Are the 8800GT cards really that bad for EQ2?

[LoneGreyWolf20]

I am going to be building my new system probably next week some time or the week after. I have always bought Nvidia (except for once and I suffered for it) and never had issues. Are the 8800GT cards really that bad off for EQ2?I had nothing but problems with the one and only ATI card that I had. I ended up sending it back to Newegg and just getting my money back.Is it everyone having issues with their 8800GT cards or just a few people?My system will be this:Case<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129021" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16811129021</a>PSU<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817341001" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16817341001</a>Motherboard<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188013" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16813188013</a>CPU<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115029" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16819115029</a>GPU<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130319" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16814130319</a>Ram<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231122" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16820231122</a>EQ2 isn't the only game that I play and there have been no other reports of issues in any of the other games that I play and the 8800GTs that I am aware of.

[MMKA]

<p>I'm running Vista and my 8800GT does not run smoothly at all. Depending on the zone, it is not very enjoyable even at high performance settings. I have tried every driver and every different setting but get the same results. (some setting make it a little better) The only thing I haven't done is run it under XP. </p><p>As soon as I switch to the 8600GTS, everything runs pretty smoothly with only a small glitch now and then. The 7600GS runs EQ2 perfectly on the same system. </p><p>I didn't research the 8800 before I made the purchase but I still would have gone with it anyway because I play other games that run fine with the 8800 in single mode and SLI. So far, EQ2 is the only game I have had problems with. </p>

[Caipira]

I have several friends that play EQ2 with 8800GT cards, most of them were very disappointed in game performance until they forced eq2 to use antialiasing through the nvidia control panel.  After that feature was turned on their framerates and quality increased significantly.

[LoneGreyWolf20]

<cite>Dismas@Najena wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have several friends that play EQ2 with 8800GT cards, most of them were very disappointed in game performance until they forced eq2 to use antialiasing through the nvidia control panel.  After that feature was turned on their framerates and quality increased significantly.</blockquote>Then maybe it would work well for me after all. I prefer AA enabled, so for me it's a standard feature.

[Troubor]

I honestly didn't have any problems using a 8800 GTX with this game, but I do hear so many do have them with 8800 series cards.  Enough so that the developers in a sticky thread for hardware recommendations in this forum suggest going with ATI I think, at least for now.  Guess all I can say is that I don't discount other's experiences, but at the same time my own personal experience, Nvidia 8800 series cards seem fine with this game.  BUT..again you may want to read some of the other threads before making your purchase.  <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />  ATI 3870's have came down in price, and 3870 x2's aren't too expensive given the performance.

[Openedge]

<cite>Dismas@Najena wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have several friends that play EQ2 with 8800GT cards, most of them were very disappointed in game performance until they forced eq2 to use antialiasing through the nvidia control panel.  After that feature was turned on their framerates and quality increased significantly.</blockquote>Sorry...but FORCING AA takes away from performance...quite a bit actually. Did you mean DISABLING?No matter what machine I have here, no AA equals huge leaps in FPS...Can you maybe verify that again?Thanks

[LoneGreyWolf20]

I guess if it comes down to it and I do end up having problems, I will just cancel my subscription and be done with it. I don't like ATI cards. Which means I will not be buying an ATI card just because one of my games doesn't seem to like the 8800 series cards.The 8800GT is probably one of the best video cards out right now. So much so Tom's hardware has it ranked as such.Maybe the techs here at SOE can come up with the reason why such an awesome card has such a hard time with this game and fix it finally!!

[Gaige]

I've used an 8800GT since they came out and other than a slight freeze every few hours or so its fine.  I run a modified high quality setting and average 30+ fps at 1920x1200.  Normally around 20ish fps while raiding.

[Thuriel]

<cite>Openedge wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Dismas@Najena wrote:</cite><blockquote>I have several friends that play EQ2 with 8800GT cards, most of them were very disappointed in game performance until they forced eq2 to use antialiasing through the nvidia control panel.  After that feature was turned on their framerates and quality increased significantly.</blockquote>Sorry...but FORCING AA takes away from performance...quite a bit actually. Did you mean DISABLING?No matter what machine I have here, no AA equals huge leaps in FPS...Can you maybe verify that again?Thanks</blockquote>I have an 8800GTS and I enabled (as in turned on, activated) AA at 8xQ forced to override application as well as AF at 16x. I used to have a lower setting for Kunark, but I can now play at slightly below extreme quality. The theory is that EQ2 is a CPU intensive game and that forcing AA and AF on the GPU frees up CPU cycles. Seems to work for me.

