I’ve finally had a chance to play Battlefield 3 for a few days and it’s been given me mixed emotions. On one side, I really enjoy the teamwork based combat that I get to experience playing with my friends and brother. Unfortunately, and this has tainted my experience thus far, I am one of the players encountering a severe (some would say extreme) input lag that is occurs at the most in-opportune times. I decided that this couldn’t possibly be normal and began my google trawl to investigate further.

One comment on a forum post mentioned they disabled Origin ingame for battlefield 3

Before I show you my research I’ll give my system specs so you know what case scenario this represents. I’m running an unoverclocked Intel Quad Core Q6600 paired with a NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT. Nothing fancy, but it will play battlefield 3 according to the minimum specs. Of course, that means playing at low settings, although I am doing a resolution of 1680×1050.

The first solution offered to me was to lower the render ahead limit to 1. However this did little to stop my issue.
Source

After this I was able to correlate the issue down to the fact that whenever my cpu was hitting 97%+ or so, this was when the problems occurred. Now I knew what was causing it. Now to isolate why. I read through a multitude of forums, all suggesting different fixes. From removing usb controllers (joysticks or gamepads), neither of which I had plugged in, to overclocking the CPU. One thing is for certain however: BF3 is CPU intensive and less GPU intensive.

I decided to try the Beta drivers, which was 1 version down from the official released by NVIDIA. It lessened the times the mouse input lag occurred, but did not eliminate.

One comment on a forum post mentioned they disabled Origin ingame for battlefield 3 and that did the trick for them. So I tried it. A simple fix really. Now the game runs silky smooth, and feels just like battlefield 2 bad company before it.

Click the gear Icon in Origin, then click settings. Go to the ingame tab and disable ingame either entirely, or for Battlefield 3.

Let me know if this solves it for you with this specific hardware, or with other hardware.

Yes, you read that correctly. Currently www.gaikai.com is offering a service that allows you to play computer game demos right from your browser, no download required! The catch? You need java. However, most people already have java installed on their systems and can play right away. This is an interesting way to try out new games without filling hard drive space. I tried the Mass Effect Demo, and I have to say, it’s pretty playable. You can tell the sound is highly compressed, and there are a few video artifacts, but nothing to be alarmed about.

I think it will be a popular way for advertisers to reach out to users to get some interest in their products. Imagine an ad on the side of a site. Click on it, and it takes you to the game demo, where you can be swayed or dismayed, and possibly  buy. Granted, it’s not a game video, so weaker computers will not be able to handle the processing load on the machine as easily and you may find stuttering.

According to Gaikai’s faq their goal will be to also produce demos of software such as that provided by Microsoft or Adobe.

Here’s a screenshot:

and here’s one when bandwidth gets a little screwy:

I recently purchased BFBC2 on steam because it was on sale for under $10 and prepared to run the game through its paces. The game loaded up perfectly fine, though I had to deal with the normal first initialization by steam: installing directx and punkbuster. Once in the game I decided to test the multi-player functionality so that I could configure my firewall and router settings if necessary (something I always do with a new game or program so I don’t have to deal with it later). Quickly finding that I was unable to connect, I began the usual trawl through forums and guides searching for different causes. I opened ports, ran a port sniffer so I could see what BF was trying to connect with, and added the game to the trusted group in my firewall, all to no avail. The internet posted a multitude of “solutions” mostly following illogical troubleshooting steps. Finally I came across a youtube video that described my problem and proposed a solution that appeared verifiable by several other users. I decided to do as instructed, and not so surprisingly, it worked! I have yet to actually play any multiplayer games, but I have enabled access to EA’s servers.

Okay now to the problem and solution. This guide is written for Vista/Windows 7

If you have properly setup your firewall and allowed access to the correct ports shown below, but are receive an error trying to even connect to the EA servers ingame, then the next step to determine if this solution is right for you is to go to: https://profile.ea.com. If you cannot load the page then continue reading, otherwise this solution may not solve your problems.

18390 TCP Outgoing
18395 TCP Outgoing
18395 UDP Outgoing
13505 TCP Outgoing
80 TCP Outgoing

So you can’t access the EA profile page.

What you are going to need to do next is alter a system setting so make a system restore beforehand, incase something gets messed up.

Disable ECN

After the sys restore is complete, run CMD as an administrator by typing cmd in the start menu search box then right-clicking on CMD on click run as administrator. Once there you will need to type “netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled” without the quotes of course. The command will run and displays “OK” when complete.

Needs Admin Elevation

That’s it. Now try loading https://profile.ea.com again and see if it loads correctly. If so, try logging in-game. The game should work from there, if not, then perhaps there is a problem with the servers.

Here’s the less verbose walkthrough version:

1. Try to load https://profile.ea.com if fails continued to step 2.
2. Run CMD in administrator mode.
3. Type netsh int tcp set global ecncapability=disabled
4. Hit enter and wait to see an OK
5. Try to load https://profile.ea.com if works proceed to next step otherwise check the command you typed in step 3.
6. Login in-game.
7. ???
8. Profit

As far as my research has led me to believe there are no inherent security risks to disabling this feature, just perhaps a slight degradation in large file downloads, but for the most part unlikely. If you want the benefits of ECN then you can write a batch file to disable it when you play Battlefield and then another to re-enable after playing. However, ECN only works where both peers or client and server both are utilizing ECN. It is not clear from what I found so far who utilizes this feature, so I do not know what impact you will see.

Thanks to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6-PEnLBb2s

who got it from: http://www.battlefieldheroes.com/en/forum/showthread.php?tid=41186&pid=359519#pid359519

here’s additional information on the feature we are disabling: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification

If you are an account holder with blizzard/battle.net you no doubt encounter numerous scam emails telling you that your account has been compromised. Well the scammers are getting more devious. Behold the latest in a string of scams. This time they even acknowledge the need for more account security by mentioning a blizzard account validation feature.