Miuramir

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One more question : how much ram should I get 4 or 8 gb ? I plan to upgrade from xp home (which i'll get with the rig) to windows 7 once it comes out and works out the kinks there.

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If you are going to use a 32-bit operating system, having more than 4 GB is a waste. If you expect to use Windows 7 x64 (I'm using the RC of this on a test machine and it's pretty good so far), you *can* take advantage of 8 GB, but you may or may not really *need* it.

If you plan on running two instances of CoH at the same time while running a lot of stuff in the background; OR if you are planning on running *more* than two instances of CoH at the same time; you may benefit from more than 4 GB of RAM. If not, don't bother.

I can run 2 instances of CoH (one live, one test; so they're not even sharing files), Excel, Firefox, and a text editor without *too* many problems under 32-bit XP with 4 GB (which is seeing closer to 3 GB usable due to the 32-bit limits), but it's clearly on the edge, and swapping somewhat when I alt-tab about. Depending on various factors, CoH can use up to around 2 GB per running copy if it's got the room to do so.

ETA: The above is for single or dual core. If you were getting a processor with 3+ cores and were actually planning on using all of them with a 64-bit OS, go with more memory.

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... I made a dark melee character yesterday and it freaked me out that I was stealing years off of peoples' lives.

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Sometime after you've brought your "friends" back to this plane of existence by infusing them with the soul of a bus stop... in a city that has no buses... you become hardened to the whole thing

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The formula for it is ArcanaTime = [Round(CastTime / 0.132) + 1] * 0.132, and the thread which describes where this formula comes from is here. Its used to calculate DPA of attacks and also the total DPS of chains of attacks because its been demonstrated to very closely estimate the in-game performance of an attack chain where the attacks are queued and fired as quickly as the game will allow.

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Wasn't that supposed to be RoundUp, or is this a change in your thinking?

I was looking at this again, and I'm still not sure I understand where the 0.132 really comes from. The following post is somewhat thinking out loud.

There's the 8/sec (or 0.1250) server power clock, and then the delay until the next 30/sec animation clock (about 0.0333). These have a beat frequency that repeats every half second, with a delay ranging from 0.0000 to 0.0250, averaging 0.0125.

Thus it would seem from a simplistic view that the formula for a single attack would be [RoundUp(CastTime / 0.1250) + 1] * 0.1250] + D, where the phasing delay D varies as above. But I don't think from looking at things that the D accumulates.

It's possible that in the case of the "exact" match (on the second and half-second), however, that the delay code takes non-zero time, and therefore it hits the *next* animation tick. That would make the min delay 0.0083, the max delay 0.0333, and the average delay 0.0208.

It seems that it still should be based on an internal 0.1250 divisor and multiplier, but you have what amounts to a "chance for extra tick" added on at the end. This might well average out to 0.132 in some range, but I'm not understanding why that would hold for a wider range of attack timing.

Edited to add:
Put another way, can your results distinguish between:
[[RoundUp(CastTime / 0.132) + 1] * 0.132]
and
[[RoundUp(CastTime / 0.125) + 1] * 0.125] + D
where D is a pseduo-constant that varies within a small range (never less than 0, never greater than 0.125, and probably either in the range 0.000 to 0.025 or 0.0083 to 0.0333)?

Checking this would seem to require testing on some powers of significantly long CastTime, which may not be popular in chains that people are looking at.

Unfortunately, that sounds like what happens when either your system or your network connection is not up to handling two copies running at once.

If you aren't already, try the following: Type *both* of the following commands on *both* copies:

/maxfps 24
/maxinactivefps 8

That should give you roughly movie-grade performance on the active window, and jerky-but-viewable performance on the other one(s). See if this helps. If it does but not enough, try reducing the numbers further.

Seriously consider reducing the max particles on each copy to less than half what you would on a single copy.

In general, turn down effects. You might even want to try running both copies in Safe Mode.

If none of this helps, it may be your network connection. Make sure that nothing else is taking up your bandwidth (background downloads, streaming radio, Windows Search indexing, anti-virus scans or updates, roommates downloading pr0n, kids across the street stealing your wireless because you left the password at the factory defaults, whatever...)

If performance tuning doesn't help, post your CoH Helper & Hijack This logs, plus some info about what kind of net connection you have; someone may be able to give you more specific tuning suggestions.

As far as I can tell, the easiest option would be for the devs to put in a "1x2 door" room. Doors already have a whole tab, it's just that 1x1 is the only option inside of it.