[Mett]

Im currently using the 8800 gts, 4 gb ram and a dual core CPU. I have almost everything maxed out on XP Pro 64 bit and I do not have any problems at all when playing.

[Openedge]

<cite>Adenn@Permafrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Im currently using the 8800 gts, 4 gb ram and a dual core CPU. I have almost everything maxed out on XP Pro 64 bit and I do not have any problems at all when playing.</blockquote>Do you have shadows on? Is complex shaders cranked up?If so, do me a favor...go onto Neriak and run from one end of the city to the other. Do you crash? If not...could you possibly post a dxdiag for us here?thank you

[Zenith]

I have a 8800GTX in my desktop and a 8600M in my laptop, both have issues with eq2. The game ran better for me when I had a 7800GT in my desktop. Eq2 is the only game either system chokes on at all too.

[Thunderthyze]

<cite>Adenn@Permafrost wrote:</cite><blockquote>Im currently using the 8800 gts, 4 gb ram and a dual core CPU. I have almost everything maxed out on XP Pro 64 bit and I do not have any problems at all when playing.</blockquote><p>I am using a bog standard setup for EQ2 with my Athlon 4000+ w/2gb RAM and an 8800GTS and can squeeze anything between 35~50 fps in normal zones (ie NOT QH or EFP) with all setting maxxed but without shadows or flora. I have never had an issue with crashes due to overloads and this system has been running for over 6 months.</p><p> I did have to mess around with the graphics settings to get AAs to work with EVE so I may try a similar approach with EQ2 to see if I can get any better performance but I am quite happy with what I've got. Incidentally my monitor runs at 60mhz and I am using XP Home on this rig.</p>

[Zenith]

I honestly wonder if it's something to do with dual cores, 8x00 series, and eq2. Nvidia drivers can multithread while eq2 can't. Since people tend to ONLY have issues with eq2 it's probably something deep in the eq2 code that's interfering with the drivers in 8x00 cards. Hell I've used 7800's in SLI mode and it ran eq2 better then my 8800 GTX.

[ChildofHate]

<p>To those of you saying you are "forcing AA to be enabled in game"...  just make sure one very important, can't be missed, doesn't work otherwise no matter what you want to believe, thing is done:  have you added the necessary line of code to your EQ2.ini file?  If not, no matter what settings you enable in your display's control panel, EQ2 will not run in AA mode.  Period.  end of story.  thanks, come again!  If you haven't added it, you won't get it.  EQ2 does not have any other way of running anti-aliasing unless you manually make that setting enabled.  You cannot set it in game.  You cannot set it with the settings.exe file...  you cannot make it work via the control panel.  Only by manually typing it into the eq2.ini file (it doesn't even exist there turned off... you have to even add the code to turn it on.  it is turned off permanently otherwise).</p><p>Once you've actually turned it on in the EQ2.ini file, then you must turn it on in your control panel.  Leaving Anti-aliasing set to auto in your control panel won't do a thing for you in game.  you need to have it actually set in your control panel as well.  My personal experience is 4x Anti-aliasing works and looks best.  Anything higher and all you are doing is cutting in to your performance without any visual gain.  I do however recommend you crank your anisotropic filtering to max.  This has very little impact on your performance yet brings out INCREDIBLE detail of the game world.  Highly recommend you boost your anisotropic filtering before messing with anti-aliasing.</p><p>Just making sure people understand this because many times i have talked with guild members and what-not ingame and they swear it's working yet they see no difference... then i ask them if they made the all too necessary changes to the eq2.ini file and i get at first silence... then questions on where the file is located.  sometimes "how do you edit it" (notepad, fyi) and finally exclaimations of either "WOW THIS IS AWESOME or DANG-IT this is killing my framerate my machine can't handle this...  this sucks!"</p><p>Enabling Anti-aliasing will never improve your frame rate... ever.  If you understand what it does and how it  works, then you know why.  If you don't know or firmly believe that enabling it will improve your performance:  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/Graphics/anti_aliasing2.shtml" target="_blank"><b><u>READ THIS</u></b></a>.  It's breaks it down very simply and thoroughly.</p>

