f13.net

I recently upgraded my video card to a BFG 8600 GTS OC from a BFG 7600 GT, and in all games  except EQ II have gotten significant performance increases, even in the Age of Conan beta.  UT3, Bioshock  run very smooth.

EQ 2 is the  only exception. On any setting above "Balanced",  the game gets choppy, expecially in the newer areas like Neriak and Kunark where there are NPC's, towns and outposts.  I usually run the game at 1680 x 1050, but even  lowering the res down even 1280x960   or 1024x768 seems to have little effect.

I am running a AMD 3800 dual core and have 2 gigs of ram.  Is the game that processor intensive, or does anyone have any recommend tweaks to make the game look a little better that it does on "balanced settings".   

This is on a fresh install of the the game on a defragged drive.  I know my hardware isn't uber but it should be more than capable of handling a 3.5 year ond game. If this is as good as it gets, no wonder this game hasn't become more popular.  WOW in comparison looks a billion times better even with the lower ply counts  , on the highest res, highest settings with full AA.

Part of the rationale that was used about the game's poor performance (frame rate) when the game first came out was that it would scale nicely with future hardware.  This doesn't really seem to have been the case as I am pretty much running it at the same settings I did  back in 2004.

Which card has more memory or are they the same? Did you check and see what driver version people are recommending for the game and try that?

Both have the same amount  (256 mb).  I am using the latest  NV drivers, which I am not likely to downgrade for one game.  The older world areas run well, but Neriak, Kunark dn the Fae starting areas don't unless I keep the "balanced" setting.  The funny thing is that the newer areas really don't look all that better than the original ones,  and the only really difference I see is that there is more "stuff" crammed into then.

Did you visit the newer areas on the old card? If so was it better, worse, about the same?

The fact of the matter is it is not your computer.....It is the game client.  EQ2 has not scaled nicely over the years - no multi-core support, and makes little use of advanced graphics cards.  Most of the processing is relying on a single-core.  Apparently they are trying to overcome this, as multi-core support was the #1 rated issue in a developer issue poll.  Not sure of timelines for that or anything, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

Yes I did, and comparitively they ran pretty much the same.


Thanks Bandit, that's probably a big part of it which probably  why that some of  newer areas  are choppier:  Hate's Envy just has so much crammed into a small area; probably more than the engine can render efficiently.

I'll continue with playing with the settings though, because there must be a way to make it look a little better without sacrificing too much performance.

Neriak is a texture hog.  You'd need more graphics memory, and possibly more computer memory and a CPU upgrade to get better performance there.

The only place I ever really have problems is GFay. Everything and everywhere else runs like a dream at max settings.

They wrote the game for the future, but got the future wrong. They guessed that this future was going to be very very fast single core processors. I had the dual core 3800+ too and performance was highly mediocre. I upgraded to a new system with a core 2 duo E6750, which is a pretty amazing CPU, and it's still not all that. I'm at 100% on one core and I get around 20fps on raids with Profit UI's "quality" settings. (Yes, I upgraded a 3 year old system to a leading edge one in order to play a 4 year old game.)

There was an old tweaking guide, but it's way way out of date and there have been a lot of additions to the game since it was released. You might peek at it though: http://www.eq2interface.com/forums/showthread.php?t=289

I have not done extensive testing and I do have a high end system, but it seems to me that many of the things we usually turn off for performance like bloom and such seem to have a pretty minimal effect for me. I'm guessing that's because it's done on the video card where a lot of the original stuff is heavy on the CPU.

Thanks, will check it out.

I haven't bought a video card with a 128-bit bus because my ati 9800 pro was such a powerhouse for its time. 256 bit busses make a difference imo.

However, EQ2 does bite it when it comes to cpu usage and texture memory usage (since I have 768MB of vram!). I can reliably cause a texture memory crash in Neriak, Kelethin and Gorowyn chug. Neriak is a bit odd, since it's all walled off, it must be drawing everything in a radius, rather than LoS? Dunno. Old world and most non-city areas run like butter. Pillars of Flame for some reason is very slow, too.

Doesn't really seem to follow any reasoning I can figure out, I just have to remember the individual areas that are slow and load a lower graphic profile before entering. On a evga 8800gtx, c2d e6600, 2gb ram.

