Hi,
I recently entered Firestorm Citadel for the first time and during the last three levels or so of this area I had almost constant fps drops (complete freezes of the screen lasting for seconds sometimes) which occur only seconds apart from eachother. During these freezes my character just keeps on doing what I was doing when the freeze happened (so if I was running he keeps running into a fire or some spikes and dies).
I have an ATI Radeon 5870 graphics card and an intel core i5 processor.
I have also noticed that my in game loading times are really long and way slower than my friends (who by no means have better computers than I do)
Any ideas on whats causing this?
Firestorm Citadel is hard on all computers. However, you seem to be experiencing the sever hiccuping that some ATI drivers appear to aggrivate. What driver release are you on? Catalyst versions between 11.2 and 11.8 are all considered sub-par for running Spiral Knights.
Another thing users do to to eliminate the hiccups is to go into the Task Manager and kill javaw.exe manually. Aftwerwards you start up the game again and you should be where you left off (the game sees this as a disconnect). Some of those hiccups you get in FSC are from the Java heap having no memory space left and pauses to garbage collect.
As for low loading times, I'd take thegeneric steps for troubleshooting this. Make sure your disk is defragged, and that it is not trying to defrage while gaming. If System Restore is enabled on that disk the times when Windows decides to write a new restore point will lower performance. Basically, make sure the disk isn't already busy while playing the game.