[Openedge]

<cite>ChildofHate wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>To those of you saying you are "forcing AA to be enabled in game"...  just make sure one very important, can't be missed, doesn't work otherwise no matter what you want to believe, thing is done:  have you added the necessary line of code to your EQ2.ini file?  If not, no matter what settings you enable in your display's control panel, EQ2 will not run in AA mode.  Period.  end of story.  thanks, come again!  If you haven't added it, you won't get it.  EQ2 does not have any other way of running anti-aliasing unless you manually make that setting enabled.  You cannot set it in game.  You cannot set it with the settings.exe file...  you cannot make it work via the control panel.  Only by manually typing it into the eq2.ini file (it doesn't even exist there turned off... you have to even add the code to turn it on.  it is turned off permanently otherwise).</p><p>Once you've actually turned it on in the EQ2.ini file, then you must turn it on in your control panel.  Leaving Anti-aliasing set to auto in your control panel won't do a thing for you in game.  you need to have it actually set in your control panel as well.  My personal experience is 4x Anti-aliasing works and looks best.  Anything higher and all you are doing is cutting in to your performance without any visual gain.  I do however recommend you crank your anisotropic filtering to max.  This has very little impact on your performance yet brings out INCREDIBLE detail of the game world.  Highly recommend you boost your anisotropic filtering before messing with anti-aliasing.</p><p>Just making sure people understand this because many times i have talked with guild members and what-not ingame and they swear it's working yet they see no difference... then i ask them if they made the all too necessary changes to the eq2.ini file and i get at first silence... then questions on where the file is located.  sometimes "how do you edit it" (notepad, fyi) and finally exclaimations of either "WOW THIS IS AWESOME or DANG-IT this is killing my framerate my machine can't handle this...  this sucks!"</p><p>Enabling Anti-aliasing will never improve your frame rate... ever.  If you understand what it does and how it  works, then you know why.  If you don't know or firmly believe that enabling it will improve your performance:  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/Graphics/anti_aliasing2.shtml" target="_blank"><b><u>READ THIS</u></b></a>.  It's breaks it down very simply and thoroughly.</p></blockquote>Thanks...I have seen this in several threads and it blows me away saying turning AA on IMPROVES framerates...lolYes...I have the r_aa_blit 1 option enabled...and I tell you what...the freezes and stuttering are much worse this way...I had to turn off AA after I saw the slideshow.I would prefer an engine fix for the 8800 issues myselfThanks again

[SmeedSmeedly]

Ive got an 8800GTS and Im having the same problems. Playing on high quality without shadows is a stretch.

[Jibber Mong]

<p>I recently built my wife a new PC for EQ2. </p><p>512mb BFG 8800GT OC, E8400, Asus p5kc and 2gb of ram (Corsair 4-4-4-12 timings).</p><p>Standard install with no tweaking/over clocking, running xp home SP2 and the latest Nvidia drivers. </p><p>It runs @ 1680 * 1050 on extreme quality with no problems and rarely drops below 50fps. Was kinda shocked the other day to see it hit 140fps in Fallengate LOL. She does have to drop it down to high quality when raiding because of the particle effect spam, easier to get here to drop it that way, than try to teach her how to adjust all the advanced options <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Openedge]

