about dualcore

[askestad]

is EQ 2 ever going to take advantage of dualcore?

[EnderBeta]

I for one wish it would, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[askestad]

I may reframe the question to : is this a realistic question at all...meaning is it possible? I saw some post where this issue was one of the top issues for EQ2 players...so im starting to think that maybe its just to much work or not a very realistic goal at all for the EQ2 engine

[Wingrider01]

this has been asked a number of times, it has been responded to also. Try searching the current threads

[Deathspell]

<cite>askestad wrote:</cite><blockquote>I may reframe the question to : is this a realistic question at all...meaning is it possible? I saw some post where this issue was one of the top issues for EQ2 players...so im starting to think that maybe its just to much work or not a very realistic goal at all for the EQ2 engine</blockquote>Technically it is possible, but I wouldn't say it's realistic because EQ2 is an old game and probably has no "future preparations" or whatever in the engine and therefor it's unlikely to happen.Unfortunately this is not as simple as releasing a patch, but it depends on how much they "prepared" the engine and how much they are willing to invest in it.EQ2 was released in a time of single core CPU's (2-3GHz), in the future the game was supposed to run on single cores of 4GHz, 5GHz, 6GHz... but that day never came since it all suddenly changed into multi-cores.Add to that that the playerbase of the existing (older) MMORPG's will get hit by the release of the new MMORPG's like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, it's just too late to justify the costs, but that's just my 2 cents.

[Cassea]

Sure they could if they wanted. In EQ1, over 6+ years, they ended up rewriting lots of code one piece at a time. Running on one core would not be as big of an issue if SOE rewrote some of the graphics engine to actually use our video cards instead of running the same code at less than 10% of the speed via CPU.IMHO if they just moved some of the code to where it belongs, the video card, they would not have to worry about multi-cores. Why did they program graphics on the CPU instead of the Video Card? Well I'm just speculating but I would "guess" that it's because back when the Star Wars Galaxy engine was being written (EQ2 runs on a modified SWG engine) people did not expect the graphics that we have become accustomed to today and SOE figured that CPU's would just keep getting faster (which they did to a point) instead of moving to less speed but more cores.SOE "guessed" wrong <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />It's also easier to program for basically two versions of a CPU (with near identical functions) instead of a multitude of video cards so they placed "basic" video functions in the game and made the rest run via your CPU. Tunning off shadows and such to get better speed was acceptable years ago... not today. Add to this the average resolution people played back then was 1024x768 with many people still using 800x600. Today most people are running at 1280x1024 or higher and look at this:800x600 requires your system to pump out 28.8 million pixels per second for 60fps1024x768 requires your system to pump out 47.4 million pixels per second for 60fps1280x1024 requires your system to pump out 78.6 million pixels per second for 60fps1680x1050 requires your system to pump out 105.8 million pixels per second for 60fps1600x1200 requires your system to pump out 115.2 million pixels per second for 60fpsSo you can see that when EQ2 came out that maybe it was acceptable to run these things on the CPU but it could be said that the calculations needed for shadows, for example, are the same no matter what the resolution.Well no matter the reason the fact is that SOE was "very" shortsighted and while they really made EQ2 into a fun game, they have shorted us on technical improvements. If they only rewrote a few core graphics functions to place them on the video card we could stop talking about multicores.-JB