This could be used for the two primary purposes people want: producing a wider doorway between rooms, and to bridge between rooms that are 2 squares apart and not currently able to be connected directly. (If they're 3 or more apart, you can put in an intermediate room to handle things.)

This is *probably* easier than rearranging the door placement code to allow folks to "chain" or "stack" the existing 1x1 doors. It's possible this would only take database changes, although we'd need to test it extensively.

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So for the specific steam engines we’re discussing, Nemesis automatons, if they don’t somehow vent their steam, then they need another heat sink of some sort. (“Say, has anyone else noticed that Dan eats a lot of ice cream at his desk and makes frequent trips to the restroom?”) If not, they quickly would stop working.

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My thought is that they have two modes; "mimic" and "combat".

In mimic mode, as they're pretending to be just another office worker, their energy needs may not be significantly higher than that of a real human. They can use many of the same methods that humans use to deal with it. (Some numbers , some other numbers)

It's not particularly unreasonable that a genius-designed automaton in this setting would be more efficient than a human, and therefore easily capable of "idling" without blowing its cover. Having a trendy-looking bottle of distilled water on their desk to sip from occasionally wouldn't even be particularly unusual.

My other suggestion is that they work sort of like the bots from Black Magic M-66, and vent steam when they need emergency cooling in or after combat, when stealth isn't a concern. A logical design might have a reserve coolant tank that is passive in normal idle mode. For short periods of moderate exertion, it's used as a heat dump, with small amounts seeped out through a capillary network to cool by transpiration (same general mechanism as sweating). For heavy exertion, enough heat is dumped into it to boil it and steam is vented. Given the likely very high working temperatures of a super-tech steam engine, the steam may be significantly superheated, thereby pushing a lot more heat out of the system per unit mass expended than you might think.

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Monitor's Max Resolution: 1600,1200
Resolution: 1280x1024
3D Resolution: 1280x1024 (Not using renderscale)
Full Screen: Yes

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The above seems odd. If this is a LCD monitor, you'll get considerably better looking results using it at its native resolution (not just the game, your desktop and everything). Your card should be up for it. If you want to trim down the 3D for performance reasons, set the actual resolution to match your desktop and your monitor, and then use the RenderScale to reduce the 3D load.

I'm not an expert, but looking over things you've got a lot of sound-related stuff, which has been problematic in the past. You've got enough main memory that the startup item cruft shouldn't be hurting you too badly on memory, but it can't hurt to clean it out and one of them might be "waking up" periodically and causing your problem.

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Is test 2 still Freedom? It used to be Virtue, but somewhere just before this apparenty it got changed. I miss my old "I won't really play you but since you were the first character I made on Test to show off the new body sliders, I'll just move you to test 02 and you'll be safe and... oops" characters there.

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See Niviene's post about this. We were warned on the 13th that any characters solely on TR02 needed to be moved to the main TR by the 18th because they were going to do a database copy from Freedom.

As a side note, at least recently the non-main training rooms have been, apparently by design, considerably more variable. The main training room (TR) has remained stable (from a data standpoint) since *at least* the Issue 12 open beta, and I believe rather longer than that. The "other" training room(s), when present at all, has been reloaded at least twice in that time frame (a copy of the main training room prior to the mac beta, and a copy from Freedom recently), and at other times in the past (a copy of Virtue some time ago at least).

(Also, for those that don't know, character transfers amongst the training servers are free.)

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Still a problem. I managed to get it to happen with netgraph running and it goes "nice little lawn BIG GIANT GREEN BLOCK nice little lawn". It looks like the "you have just opened the market" or "you just zoned" green block, but much much longer in duration. Like 45 seconds to a minute.

My wife shares the connection and she doesn't have these problems.

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Odd. The net graph would seem to indicate that it's a network-related problem, but the other evidence would seem to indicate that it's not. Are you perhaps using the built-in network on your motherboard, or a lower-end add-on network card? Some of these save money by depending on the CPU to do more of the work, so could show seeming network problems if your computer is merely "busy" enough that the network-handling tasks are being delayed.

Do you have any sort of search or indexing feature on? Is your anti-virus conducting background checks of some sort? It seems like there's something that's waking up every so often and keeping your system partially occupied for a bit.

Do you log chat or combat to disk? Hypothetically I could see that being an intermittent issue, if it buffers then does a delayed write. Or perhaps Windows Search is trying to index the chat logs as it gets added to?

