Some of this information has been posted elsewhere, but it bears repeating!When I started playing about 3 weeks ago, my system specs were:
P4 2.8Ghz
1GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9800PRO video card w/ 128mb RAM
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
This should be sufficient to run Ryzom - but when I started playing, the game was quite laggy. I did not have the networking issues that some people get ("Please wait"), it was just the fps were pretty unspectacular (I'm guessing 20-30) - and all my graphics settings in game were at "low".
The most obvious first fix was the sound card. I was getting a lot of static in all the sound, and the TB card is pretty old. I had actually put this old card back in my system about a week before I started playing Ryzom, as my newer card was causing hard crashes (reboots) in other games. After a week in Ryzom though, I put the newer one back in - a Creative SB Audigy 2 ZS. This certainly helped the sound quality, but didn't affect the lagginess too much - maybe an extra couple fps.
The second thing I did was to upgrade the video card and the RAM - this may not be a solution for everyone, as obviously it can be quite expensive. However, my computer is approaching its 3rd birthday, and this was a good alternative to upgrading the entire thing. I now had 3GB of RAM (a bit of overkill IMO but hey, it was on sale!) and a GeForce 7800 GS video card w/ 256mb RAM, about the best AGP-style card I could find.
Logged into Ryzom, and was a little puzzled - the fps had improved, but not nearly as well as it should have. I was now up to maybe 30-40, with the graphics settings now turned to "normal". This is an acceptable fps for me for playing an online game usually, but I was curious about the lack of improvement. With the specs I had now, it should run very smoothly.
I did some hunting in the forums here, and found a post that mentioned turning off the antivirus software, as well as Norton Internet Security, which I do have on my machine. So I turned these off...and lo and behold, the game ran smooth as butter!! I was extremely pleased with the performance.
I happily played Ryzom for about a week. Then I logged in one day, and the performance had dropped to absolutely horrible depths. It was nearly unplayable, with fps somewhere around 10-15. Trying to walk from one end of Fairhaven to another was almost funny, it was so bad. As it was a Sunday, I had time to try to dig into the problem. I did everything I could think of - video & sound drivers were up to date, the router firmware was up to date. There is a second computer on my home network that also plays Ryzom, which was not having any issues. We tried it with this machine powered off for 3 hours - still horrid. Checked GPU and CPU temps - all normal. Tried powering off the DSL modem, the router, and both computers, and then turning them back on. Nothing worked.
In desperation, I finally logged into Klients and talked to Zerlin. After lots of questions, he suggested forcing Ryzom to run in Direct3D, rather than the auto option it's normally set to. (This can be set using the Ryzom configuration utility you can run from Start->Programs->Ryzom.) I have to admit I was rather skeptical...but nothing else had worked so I tried it.
Lo and behold again...the game was back to its former sleek performance! He said that they were seeing this a lot with the new nVidia 91.X video drivers. I have not had any issues since then, and the game continues to run very smoothly.
Sorry for the long monologue...can you tell Ryzom is down at the moment? Hope this helps some other poor lost soul out there. Have fun playing!