Diablo II - hard drive access

M

Mysterial

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I have a 400 Mhz K6-III, 320mb RAM, a Geforce 2 MX card, and a SB PCI128 card. When I play Diablo II, I get a lot of hard drive access when playing, even more when multiple large enemies are on the screen. Changing options has no effect. Changing video/sound drivers has no effect. Switching to DirectDraw helped a little, but its still pretty bad.

As a test, I disabled virtual memory, turned on the System Monitor utility that comes with Windows, and ran Diablo II. Alt-tabbing out while playing, I noticed that D2 is ignoring over 200mb of my memory! It seems to prefer accessing its stuff straight off the hard drive during play rather than loading it into memory.

Does this happen to everyone? Anyone come up with a fix, or some way to at least minimize the effect?
 
Diablo II is a generally poorly designed game. Everyone lags now and again even with a very powerful computer. I have a 800mhz Duron with 256MB of ram and I lag. My brother has a Pentium 500mhz with an ATI All-in-Wonder 128MB Ram video card and 512MB of Ram and he lags...

What is your Operating System ?
 
Originally posted by NoNameRequired

What is your Operating System ?
Click to expand...

Win98. Oh well, I guess I'm stuck with it being choppy.
 
An Excerpt form the link that NoNameRequired posted

Lower your CD access and read time
If you continue to experiance sluggish gameplay and choppyness, copy the D2CHAR.MPQ and the D2MUSIC.MPQ files from the Diablo II Play Disk into your Diablo II directory on your hard drive.
 
Originally posted by t'kron
An Excerpt form the link that NoNameRequired posted

Lower your CD access and read time
If you continue to experiance sluggish gameplay and choppyness, copy the D2CHAR.MPQ and the D2MUSIC.MPQ files from the Diablo II Play Disk into your Diablo II directory on your hard drive.
Click to expand...

I already read that stuff, it didn't help because I have plenty of memory and CD access isn't the problem (in fact it never accesses the CD except for character voices and music in Act V, because I have LoD installed). The problem is the near-constant hard drive access.

I'll try that accelerator and see if it helps though.
 
A few things you may want to try:
Try pulling a stick of RAM to lower your RAM size down to 256, some motherboards/chipsets got a bit dingy if you went over 256 and would start caching to the hard drive.

Make sure that none of your drivers are running in 16-bit mode (you can check this under Control Panel, System, then Performance), as this will slow things down and will usually cause bnet games to not even work period (doubt that's your problem)

If you are using the original Windows 98, try upgrading to Windows 98 Second Edition (if possible), as the original may not be able to address that much RAM (I run 98SE with about the same amount of ram as you). I wouldn't suggest installing the cow pie that Microsoft has dubbed Windows XP, but that's just my own opinion.

-- Magickian, in Las Vegas, not Hell AKA Phoenix
 
After talking to a blizzard rep in Bnet, I found out that for some demented reason having a huge swap file (the rep recommended 400mb) makes D2 work better than with a small or no swap file. I don't understand it, but it certainly helped my performance. (Yes I know that was on that page that was already posted, but like I said, it doesn't make any sense!)

The remaining hard drive access probs I'm having I suspect is due in large part to D2 using EAX whether you like it or not. I've had problems with EAX ranging from crashes to extreme hard drive swapping and everything in between. Problem is, AFAIK you can't stop D2 from using it, although I'm 99% sure there's a registry entry that will handle it.

Good idea about that memory thing. I didn't think of that. I don't think it's directly my motherboard, it's not THAT old, but it's worth a try.

I've been trying to upgrade to 98SE, but especially since XP came out its very hard to get ahold of a CD.

Thanks for the help.
 
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