Maniaplanet Forum

if you run the game in window mode, can you see anything written and changing in the title bar?
I can see somehting like "calculating shaders" or others.
Before the map loads, there is some kind of a freeze indeed.
This freeze is longer if I forget to set my PC into performance mode.

It freezes within 10 seconds of the first drive. There's no difference if i've placed some blocks first or start driving straight after loading. Also, no change after shadows calculated and no difference between shader settings and such.

try with low textures & no sound, and tell us

The minifreezes stay on each and every setting. I've tried everything I could find on the forum about this issue. Including the different frameskips and other compettibillity options. Other games run just fine on high, if not highest settings.

Strange. As if something else was causing it.
Are you able to see disk or network activity?
Do you have permanently connected a external USB?

Are you running the Task Manager constantly, or any other CPU and GPU performance / fan speed / temperature monitoring application?
Those applications constantly cause a minimal drop, and it depends a lot on the system if they are noticeable or not.

I run nothing else when playing TM. Net and disk activity are very low when TM runs. Windows security essentials on or off doesn't make any difference neither. I have a permanently connected USB-MIDI controller. Makes no difference when it's connected or not. Further more, it would be a huuuuge coincidence that each time somebody joins a server at the exact time the system drops because of other shit is polling something.

Hmm
While playing around with the settings, I had a similar issue wih lot of short and major stuttering, but it was caused by to high filter and AA settings, combined with wrong CPU/GPU synchronisation, triple buffer usage and VYsnc. I could not get more than 80 fps even on small maps, except when using the free camera and looking to the sky only.
Before that, I had VSync option on, fps almost stable at 60, and only very rare stuttering on huge maps with heavy lighting.

It also makes a difference if you play real fullscreen, windowed fullscreen, or windowed.

I would bet on the side of AGP if it is ressource related. When your memory is near completion, there could be twist in the AGP with the system declaring more memory than the board can handle and putting some stuff on the CPU memory and causing lag. Eventually find a way to unactivate AGP on your system.

I guess using standard quality for textures and also lower the settings of filtering would also do the trick?
But it seems for zarexz all that did not help.

With the increasing complexity of the video settings, I can figure that predicting a recommendation for this or this system or resolution is now very difficult.

I would bet it's not GFX related at all since it freezes on server joins and buddy activities.