Massive lag when selecting spells/ casting

[Drake Wingfire]

Long time since I have played MSC, when I decided to fire it up today I noticed that on many maps I get a huge almost game freezing spike of lag when I try and use the number keys to scroll through my memorized spells. Like the game will freeze for a few seconds and then jitter as I try and scroll through the rest of the spells. This also happens when I am casting spells like blizzard, volcano and poison cloud.

I have a sneaking suspicion its related to this ATI card I have, a Radeon HD 6970. The game will play fine most of the time so long as I don't use any spells or anything with spell-like effects.

I am not opposed to disabling a few features to make the game run smooth. Any ideas?

*edit*
So I am playing rmines to test, and it seems throwing spears, particle and lighting effects are doing this as well on this map..

 

[Thothie]

ATI/AMD series in general hates legacy OpenGL, especially from Vista on, due to multiple, somewhat flawed, emulation layers. Dynamic lights and sprites tend to be the worst.

You can disable lights with r_dynamic 0, but I do not currently have a way to disable sprites (plus it'll be dark). May look into it - though, I'd have to figure some way to disable the sprite rendering, without disabling the sprites themselves, as some events are generated client side based on sprite position/collision.

 

[Drake Wingfire]

Is this something I do in-game or do I edit the config file similar to your guide on low end settings for systems?

 

[Monika's_BFFEx0256]

It's a console command.