Radeon 3870x2 has anyone tried this card with eq2

[Chan]

<p>Hi all</p><p>I was wondering if anyone has tried the Radeon 3870x2 (singlecard not crossfire) with eq2 and if so how does it perform? I have heard rumors that eq2 doesnt make use of multiple gpu's and im not sure if that meens a card like this or crossfire/sli. Since eq2 is pretty much the only game I play these days I have desided to change to ATI because im fead up with the stuttering i get from my current 8800gt, which after reading alot of posts i see many people have the same problems when using 8800's. Any feed back would be very much appriciated also any other good graphics card sugestions for playing eq2 at medium to high settings smoothly without stuttering. Thx in advance <img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" /></p><p>Just because you're paranoid doesn't meen they're not after you!</p>

[Balamoor]

<cite>Regis wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>Hi all</p><p>I was wondering if anyone has tried the Radeon 3870x2 (singlecard not crossfire) with eq2 and if so how does it perform? I have heard rumors that eq2 doesnt make use of multiple gpu's and im not sure if that meens a card like this or crossfire/sli. Since eq2 is pretty much the only game I play these days I have desided to change to ATI because im fead up with the stuttering i get from my current 8800gt, which after reading alot of posts i see many people have the same problems when using 8800's. Any feed back would be very much appriciated also any other good graphics card sugestions for playing eq2 at medium to high settings smoothly without stuttering. Thx in advance <img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" /></p><p>Just because you're paranoid doesn't meen they're not after you!</p></blockquote>I'm playing with the sapphire 3870 and my next door neighbor is playing with the 3870 X2, both cards preform well but the 3870 X 2 does make the game look significantly better in my opinion...also the whole EQ II doesn't make use of dual cards is a misnomer.  No EQ II isn't optimized for crossfire or SLI (Honetsly if people bought crossfire or SLi just to play a small handful of games that are optimized then both companies would go broke, or at least can dual platforms)   however any game will benefit from dual cards simply because it isn't a matter of getting more FPS it's a matter of not bottoming out when you get slammed with a ton of stuff happening at once. The dual cards keep you at a steady frame rate even under an intensive load.....Crossfire more so simply because it is based on the old Voodoo extreme Machine code.  People listen to the outhouse Experts  and usually do themselves a great disservice by not going crossfire or SLI.

[Chan]

Thx for the reply Balamoor<img src="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" />. I was wondering, what kind of performance settings do you run on with your 3870 and hows your fps's? It would be nice to save some money and just buy the normal 3870 seeing all i play is eq2.

[Effie]

<p>I'm running a single 3870 and have it set to extreme quality with a few tweaks.... mainly to turn down particle effects in raids/groups. It's hard to track down mobs with all the fireworks going off. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>When I run 2 instances of EQ2, I turn it down to balanced for both instances.</p><p>The only time I experience any sort of framerate drop is entering an area with a lot of players (like QH, dockside markets, etc).</p>

[AgingGamer]

I'm running a 3870 x2, a dual core Athlon 4600+, 4 GB of RAM, and a pair of RAID0 WD Raptor 10k RPM drives.<div></div><div>EQ2 turns into a slide show (perhaps 10 fps?) in some zones, particularly the crafting instances, if I turn shadows on in any way at all. I can run smoothly with "balanced" plus a few tweaks at 1600x1200, but shadows totally kill the performance. </div><div></div><div>The other posters in this thread seem to imply no such difficulty.  Am I the only fool trying to activate shadows, or is there something wrong with my config?  My assumption is that the EQ2 graphics engine is totally unable to take advantage of multi-core CPUs and multi-processor/SLI video, but I'd happily be proven wrong.</div><div></div><div>Prior to upgrading to the 3870 x2 (dual GPU on a single card), I was running a single ATI X1950XTX.  Performance change between the two cards in EQ2 is minimal.   I haven't performed a thorough wipe of the video drivers/re-install of DirectX or other undirected "shotgun" approaches to improving performance yet, but if everyone else running 3870 x2's is experiencing smooth/fast/stutter-free movement with shadows on, then maybe I should start digging.</div>