I'll have to get back out to some of the classic areas in the game and crank the details up.  Since the free Neriak expainsion I started suffering from alt-itis, playing exclusively  through the new areas since  I don't think I could bear starting  on 'refugee' Isle again after going through it so many times.

They also made some serious modifications to the client in LU44, which were intended to allow all users to keep an extended draw distance by doing a better job using mip-mapped textures.  Unfortunately for me, it basically made the game unplayable at any setting other than the lowest.

It is definitely the game. I went from a 7950 + 3.2GHz single core to a 8600 Ultra + 2.4Ghz core duo and the difference was basically invisible.  The stuttering comes from texture loading so the MHz of your graphics card doesn't have a large impact. RAM and vidRAM are what you need.

So, any news on this also -- do the graphics still demand a PC from the year 2012?

Nothing has changed except the price of a PC that will run the game well.

I think they're using the same toolset and texture qualities for new xpacs that they built the game with.  It's a fun game, but it's hampered by terribad graphics. 

Upside is that today's gaming rig should run it acceptably. 

Terrible graphics? I might agree with criticism of the art direction and style, but the graphics engine in EQ2 has always been superior to just about everything. The lighting, shadows, and mapping have always been great quality. It's one thing I miss in most other games.

Also one of the great crimes of mmo, the most technically stunning engine (still imo, though I haven't seen AoC in action) hampered by poor art direction. Kinda like WoW's great art direction hampered by the poor technical engine.

I didn't think the graphics in EQ2 were terrible - or even terribad, either.  I liked them.  The character models, however - ugh.  Not interesting at all.

To run the game decently with other people around, you can't run it at extreme.  Look at these textures, specifically ground and wall textures:  That's not quality work.  Other games have done better work with less. 

I still think the redesigned game is decent.  Hell, I'll play it when I bore of the WoW xpac in six months.  But I'm not playing it for the graphics, that's for sure. 

So you're saying the graphics look bad when you turn them down.  :uhrr:

I don't have a particularly great computer, and when I was playing EQ2 I had a GeForce 7800 GT (have a better one now) and my game never ever looked that awful.

To a playable, acceptable fps.  Yes.  Watching a beautiful slideshow is not acceptable to me. 

Go to an older zone, say.... Commonlands.  Take a ride around.  Take in the... sights.  Some of those textures look as if they were ripped right from EQlive. 

I can't spend all day telling you why orange is a better color than red.  It's my preference.  If the game looks awesome to you, that's cool.  I feel they could have done more with what they had.  Or, rather, should have done less with what they had.

They didn't look "awesome" to me, just not as bad as those pics you posted.

And why can't you spend all day with us?  You make me feel insecure.  (http://www.sheknows.com/graphics/emoticons/blankie2.gif)

I'd be happy to spend the day... just not discussing EQ2.   :grin:

Yay! Umm...

So what are you wearing?

First the graphics are crappy when you turn them down. Now you bitch about the texturing of a launch zone.

How 'bout you just shut the fuck up, mmkay?

I don't know enough about engines to judge them on their graphical capabilities, but their streaming technology is exceptional. While the game was crashing due to faulty memory, I could still take a griffon flight and while the landscape might have been a mere gray low-poly version and the minimap was all transparent due to my failing harddrive not being able to keep up, I would still end up at my destination right on time, then could keep playing while everything was loading.

Sometimes, in the dead of night, I wonder. What did they make out of my weird crash reports? Did they say to themselves: "that's not right, that can never happen on a working system". Or did they write code to work around my faulty memory stick?

Yeah, some of the newer zones run like garbage for me as well...though my PC is fairly old, from 2002. Especially zones like Gfay, there's just a lot of...stuff. I usually put my clip plane to max, though I should probably start bringing it down when I go into such zones.

If you can't approach another person's opinion civilly, maybe a forum isn't for you.  I haven't seen too many personal attacks on F13 so far, not sure why this one's OK. 

I don't know why Sky would react that way towards you.  He's usually so sweet, almost ladylike in his polite demeanor. 

My good man, possibly the examples that you have chosen to support your argument are lacking in impact and you should either choose a better approach or insert your genitalia into your own orifices.

Consecutively or simultaneously?

You need a machine upgrade. I was running a 3.06 p4, 1 gig of ram and Radion 9700 pro with 128 and the game was stunning and ran just fine with some custom tweaking. I don't know what you are running, but it seems to be something out of 2000 or before.

