your hard drive. If you are running out of space you might also see where you have some junk that can be cleaned out. Michael J

Lower your BF2 settings to medium if there not allready and set your AS and AF to off also move your system performance slider to system performance see if that makes any difference you can allways change it back also one last thing try turning off vertical sync all of the above are draining the system while in-game BF2 can still be played quite nicely withought the need to have fancy smooth edges etc.....even though your running a 6600gt and a fairly decent midrange cpu it might be worth slinging in another gig of ram. AMD x2 Dual Core 64 Processor 4400+ Asus Deluxe nForce 4 Ultra PCI-e SLi Chipset Motherboard 2048MB DDR400 Corsair LL Performance Ram Maxtor SATAII 200GB Hard Drive Windows XP Professi

Lower your BF2 settings to medium if there not allready and set your AS and AF to off also move your system performance slider to system performance see if that makes any difference you can allways change it back also one last thing try turning off vertical sync all of the above are draining the system while in-game BF2 can still be played quite nicely withought the need to have fancy smooth edges etc.....even though your running a 6600gt and a fairly decent midrange cpu it might be worth slinging in another gig of ram. AMD x2 Dual Core 64 Processor 4400+ Asus Deluxe nForce 4 Ultra PCI-e SLi Chipset Motherboard 2048MB DDR400 Corsair LL Performance Ram Maxtor SATAII 200GB Geforce 7800GTX Extreme Edition

posted twice sorry! AMD x2 Dual Core 64 Processor 4400+ Asus Deluxe nForce 4 Ultra PCI-e SLi Chipset Motherboard 2048MB DDR400 Corsair LL Performance Ram Maxtor SATAII 200GB Geforce 7800GTX 256mb Extreme E

hey, i have a very similar computer to yours, Pentium 4 3.2Ghz 1024MB DDR2 RAM 120GB SATA GeForce 6600GT I too have that problem when BF2 starts a map up. Its just because the maps are sooo big that the game is still loading textures and the like after you enter the map. DONT LISTEN TO ANYONE ABOUT YOUR RAM! I have another computer, identical, excapt it is 3.4Ghz and has 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 RAM. It has the same probs. the only time that 3.4Ghz computer has been faster than mine is in Quake 4. I play on high detail but you need more ram to play on ultra and 2 gigs can do that. unfortunately though, the computer isnt mine :(

well getting extra ram may not allways solve some gaming issues and thats not exactly what i said :) quote "it might be worth slinging in another gig of ram" unquote....but obviously his awnser is better solved from somone who suffers from the same thing as i have played BF2 but did not suffer from a sluggish load up. AMD x2 Dual Core 64 Processor 4400+ Asus Deluxe nForce 4 Ultra PCI-e SLi Chipset Motherboard 2048MB DDR400 Corsair LL Performance Ram Maxtor SATAII 200GB Geforce 7800GTX 256mb Extreme E