Malware is also a distinct possibility in this day and age, unfortunately. I'd suggest some careful scans with good software and some cleanout of unneeded stuff / accumulated crud. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware and CCleaner would be a good start.

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One such area was Kings Row which, according to the book, was named after a group of mobsters who took over the area. I believe it mentions that Statesman fought them but no time frame or any other information was given.

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That seems to contradict what is in the game on plaques and the like; see the Smokey badge in particular "King Garment Works dominated the Kings Row economy for years. These smoke stacks were part of their manufacturing facility. " and the "King Garment Works" neighborhood. It's strongly implied at least that the tenement rowhouses gave the neighborhood its name and it was the reason for the zone name.

There is mention of Statesman fighting in the zone, but the Summoned badge says he was fighting CoT. I suspect this is a case of the Prima guide either using a pre-release set of info that subsequently changed, or of them making stuff up again.

(It's possible that there were gangs that took their name from the area; "[adjective] Kings" shows up in real-life gang names, including at least one major example from a heavily industrialized city.)

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I don't believe aggro or threat value is the issue. My henchmen attack cars, boxes, parking meters, fire hidrants, etc with no problem. It just seems to be the vault door that they just can't grasp attacking.

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All of those can be targeted with Next Target, Nearest Target, etc. It seems that the vault door cannot be; in my experience, I have to actually click on it manually to get it to register. *Something* is different between it and nearly every other destructible object.

It's possible that the henchmen are using by default a next / nearest target routine that is similar to the PC one, and are therefore not recognizing the vault door as a target. Forcing them into a more explicit target mode (such as My Target) would, like clicking on it on a PC, skip that and give them the target directly, allowing it to work.

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I don't get why CoX is so graphic intensive.

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See this post for a summary of some of the underlying reasons I recently gave to someone else.

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I use a NX wireless mouse. Since starting to play the game over a year ago, Sometimes I would auto run without touching any keys, My mouse jumps randomly around the screen, while typing, sometimes it will just automaticaly erase everything I have written (In game and out of game) or will randomly jump to a different part of what I am typing and finish typing what I was typing someplace else....

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Some things to consider:
* Battery / power: if the mouse uses an internal rechargeable battery pack, it could have weakened over time, and not be providing quite enough power for reliable operation. (Hopefully if it used normal batteries you'd have already tried replacing them.)

* Radio interference: all sorts of things can interfere with the radio signal. Depending on what band it's in, microwave ovens, baby monitors, cordless phones, video senders, and who knows what else. Other wireless keyboards and mice are particularly likely to be a problem.

* Gunk: Hopefully if it's a ball mouse you know to clean the little rollers inside, but way too many people don't. Fewer people realize you need to carefully clean the optical sensors on a LED or laser mouse every so often as well. A small piece of fluff up in the optical path can cause all sorts of weird effects, as can a speck of gunk on the sensor itself. The lenses are likely plastic and who knows what sort, so don't use any solvents.

If you're sure you want to stick with wireless, you might want to try a Bluetooth mouse. They are far less subject to interference problems than typical RF mice.

However, in my case even after upgrading to a nice Logitech MX 5500 Bluetooth keyboard & laser mouse set, I finally went to a corded gaming mouse (Logitech G5 Laser) as I just wasn't happy with the performance of any wireless mouse compared to a quality wired one for CoH. (Note that in general, wireless keyboards are much less problematic, I'm still using the 5500's keyboard.)

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While I might (sadly) agree that it's not a priority for the Devs to ADD new "RP tools" what we are talking about here is fixing a feature that's been in the game from Issues 0-13 and got BROKEN.

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It's fairly clear from the last several issues that the text display system (to the extent that it is valid to describe it as a "system", which is unclear) is a mess. IIRC *every* time they have made a change to it, there was some sort of unintended consequence or bug that popped up.

This certainly looks like the result of a system that was written by someone who is no longer there, or possibly no longer working in that area and too busy to go back and deal with their old code. It has accumulated hacks by people who didn't really understand the code, and this has left it in a fragile mess.

Some of the problem probably comes from an original design that thought of text as basically an ASCII stream of "passive" data. This has been mangled over the years to bring it to a more HTML-like (and influenced) design where text is a "live" stream containing a mix of data, formatting instructions, and complex external calls. The mentality shift between a "text handling system" and a system where the text "handles" itself, but needs a variety of supporting routines to let it reach its full potential, is a lot more significant than most people give credit for.