<cite>Jibber Mong wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>I recently built my wife a new PC for EQ2. </p><p>512mb BFG 8800GT OC, E8400, Asus p5kc and 2gb of ram (Corsair 4-4-4-12 timings).</p><p>Standard install with no tweaking/over clocking, running xp home SP2 and the latest Nvidia drivers. </p><p>It runs @ 1680 * 1050 on extreme quality with no problems and rarely drops below 50fps. Was kinda shocked the other day to see it hit 140fps in Fallengate LOL. She does have to drop it down to high quality when raiding because of the particle effect spam, easier to get here to drop it that way, than try to teach her how to adjust all the advanced options <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" /></p></blockquote>But, with those framerates, talk about some ugly tearing issues. If VSync is off, the game hits some high frames for sure, but, the tearing on a 27" lcd is mighty ugly..I think the real issue is various ...Have you kept it on extreme quality and run through Gorowyn, Neriak or Kelethin?Even though you have it on extreme quality, what are the Nvidia control panel settings (Application Settings? Defaults?)There are a lot of caveats here alsoNo AA ever if your using Extreme Quality...(do you have it enabled in the .ini?)Shadows and Cities and certain dungeons just hate each other...Maybe you would be kind enough to post a DXDiag for the machine that is rocking? I would like to see what your using?I have multiple systems (different setups...AMD/Intel) different OS's and different types of model 8800's and they all buckle under EQ2...Thanks

[Tebos]

