lag when playing mmos

the lag i'm talking about is when you go into a heavily populated area in an mmo. What exactly causes that lag? What i mean is, what hardware(s) are responsible for that lag?

I ask this question b/c i personally have a good computer and don't understand why when im playing a game like war or immortals and go to the main town center (which, granted, has a lot of people) and get hit with lag (not an excruciating amount).

oh and in case your wondering, my specs:
i7-960 (3.2-3.46GHz) 8MB L3 Cache, Ram 6GB - DDR3 1333MHz Memory, dual HD6990M's (4096MB Total) GDDR5 DX11

i thought ram was responsible for controling that lag, but my comp is only using 4 gigs out of 6 for me when i'm actually in that town center (not to mention everything else on my computer is running full speed...just a sluggish game in my window)

Uhhh, if you are lagging in MMOs usually it's generally related to either your internet connection, the location to the server or the server itself.

Computer specs only come into it if the problem is what they call "graphic lag".

heres what it looks like. If i were to stream video of my gameplay live...and you were watching the stream, in most cases the stream wouldn't be perfectly smooth...you'd notice some "lag" to it. That's what it looks like. Whether you dub that as graphics lag, i don't know.

To easily monitor real graphics lag, you should download FRAPS. The free version should be enough for this.
After installation you should be getting a digit in your top left corner.

Graphics lag will start to be noticeable really well at about 20FPS or lower, 20-30FPS is doable and above 30 is good. 60 is perfect ofcourse.

Seeing you have a good computer, this shouldn't be a problem.


As for network lag, the only thing you can do if your PC is fine is to get a better connection.
Though, you might want to search for other causes like a forgotten torrent, pando media booster, viruses or other people on your network that might use up a lot of bandwidth.