It's highly likely that hasty fiddling with paragraphs will break the MA text fields again, since the original error came from fiddling with how the MA text fields processed pseduo-HTML and line breaks. This was changed around several times in I14 Open Beta, breaking people's arcs. Breaking people's arcs in live MA is bad, so hasty changes here are not a good idea.

Unfortunately, working on text processing is "not sexy", and tends to be pushed way down the priority list by owners, developers, and programmers. This is particularly true when you consider that CoH has an unusual situation compared to most MMORPGs, where there is significant persistent text that is "owned" by players (bios, MA text, etc.).

The hope is that they realize the problem, and have either hired or assigned someone to rewrite or at least clean up the text system(s) as part of the big Going Rogue cleanup. It's possible that part of the "character creator 2.0" rumored for GR includes an entirely new or rewritten text system for bios among other things, and that they don't want to waste time trying to fix something that is known to be twitchy and has already been replaced in the builds they're working with internally.

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Playing one of the RWZ arcs the other day, Faultline and Fusionette were helping me take out the AV.

[NPC]Faultline: /t Fusionette So, you wanna go to a movie tonight?
[NPC]Faultline: Oops! Mistell! Let's get back to the business at hand

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I noticed that just recently myself. I'm now curious which, if any, of the other NPCs are *in the in-game canon* supposedly being played by another player.

The terminology becomes difficult; we've got examples like the above, where a NPC that is presumably run under the hood like any other NPC is supposedly a bot pretending to be a player-run character; and we also have the MA custom characters which are mechanically a lot more like an AI-controlled player but are thematically clearly NPCs, and at an extra level of abstraction due to the MA itself as well (so they're NPCs in the game-within-the-game even).

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Anyone tried running CoH on a widescreen LCD TV with a PC input? I'd like to hear specifically if anyone has done it on a 37 or 42" widescreen, and if they thought it was worth it or not. I bet the resolution gets very pixelated at that big of a size.

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The visual perception of resolution can be tricky, but there are some simple things you can do to estimate.

First, be warned that not all large TVs actually support their full resolution through the "PC input(s)", especially if they've got only an analog VGA input. For example, the 42" LCD in our conference room at work displays a beautiful 1,920 x 1,080 if you connect a sufficiently powerful PC via the HDMI inputs (either true HDMI, or with a DVI-D to HDMI adapter), but can only display a visibly lower quality 1,360x768 if you connect an older laptop with the VGA input. This is one of several differences between getting a LCD TV that is also a monitor, and getting a LCD monitor that is also a TV.

Once you have that sorted out, you need to know that screen size, screen resolution, and viewing distance are all inter-related. In general, the "sharpness" of the picture is connected to how many pixels are within a given solid angle of the center of your vision, which is controlled by the dpi resolution of the screen and how far away you are. The "immersion" of the picture is connected to how much of your vision it takes up, which is controlled by the physical size of the screen and how far away you are. For a given screen, being closer will improve the apparent immersion but reduce the apparent clarity.

In general, to get the a high quality image for solo gaming, you want to pick the highest resolution that it's practical to get (1,920 x 1,200 would be typical these days - you can go higher but the cost goes way up), and then pick a screen size that has it just about filling your center view at the distance you'll be watching it at. If you're playing sitting at a desk, a 24" to 30" should do the job; if you're on a couch in front of an entertainment center a 32" - 35" may work; if you've got a large or long room you may need to go up to 42" or more to get the same visual effect.

Note that this is slightly different advice than you want for movie viewing; movies are designed to not have crucial information / content at the edges, and a lot of the "immersion" is by deliberately having the image background extend past your central vision. Games, on the other hand, frequently are set up to have important information around the edges of the screen, so you want to be able to take that in with a glance.

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A friend of mine is moving and wanting to sell me his Samsung 32" 1080p 120hz LCD. My question is; will the 120hz make any difference to PC games?

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Not for most people. The primary reason that 120 Hz is useful is for smoother and more accurate rendering of both material originally produced at 24 fps for 35mm (theatrical) film, and originally produced at ~30 fps for TV (NTSC).

Each originally 24 fps film frame is shown for five 120 Hz LCD frames, and each originally ~30 fps TV frame is shown for four 120 Hz LCD frames, with no need for any of the tricks or artifacts common with 2:3 pulldown or the like.

Realistically, I suspect even your rig is not going to be able to do 120 fps at 1,920 x 1,080 resolution, and from what I understand of the way those LCDs work you're going to be at an effective 60 fps if you can't drive 120.

tl;dr: Get a 120 Hz LCD if you watch a lot of high-def films and want the best quality for them. For computer purposes, price compare to 60 Hz LCDs and see if it's still a good deal you're being offered, as I doubt you'll see any difference.

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I've got a fairly new computer with a Nvidia 9800GFX+ . When I'm playing CoH sometimes - not very often- the graphics will just sort of freeze. A few seconds later (order of 30 seconds?) it will start running again. The CPU during this time seems to show no activity.

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Please post your CoH Helper info at least, and preferably also your Hijack This.

Just to get it out of the way, are you using a SSD (Solid State Disk)? There are known problems with the majority of these currently on the market, with occasionally multi-second "hangs". If this may apply to you, I can direct you to some more info.

The next most likely suspect is something else on your network. Try using the /netgraph 1 command to display network performance. It should look like a short green lawn, possibly with the occasional taller bits of green. If you see spikes of other colors, you have network issues of some sort.

Some likely suspects:

* We've had reports of game consoles (PS3, possibly Xbox 360) set to allow multimedia browsing hammering the network badly every so often. Turn off their multimedia features.

* Other people sharing the network connection, intended or otherwise. Is there anyone else in the household? Is your wireless secure?

* Other programs running on your computer. Anti-virus updates and Steam are common culprits, but all sorts of (mostly) legit programs connect to the network on their own to check for updates these days. (The Apple updater for Windows is particularly annoying, as it grabs focus but doesn't switch to the top; looks like an input hang.)

* Infections. Malware, Spyware, actual viruses or worms, etc. The Hijack This logs are particularly useful for spotting this sort of thing. While many of these cause visible problems, if your computer has been made part of a "zombie" botnet, you may not notice any major changes until much later.

In addition to the above, some people have noted problems in the past with "3D sound" and hearing the glowie sound. 3D sound support in CoH is a bit marginal in general, and apparently the way the glowie sound is implemented doesn't work well with certain implementations.

I am working on a villain who needs to level up solo to match some friends, without having done any more of the early villain contacts than they did as a large group so that we'll match up later. This ends up with either a lot of streethunting, paper missions, or the MA, and I prefer the MA. It's on a server we don't have much other presence on, so inf is at least partly a concern.

What are the most effective ways to spend moderate amounts of tickets at quite low levels? Are there enough (any) gems in the 10-14 or 15-19 bronze or silver rolls to make them worthwhile?

My current thought is that rare salvage seems to be the best option, as the level of the character buying it doesn't have any impact on their quality / type / market value, but figured I'd ask and see if anyone has looked at things more closely.

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Even if nobody preferred any arc length over any other, shorter arcs would still get more play. A short arc that takes 15 minutes is going to get eight times as much play as a long arc that takes 2 hours, and that's just with people playing arcs randomly.

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Wait, that makes no sense. If all arcs are selected at random, short arcs will get picked no more often than long arcs. The only difference is how quickly they get finished and another arc randomly chosen.
...
Sorry, couldn't just let that slip past my mathematical fascism

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I got curious, and poked at a spreadsheet version of this. I need to see if I can get this to properly convert to Google, but I found that for an exactly 50% difference, it did mostly converge, but it took a *long* time for the initial boost to become less relevant. (I ran out to 1,000 ticks of 15 min, which is more than 10 days.)

Given that I think that the average player is at least slightly more likely to play shorter arcs, and that things like server resets / maintainence happen on a shorter timeframe than the settling time, short arcs *do* have a statistical advantage, if you're concerned with number of plays. (And this doesn't even account for people more likely to have sudden changes of plans and dropping a longer one.)

Of course, this matters less now, given the announced MA badge changes.

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Why did they let Villains play Heroic arcs, and vice vesra?

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Because it's a roleplaying game. You don't have to pass some sort of moral test to be allowed to play a heroic or villainous character in a roleplaying game in the real world, why should you have to do so in a fictional universe?

Remember that the majority of the paying customers for Architect Entertainment are normal citizens. Actual heroes and villains are the "talent", and get free use of the system in exchange for creating content and hanging around the lobby in cool outfits convincing the general public that it's an "authentic experience".