Obviously Sky was just having a bad day and he's back to his usual refined and courteous self.

Last time I played was on a 8800gtx, q6600, 3.25 gigs ram.  Maybe I prefer to run games at a higher fps than others; maybe that's why my textures look like shit. 

I don't know... if it looks great to you all, that's awesome.  It's not in my personal taste though. 

 :oh_i_see:

See what I'm saying?

here's a probably stupid question -- FPS and overall performance would be defendant on your HD's bus right?  So hypothetically if I had EQ2 on a secondary drive that may be slower than whatever in speed or bus, that would lessen the shineh?  correct? 

Only in times when it was loading data off the hard drive, once the data is in memory, it wouldn't matter as far as rendering is concerned. To much data, to slowly loading (or "streaming") off the hard drive creates what is commonly known as "Hitching". Depends on the games architecture. If i recall EQ2 has zones and loading screens so, to a point, its irrelevant, as the zone (assets) is loaded at that time, i don't recall if it uses streaming at all. The exceptions may be dynamic objects like players, that are not part of the zones asset package, those are potentially streamed as encountered.

Its been to long for me to recall how eq2 handles things. I do remember how it uses textures on world objects and interiors, and why it looks shitty on lower settings. Most of the world, building and zone textures such as brick are really about 3-4 textures creating the final composite. (Color, Grey scale detail, bump, and specular layers). Lowering the settings means the removal of layers, until only one is left, color, and its nothing more than that, a blank pure color. As seen in Hawkbits screen shots. Genius really.


Yep.

Release EQ2 handles almost everything in a single CPU and RAM. Those are what you want.

4 gig of RAM (or the 3.1-3.4 it leaves you actually able to use) and turn on the /3GB flag. For a CPU, the CPUs literally don't exist that can perform up to the engine's potential.

The whole setup with the CPU handling most graphics leads to some weird things where effects such as some of the lighting things that drive other games to their knees are effortless in EQ2--because they were added after launch and are done on the GPU which otherwise isn't doing a whole lot. Then other really basic stuff like shadows will give you a slideshow.

"turn on the /3GB flag"

there's an option on the graphics settings for this?

Windows 32 will use up to 4gb of memory between programs, system overhead, and video overhead. It will not, however, allocate more than 2gb to a single process unless you toss a flag into the ini file.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/pae/paemem.mspx

thanks

we should have a PC performance sticky in PC Games with stuff like this.  Cheers.

I didn't see any mention of Vista on that link, does that not apply with Vista?

Vista 64 you don't need to worry about and Vista32 apparently uses a different method

http://www.prophotowiki.com/w/index.php/IncreaseUserVa

This one I haven't tried and I just did a 2 second googlesearch to find it so I can't vouch for its accuracy.

Bored with everything else so I resubbed recently.  Performance has skyrocketed since I played last summer.  Seems as if they added multi-core support, I'm guessing it's making a helluva difference.

They did the same kind of thing that COX did, where they moved some specific graphic rendering stuff to the second core. The big one being shadows. There should be a checkbox somewhere in the settings.

They are moving shadows to the GPU, it's apparently up on test and people are reporting framerates doubling.

About time! Since I lost a stick of RAM last week, I haven't played a whole lot of EQ2. Performance with 1GB is just messing with me too much. I tried tweaking some settings, but I figure the hell with it, the almighty egg will be coming through with my 4GB in a day or two.

I just hope the slot isn't toast, didn't think of that until I had placed the order  :ye_gods: On the upside, I'll still have 2GB, on the flip it'll be in single channel mode.

Really not a good time to consider building a new pc :|

Game running so much smoother with 3GB. Only a slight bit of hitching in Teren's Grasp with everything maxed out. Neriak, which had been pretty choppy, was running like glass. Tempted to get Vista64 and 4GB more since it's so dern cheap. Trying to hold out for Windows 7.

Still should roll over to test and see whether it's better to run shadows on the second cpu or on the gpu. I think texture swapping is really the main bottleneck I have, because I use max textures without LoD (with 768MB vram), I could bump LoD a bit and probably run without any slowdowns at all.

Windows 7 is fantastic and I've had no troubles at all with it at all. Everything has run fine with the default drivers and nvidia even has beta's up. I could stick the ISO somewhere if anyone wants to try it.

I don't want to jump in with both feet and don't have a disk to load it onto. I'll just hold off until it's released.