<cite>Openedge wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Jibber Mong wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>I recently built my wife a new PC for EQ2. </p><p>512mb BFG 8800GT OC, E8400, Asus p5kc and 2gb of ram (Corsair 4-4-4-12 timings).</p><p>Standard install with no tweaking/over clocking, running xp home SP2 and the latest Nvidia drivers. </p><p>It runs @ 1680 * 1050 on extreme quality with no problems and rarely drops below 50fps. Was kinda shocked the other day to see it hit 140fps in Fallengate LOL. She does have to drop it down to high quality when raiding because of the particle effect spam, easier to get here to drop it that way, than try to teach her how to adjust all the advanced options <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src=" width="15" height="15" />"></p></blockquote>But, with those framerates, talk about some ugly tearing issues. If VSync is off, the game hits some high frames for sure, but, the <span style="color: #3333ff;">tearing on a 27" lcd</span> is mighty ugly..I think the real issue is various ...Have you kept it on extreme quality and run through Gorowyn, Neriak or Kelethin?Even though you have it on extreme quality, what are the Nvidia control panel settings (Application Settings? Defaults?)There are a lot of caveats here alsoNo AA ever if your using Extreme Quality...(do you have it enabled in the .ini?)Shadows and Cities and certain dungeons just hate each other...Maybe you would be kind enough to post a DXDiag for the machine that is rocking? I would like to see what your using?I have multiple systems (different setups...AMD/Intel) different OS's and different types of model 8800's and they all buckle under EQ2...Thanks</blockquote><p><span style="color: #00cc99;">A copy/paste from some where else as follows:</span></p><p><span style="color: #ff3366;">I recently learned that how I thought vsync worked was wrong, and now knowing the way it really does work, I think it would be worthwhile to make sure everyone here understands it.What is VSync? VSync stands for Vertical Synchronization. The basic idea is that synchronizes your FPS with your </span><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=928593#" target="_blank"><span style="color: #ff3366;">monitor's</span></a><span style="color: #ff3366;"> refresh rate. The purpose is to eliminate something called "tearing". I will describe all these things here.Every CRT monitor has a refresh rate. It's specified in Hz (Hertz, cycles per second). It is the number of times the monitor updates the display per second. Different monitors support different refresh rates at different resolutions. They range from 60Hz at the low end up to 100Hz and higher. Note that this isn't your FPS as your games report it. If your monitor is set at a specific refresh rate, it always updates the screen at that rate, even if nothing on it is changing. On an LCD, things work differently. </span><span style="color: #3333ff;">Pixels on an LCD stay lit until they are told to change; they don't have to be refreshed. However, because of how VGA (and DVI) works, the LCD must still poll the </span><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=928593#" target="_blank"><span style="color: #3333ff;">video</span></a><span style="color: #ff3366;"><span style="color: #3333ff;"> card at a certain rate for new frames. This is why LCD's still have a "refresh rate" even though they don't actually have to refresh.</span>I think everyone here understands FPS. It's how many frames the video card can draw per second. Higher is obviously better. However, during a fast paced game, your FPS rarely stays the same all the time. It moves around as the complexity of the image the video card has to draw changes based on what you are seeing. This is where tearing comes in.Tearing is a phenomenon that gives a disjointed image. The idea is as if you took a photograph of something, then rotated your vew maybe just 1 degree to the left and took a photograph of that, then cut the two pictures in half and taped the top half of one to the bottom half of the other. The images would be similar but there would be a notable difference in the top half from the bottom half. This is what is called tearing on a visual display. It doesn't always have to be cut right in the middle. It can be near the top or the bottom and the separation point can actually move up or down the screen, or seem to jump back and forth between two points.Why does this happen? Lets take a specific example. Let's say your monitor is set to a refresh rate of 75Hz. You're playing your favorite game and you're getting 100FPS right now. That means that the mointor is updating itself 75 times per second, but the video card is updating the display 100 times per second, that's 33% faster than the mointor. So that means in the time between screen updates, the video card has drawn one frame and a third of another one. That third of the next frame will overwrite the top third of the previous frame and then get drawn on the screen. The video card then finishes the last 2 thirds of that frame, and renders the next 2 thirds of the next frame and then the screen updates again. As you can see this would cause this tearing effect as 2 out of every 3 times the screen updates, either the top third or bottom third is disjointed from the rest of the display. This won't really be noticeable if what is on the screen isn't changing much, but if you're looking around quickly or what not this effect will be very apparant.Now this is where the common misconception comes in. Some people think that the solution to this problem is to simply create an FPS cap equal to the refresh rate. So long as the video card doesn't go faster than 75 FPS, everything is fine, right? Wrong.Before I explain why, let me talk about double-buffering. Double-buffering is a technique that mitigates the tearing problem somewhat, but not entirely. Basically you have a frame buffer and a back buffer. Whenever the monitor grabs a frame to refresh with, it pulls it from the frame buffer. The video card draws new frames in the back buffer, then copies it to the frame buffer when it's done. However the copy operation still takes time, so if the monitor refreshes in the middle of the copy operation, it will still have a torn image.VSync solves this problem by creating a rule that says the back buffer can't copy to the frame buffer until right after the monitor refreshes. With a framerate higher than the refresh rate, this is fine. The back buffer is filled with a frame, the system waits, and after the refresh, the back buffer is copied to the frame buffer and a new frame is drawn in the back buffer, effectively capping your framerate at the refresh rate.That's all well and good, but now let's look at a different example. Let's say you're playing the sequel to your favorite game, which has better graphics. You're at 75Hz refresh rate still, but now you're only getting 50FPS, 33% slower than the refresh rate. That means every time the monitor updates the screen, the video card draws 2/3 of the next frame. So lets track how this works. The monitor just refreshed, and frame 1 is copied into the frame buffer. 2/3 of frame 2 gets drawn in the back buffer, and the monitor refreshes again. It grabs frame 1 from the frame buffer for the first time. Now the video card finishes the last third of frame 2, but it has to wait, because it can't update until right after a refresh. The monitor refreshes, grabbing frame 1 the second time, and frame 2 is put in the frame buffer. The video card draws 2/3 of frame 3 in the back buffer, and a refresh happens, grabbing frame 2 for the first time. The last third of frame 3 is draw, and again we must wait for the refresh, and when it happens, frame 2 is grabbed for the second time, and frame 3 is copied in. We went through 4 refresh cycles but only 2 frames were drawn. At a refresh rate of 75Hz, that means we'll see 37.5FPS. That's noticeably less than 50FPS which the video card is capable of. This happens because the video card is forced to waste time after finishing a frame in the back buffer as it can't copy it out and it has nowhere else to draw frames.Essentially this means that with double-buffered VSync, the framerate can only be equal to a discrete set of values equal to Refresh / N where N is some positive integer. That means if you're talking about 60Hz refresh rate, the only framerates you can get are 60, 30, 20, 15, 12, 10, etc etc. You can see the big gap between 60 and 30 there. Any framerate between 60 and 30 your video card would normally put out would get dropped to 30.Now maybe you can see why people loathe it. Let's go back to the original example. You're playing your favorite game at 75Hz refresh and 100FPS. You turn VSync on, and the game limits you to 75FPS. No problem, right? Fixed the tearing issue, it looks better. You get to an area that's particularly graphically intensive, an area that would drop your FPS down to about 60 without VSync. Now your card cannot do the 75FPS it was doing before, and since VSync is on, it has to do the next highest one on the list, which is 37.5FPS. So now your game which was running at 75FPS just halved it's framerate to 37.5 instantly. Whether or not you find 37.5FPS smooth doesn't change the fact that the framerate just cut in half suddenly, which you would notice. This is what people hate about it.If you're playing a game that has a framerate that routinely stays above your refresh rate, then VSync will generally be a good thing. However if it's a game that moves above and below it, then VSync can become annoying. Even worse, if the game plays at an FPS that is just below the refresh rate (say you get 65FPS most of the time on a refresh rate of 75Hz), the video card will have to settle for putting out much less FPS than it could (37.5FPS in that instance). This second example is where the percieved drop in performance comes in. It looks like VSync just killed your framerate. It did, technically, but it isn't because it's a graphically intensive operation. It's simply the way it works.All hope is not lost however. There is a technique called triple-buffering that solves this VSync problem. Lets go back to our 50FPS, 75Hz example. Frame 1 is in the frame buffer, and 2/3 of frame 2 are drawn in the back buffer. The refresh happens and frame 1 is grabbed for the first time. The last third of frame 2 are drawn in the back buffer, and the first third of frame 3 is drawn in the second back buffer (hence the term triple-buffering). The refresh happens, frame 1 is grabbed for the second time, and frame 2 is copied into the frame buffer and the first part of frame 3 into the back buffer. The last 2/3 of frame 3 are drawn in the back buffer, the refresh happens, frame 2 is grabbed for the first time, and frame 3 is copied to the frame buffer. The process starts over. This time we still got 2 frames, but in only 3 refresh cycles. That's 2/3 of the refresh rate, which is 50FPS, exactly what we would have gotten without it. Triple-buffering essentially gives the video card someplace to keep doing work while it waits to transfer the back buffer to the frame buffer, so it doesn't have to waste time. Unfortunately, triple-buffering isn't available in every game, and in fact it isn't too common. It also can cost a little performance to utilize, as it requires extra VRAM for the buffers, and time spent copying all of them around. <span style="color: #ffcc66;">However, triple-buffered VSync really is the key to the best experience as you eliminate tearing without the downsides of normal VSync (unless you consider the fact that your FPS is capped a downside... which is silly because you can't see an FPS higher than your refresh anyway).</span>I hope this was informative, and will help people understand the intracacies of VSync (and hopefully curb the "VSync, yes or no?" debates!). Generally, if triple buffering isn't available, you have to decide whether the discrete framerate limitations of VSync and the issues that can cause are worth the visual improvement of the elimination of tearing. It's a personal preference, and it's entirely up to you.</span></p>