From an in-game marketing standpoint, I expect that having cross-faction / alignment / whatever arcs would be an even bigger draw. "By day, Stupendous Person is a tireless force for good. But his amazing strength and unmistakable jawline make it hard for him to truly relax with normal people. What does he do to really unwind after a hard day of saving the world? The brighter the light, the starker the shadows... come to Architect Entertainment, and you'll not just *see* it, you'll *experience* it! (Mention this ad and code V6K08 to get 10% off a 3-arc package and a free pamphlet to help you find arcs by your favorite superstars, or save even more with our All Day Super Saver Pass!)"

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At first i thought it was a heat problem. If i pointed a desk fan at the system it seemed to fix the problem, but now I'm not sure. I just installed two more new fans, a third 80mm and a pci exhaust fan. Now the crashes are worse than ever.

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It sounds like it may be a combination of power and heat issues. You put more load on the system, which not only draws more power directly, but increases the heat, which causes the fans to draw more power. Having an external fan helped, but adding fans drawing off your internal power supply made things worse.

Make sure you've physically cleaned out the system, particularly the heatsinks on your CPU and GPU, and the power supply itself. Getting some non-flammable canned air is a good idea. Try disconnecting most of your case fans (leaving CPU, GPU, and any motherboard (Northbridge) fans on), open the side of the case, and run with a desk fan blowing right through things. If it's any better, you've narrowed things down.

If you give us the detailed specs of your power supply, we may be able to estimate what's going on a bit better. It may never have been really powerful enough, or it may have partly failed at some point, or may have been cheap components that have aged badly.

There are several different settings that interact to control what level of detail you see at what distance, plus possible driver issues. Please post your CoH Helper info so we can make recommendations.

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Other games run fine on my system. There is no excuse for it being more "demanding" on a system than every other game on the market because it isn't.

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Except that the *actual evidence* shows that it is. There is a near-constant stream of people posting here with the refrain "my system runs other modern games fine, but chokes on CoH". The only logical conclusion is that CoH regularly stresses out systems more than the majority of other games.

There are several likely components to this. The vast majority of 3D games are specifically optimized to have a limited variety of things on screen at once. CoH's amazingly flexible costume creator is pretty much the opposite of this; a single frame from someone standing in a busy spot like Wentworth's may well have more individually distinct 3D objects in it than an entire level in a shooter. There's also the database load involved; loading all the auction info at the same time as trying to keep up with everyone's powers is one reason why a lot of people complain about major slowdowns or crashing at Went's.

Other MMOs frequently have strong level gating effects running under the hood; under combat conditions where performance is important, odds are that you've got a much smaller set of visible equipment. There's also frequently a lower level of graphically intense toggle effects that can be run continuously, especially out of combat.

The number and variety of animated player effects, both costume and power, is also significant. Capes, trenchcoats, auras, wings, showers of spent brass casings, and the occasional literal kitchen sink. Note that when a bug in the Magic booster costumes allowed both a cape and a bolero, we were told that while they agreed that it looked cool, that having it readily available would exceed the rendering "budget" and reduce performance for too many people with less powerful systems, so it had to go.

All of the above is based on *what* the game does; there's also the issue of *how* the game does it. CoH is in the most general of terms an old engine that has been upgraded to do new things several times; it's going to be less efficient than a new engine written from scratch to do the same set of things.

From another angle, CoH uses OpenGL. The majority of current Windows games use Direct3D. These are different in a whole host of fundamental ways in how they address and use the features of a card. Direct comparisons are only really useful between CoH and other OpenGL-based games, as both the hardware and the software (drivers) in a given system may have been optimized very differently.

All that aside: I'm not aware of any particular driver issue that would cause the sort of problems you're seeing. What you describe is in my experience almost always a card that has serious problems and is failing. The usual culprits are overheating, damage from past overheating, under-spec power, damage from power surges, and physical damage from flexing or dropping.

There is a small chance that it is your power supply, your motherboard (Northbridge failures in particular can mimic or cause graphics card failures; a lot of motherboards insufficiently cool them), or your memory; but odds are quite high that it's your graphics card.

If you haven't already done a close physical inspection looking for discolored areas, bulging caps, heatsinks not making proper contact, warping, and cleaning out everything with canned air, you should do so. The logical next troubleshooting path would be to swap the card with one from a working system, and see if the problems follow the card or stay with the case. If you don't have access to another system, it may be time to just get a new card.

One of the things that the CoH Helper does is give us some more info about what you're actually running; for instance, you still haven't told us what actual card you have. Rather than playing 20 questions, it's far easier to have the most commonly needed info in a standardized format. In this case, it may also be helpful to have some info about your power supply; both because it may be part of your problem, and because it is relevant to recommending you a new card if needed.