thyriel81
09-09-2007, 02:45 PM
So after some days of testing every single setting with fraps fps display to get the best look in all various situations without having any drops of fps under 25 (normally), and soloing fps around 40 i thought i will share all this in a guide. I know theres somewhere an old guide like this, which i also used to begin tweaking the settings, but i soon saw that everything described there does not fit in any way to nowadays hardware. The settings that are there as "major perfomance impacts" mostly just do a 1-3fps impact now, and others that could never have been used that time may now be runable.<b>Test Setup</b>Ive tested all this on an i would say "nowadays cheap gaming machine" with:Intel E4400 @ 2,15Ghz (intelligence Overclocking when needed via BIOS)2 GB RAMHD 2600 XT 512MB (badly i found no software that can show how much is actually used so i cannot say if theres any markable difference on a 256MB card, probably someone could add some comment about it)Vista 64bit (there shouldnt be much, if any, perfomance differences to an XP machine. With the new Microsoft hotfix changing the way virtuell memory mapping from 3D applications is used XP should even lose a massive amount of perfomance IF the machine has more then 2gig RAM) I will add next week some details on XP-Vista compare on 4gig when i got my 4gig upgrade this week if in practise its what the microsoft hotfix is promising)<b>Testing Environment ingame</b>Ive tested 4 different cases, where the last one didnt do any change. If i will someday again be raiding i will add tests for that anywhen later. Probably someone could add some comments on thatTest 1 - solo - Island of RefugeThis is a very good location to begin testing, there are locations like behind the tower where a lot lights are present and some NPCs, also locations like just where the first gobs are where a good 20+ NPCs are around and water beside.Test 2 - Neriak from entrance to Broker @Dockside Markets (lots of ppl hehe)My personal goal was not to get this running with 20+ fps, actually when its finsished loading (which can take some seconds), its running with nice 25fps. As long as you aint move <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />Moving causes a lot to load, the problem not being the environment or NPCs, its the players data he need to transfer. And when you look at them with max details and he needs to load 20-30 players it just can take some time.Test 3 - Enchanted Lands - Docks.Much water, a high amount of NPCs. Its the lowest FPS i had so far, sometimes they droped slightly under 20 which isnt too bad imho.Test 4 - Full group in Ruins of VarsoonAlthough i didnt thought so first, i didnt had any fps change compared to doing something solo. Some years ago grouping was a major impact on perfomance, especially particle details & model details had to be reduced to keep nice fps.<u><b>Ingame Settings</b></u>Im now only going through those that have more then 1 fps dropdown, all other settings can easily be turned to their maximum without seein any perfomance changes. (Or they would made the picture so much bader that no one would set em to anything else like Graphics Resolution for example)<b>Perfomance</b>Window mode can drastically reduce your fps. When i have ingame around 35-40fps and do the same in window mode, it reduces to 15-17 fps. Unfortunately i didnt found out why this is. Somehow in window mode EQ2 only used around 70% cpu of one core, and 40% GPU, while in fullscreen it used 95-99% of first core and sometimes even 20-40% of 2nd core. (Id just wish it would use both to 90% ^^)Sync / Triple Buffer - i recommend turning this off, theres no real visual improvement from this and fps drop around 5-7 with it enabled.Rendering Distance - there is normally no change in fps if this is set to 120 or 1000. However, you can affect lag with that setting. Think of it like a circle around you that determines where it begins to load things. Generally you will have lesser lag when this is set to 1000, but only if you just cant see the things that are that far away. In that case it will just load things but not render them, so you will end with something like a buffer. If its set to very close you will nearly always have lag when you move fast. In cities i turn this down to 120, its a bit more laging then, but it wont lag long, just more often. Its up to the user then what he likes more.Complex Shader Distance - One of those settings that lets the game look very cool. And the best is, its only costing 2-3 fps if enabled or disabled. And there is not one fps difference if its set to 5 or 300. Just set it to maximum<b>Widescreen Letterbox</b>Beside that i find it gives a much nicer look playing with a widescreen letterbox and having the entire UI inside the black zones, it can drastically improve perfomance enabling it. Its like you would change your screen resolution, the entire scene that needs to be recalculated gets smaller.<b>Texture Resolution</b>Just set them to maximum. The third setting (LOD Res) determines which textures are used for the low res characters (see Model Detail for more)<b>Atmospheric Effects</b>Just set them on or off as you like. I personally dont like the bloom effect (and its eating around 3fps) so i have that turned off.