Constant latency problems can someone help?

[Szkeptik]

I have a demo version, and the only thing that's keeping me from buying the full game are the connection problems that have popped up in every single game I have played so far. I haven't spotted any regularity in them yet, they simply occure whenever they want. After maybe 10-15 minutes of play I get the big red "Connection problem" message and it starts counting seconds. I usually wait for a few minutes, then I give up and quit. The latency meter in the upper left corner turns red with"High Latency" message.

I have a 8Mbit connection and I'm not downloading anything when I'm playing so the bandwidth couldn't be a problem IMO.
Can someone help me with this? I really like the game but I won't buy it if I can't play it.

[bert_the_turtle]

There are two possible reasons I can think of:
1. Connection drops. Your connection can be as fast as hell, but if your connection to your ISP drops every few minutes, that's no good for online play. Do regular lengthy downloads (via HTTP or FTP, not BitTorrent or other file sharing services, those compensate for drops automatically) work reliably for you? If not, this may be your problem.
2. Low performance. Defcon simulates the world with 10 FPS. If you get less than 10 FPS in the game, the simulation will start to lag behind, which unfortunately will look just as if your network was lagging. If that's the case for you (you can tell by pressing F1 in the game, this displays an FPS counter in the top left corner), zooming in on an empty piece of ocean for a bit makes your game catch up.

What's generally of use in troubleshooting is your output of the dxdiag program, it lists your hardware and drivers. Stealing the instructions from frenchfrog:
1)'Start' windows button
2)'Run ...' or the search bar in Vista
3)Type 'dxdiag.exe' in the 'Open' textbox and press the 'Ok' button
4)Once the 'dxdiag.exe' dialog is up, click the 'Save All Information ...' button.
5)Choose a destination for the file (ie: your desktop) and a name for the file (ie: 'dxdiag_info.txt')
6)Post the content of the file here.

[frenchfrog]

Are you on a wireless network? If yes, does playing wired solve it?

Perhaps try to test for Packet loss?

[St. Rontium]

DirectX has nothing to do with Defcon; it's an OpenGL game. If you really suspect FPS < 10 is the problem, I'd suspect you are running a software emulation of OpenGL rather than having hardware support on the card.

You need to download and run the OpenGL Extensions Viewer. Tell us what you see.