[Thuriel]

<cite>ChildofHate wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>To those of you saying you are "forcing AA to be enabled in game"...  just make sure one very important... thing is done:  have you added the necessary line of code to your EQ2.ini file?</p></blockquote>Well that explains a lot. I guess it's not the AA setting that improved performance for me.

[Openedge]

<cite></cite><blockquote><p><span style="color: #ff3366;"> <span style="color: #ffcc66;">However, triple-buffered VSync really is the key to the best experience as you eliminate tearing without the downsides of normal VSync (unless you consider the fact that your FPS is capped a downside... which is silly because you can't see an FPS higher than your refresh anyway).</span>I hope this was informative, and will help people understand the intracacies of VSync (and hopefully curb the "VSync, yes or no?" debates!). Generally, if triple buffering isn't available, you have to decide whether the discrete framerate limitations of VSync and the issues that can cause are worth the visual improvement of the elimination of tearing. It's a personal preference, and it's entirely up to you.</span></p></blockquote>Uh...big post....lol. I assume it all boils down to this last sentence really...I always play with VSync on, as otherwise, the tear on such a large screen and at 1920x1200 is just too much..The performance with no Vsync is also quite misleading, as it it pouring so much info at the screen, that the monitor can only display so much...reason for the tear...So...I just want to see a nice steady 60FPS which is the sweet spot for my LCD...and if I am hitting the low 20's which I do quite a bit in various areas (especially cities) then my gameplay experience is less than adequate...Thanks for sharing that....