Technical Support

This is an issue on one of my computers regardless of which os I use. I have an ati 500mb graphics card in a penium duo 3.4 mhz pc. THIS IS NOT A DIRECTX 9 ISSUE.

You mean like this ?  I get it all the time on a Mac (through several OSX upgrades) so its not an OS issue.

i use windows 99% of the time, i also have the same issue from time to time arfur, i call it "the last block hang-up" often fixed by simply killing the process, logging in to "force-log" the account, wait 30 seconds, then log in yet again, most times it will load fine on the final try, but rarely you have to repeat the process a couple times (which is very rare in my xp)

and i agree it's without a doubt not a directx issue as i've had mac and linux players encounter the same issue (arfur is on mac). not sure if there's anyway to track down what causes this random error but at least it's out there for the dev's to look at and wonder about.

talk

I have had similar issues for a while, in addition to other related issues that would crash the client shortly after startup.

In my case, the culprit turned out to be MSI Afterburner which I use to control my nVidia card. The issues started not long after updating Afterburner, and quitting it stopped my client crashing on startup. There are similar programs for Radeon/AMD cards as well that might have the same incompatibility. So if you use anything to tweak your GPU, that program may be the problem.

The client has crashed on my Mac so many times for so many reasons... I'd say to be safe edit config file to turn off sound and microveg... Maybe doesn't apply to you, but couldn't hurt.

I run microveg and sound without issue. I've also crashed in Zora with them off when playing on my laptop. It's possible that it may help, or that it's a flaw in the OS X and Linux versions that isn't in the WIndows version (both OS X and Linux are UNIX derivatives and fairly similar under the hood), but I can only answer based on my own experience.

I turn off Microveg when there are more than 2-3 players around otherwise I get lag - not PWs, not rubberbanding but juddery video.  It is clear to me that this is a bandwidth issue.

I turn sound off before I TP or go through a portal.  With sound on, I crash out about 60-70% of the time.  With sound off I NEVER crash out.   Again, very clear.  
I play on a Mac with the latest OS - several upgrades of the OS have not changed these issues.

Please check out this section of the forums for possible fixes to Mac related problems with the client:

Forums » Technical Support / Web Apps Bugs » Mutual Mac 

It contains a freshly compiled Mac client courtesy of Tgwaste.

I play under Win7 and haven't had the same issues with crashing on TP-ing or portals. It's only when running into Zora that I have about a 5% chance of crashing. Most of the people I know who crash in Zora almost every time are running Linux. That's why I'm leaning towards the Windows client being more different from the *NIX-oid clients than just the normal differences you'd expect from a cross-platform port.

As for the other, it sounds to me like the bandwidth issue is in your GPU. Aside from the top 27" models, the GPUs in Macs are less powerful than my GTX465, often far less. I had the juddery video issue on my Toshiba laptop and an old Pentium 4 as well, but I expected it as their GPUs are not even one-twentieth what my main system packs. Rendering all the polygons of other homins may just be too much for your GPU to keep up with, leading to framerates plummeting.