<b>Water</b>Here are quite some settings where you can drastically improve perfomance with the right settings. Why those are improving perfomance even when no water is present no one knows <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />The important settings here are:Environment Cube Map Updates - this is eating a lot of fps, i no case i would set this to max. At best (depends on how nice your CPU is), set it to one time or fast. This will only affect how often the reflections on water are redone, theres not much difference to see even between every frame and fast.Reflections - This too can drastically improve perfomance, i got 15 fps more with setting these to Cube Map. However there is a huge difference in how water will look like.<b>Particle Effects</b>Just set everything to maximum, this doesnt even need perfomance when your in a group with a lot of casting going on. However a melee may want to set the max spell results per Character down in a group to see more then just buffs / debuffs / heals and flames :p<b>Lightning</b>Light Quality - there is a slight perfomance increase (3-4fps) when using High quality instead of Very High. I could not find any difference between those 2 beside perfomance so i recommend setting it to High.Specular Lightning & Max Bumpy Point Distance & Max spec lights:This is what makes high res look so good, it even does not cost much perfomance (3-4 fps).Spec Lightning turns it on, Max spec lights determines the amount of lights used for specular and the distance is like the Complex Shader distance in "Perfomance". Id even could not find any differences in city locations if its set to small amount of lights or maximum.Additional Specular while raining. Thats the last thing you should set to on when everything else is working nice. For me its droping fps for over 5 when its raining, and i find it even looking too plastic like then. Also on some surfaces it can cause graphic errors like the additional specular is applies to one texture and not to one beside that (so you end with seeing the texture lines on the surface)<b>Shadows</b>Shadows are completely rendered with the CPU, too badly it has no impact on the GPU Activity and therefore even on todays systems drastically droping fps. I know there are CPUs that can handle that quite good, but that comes more to real high end systems. However if you want to get it running on a middle system it is possible with still having nice 20+fps.Just turn off Environment Shadows (wich have the most perfomance impact), and set shadow amount to average or High. At best just play around with the shadows after everything else is running smooth to see how well its working.At least it should be runable with setting it to Very high and only enabling Torch, off-screen and specular. This should only have impacts of around 5-6 fps.<b>Model Details</b>Level of Detail bias - This determines how detailed far away objects are drawn. I could not find any perfomance differences with that slider so just set it to max.High / Low Detailed Characters - This 2 sliders determine the textures used for the before set high / LOD textures. In cities where people come and go it can make a good difference if you set the high detailed to 0 or 10. I recommend just setting these to 10 - 10, so you end up with 20 max detail chars. (including mobs). If more is in the screen the rest will be drawn with lowest which makes it fine when your are broker and many people are standing there, all the new coming are just loaded low <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /><b>Animation</b>no differences in the various settings (beside its looking funny when you set it down)<b>Flora</b>Heres another very CPU intensive task. Flora Radius to maximum can drop down fps by 5-6, instead setting it to 85-90% only takes around 2fps.The same goes density.Flora Displacement i recommend turning off and instead using more shadows. It can take over 10fps while moving and so great it isnt looking that i would give up shadows or other nice things for it.<u><b>Driver Settings</b></u><b>ATI Catalyst</b>first if you want to enable AA/FA or anything else on the driver settings for EQ2 you need to turn off Catalyst AI. For AA you also need to place "r_aa_blit 1" in the eq2.ini (or create that file)<b>NVIDIA</b>place that "r_aa_blit 1" in the eq2.ini (or create that file)and set it in Forceware to overwrite application settings (or define own for the everquest2.exe)<b>AA/FA</b>Consider that using AA (especially Temporal Anti Aliasing or Adaptive AA) can cause various graphic errors in EQ2 (that is why ATI forced to disable AA via driver for EQ2 when Catalyst AI is enabled).Most interesting is also that Anisotrop Filtering (AF) isnt using any noticeable perfomance. (at least not more then 2-3 fps). Therefore if you want to use the disabled Catalyst AI, i recommend first setting AF to 16X (it also sharpens textures a lot on characters a bit away from you, even for yourself when in 3rd person)Which AA level you can i would just test out. It doesnt has much impact on perfomance (even on cards like the 2600XT that isnt known to be good on AA)Hope that help some peeps out, there are quite a few threads about perfomance problems on new systems that i bet lay just on 1 or 2 settings that dont improve the look very much but eat a lot of perfomance <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />