Goal: Max settings. Any zone. >30fps

[Kokus]

<p>One thing I've always wanted to do, is be able to play any game at max settings.  Particulary Everquest.  I built my first machine to play Everquest.</p><p>In EQ it was very easy to have playable frames at "max settings":</p><ul><li>AMD K6-2 400mhz</li><li>128 mb sdram pc100</li><li>Ati Rage 128</li><li>Asus mobo</li><li>Windows 98se</li></ul><p>But when Kunark came out, this system miserably failed.  Most blamed it on the "wiggling trees"</p><p>So I upgraded:</p><ul><li>AMD K7 700mhz</li><li>512mb sdram pc133</li><li>Ati Rage Fury Pro</li><li>Epox mobo</li><li>Windows 98se</li></ul><p>This was fine for awhile.  I left EQ, and played other games for awhile.  When Warcraft 3 came out, and I started having difficulties.. I upgraded again..</p><ul><li>AMD Athlon XP 2100+</li><li>512mb ddr400</li><li>Ati Radeon 8500</li><li>Epox 8rda</li><li>Windows XP Pro</li></ul><p>This made short work of Warcraft 3. And seemed to do fine for me.  I kept this machine.. and then I got invited into EQ2 beta.. Wow.. Absolutely crippling.  I immediately had to upgrade, but not the entire computer</p><ul><li>AMD Athlon XP 3000+</li><li>2x512mb ddr400</li><li>Ati Radeon 8500 (overclocked the core and memory by 25mhz)</li><li>Epox 8rda</li><li>Windows XP Pro</li></ul><p>This helped.. it helped me actually be able to walk around the cities.. or zone into Solusek's Eye.. but it wasn't enough.  I could walk around Qeynos, but it was very painful and slow.  I knew that I needed to get a new computer so I went for it</p><ul><li>AMD Athlon 64 3500+</li><li>2x1gb ddr400</li><li>Nvidia 7800gt</li><li>Asus A8N-sli</li><li>Windows XP Pro</li></ul><p>Still.. I was quite surprised to see that I could not run the game on max settings, over a year after the game had been released.  Shadows were death.  So I took it a step further half a year later with that box.</p><ul><li>AMD Opteron 180 (2.4ghz dual core)</li><li>4x1gb ddr400 (only 3 used via 32bit OS)</li><li>2xNvidia 7800gt (sli)</li><li>Asus A8N-sli</li><li>Windows XP Pro</li></ul><p>Besides moving from 512mb to 1gig of memory, moving from the 3500+ to the opteron 180 was the single biggest performance increase I had seen.  But it still wasn't enough.  Max settings were still not playable.  Having all spell effects on didn't seem to hurt anymore.  Shadows were still death.  Especially treants, and spiders, and stairs outside of mistmoore castle.</p><p>I stepped it up once again last month.  I built a brand new machine, as my older 3000+ box died in February, and I used that comp as a web and file server.  One thing I did not get yet is a new video card.  Which will come into play at the end.  New computer:</p><ul><li>Intel E8400 (3ghz dual core)</li><li>4x2gb ddr800 (4-4-4-12 timings)</li><li>Gigabyte x48 DS4</li><li>Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate</li><li>Nvidia 7800gt (for now)</li></ul><p>So this new box is using one of my video cards I was previously running in Sli until the new Ati HD4870 comes out this week.  I'm going to grab just 1 for now, and later and 2nd for games that can utilize dual GPU's.  With the system as is.  Everquest 2 performance is sadly very close to my Opteron box.  I'd say it's better, but not much better.  Partly due to the fact that now I play on a 24" monitor in 1920x1200 instead of an 18" at 1280x1024.  I'm still unable to crank the game to max settings and have it stay above 30fps in any zone.  I'm not talking about raiding here.  Just walking around Qeynos Harbor, max settings, over 30fps.  What is it going to take?  Where is my bottleneck here?  I know the 7800gt is 2 generations old in the video card market, but it's no slouch!  The 7800gt unfortunately is a 256meg card, which I think may be causing part of the problem playing at 1920x1200, and as I said, I'm getting the HD4870 this week.</p><p>Will this do it? Will the high end new generation of video cards make the difference?  Will the goal finally be reached nearly 4 years after I started playing?  From switching between a Radeon 8500, to a Radeon 9800xt, to an Nvidia 7800gt, the difference didn't seem to make much of a difference in EQ2.  EQ2 seems like it's more CPU/memory dependent than anything.  Which has me pondering looking at going even more high end on the cpu, and then overclocking it on top of that.. but I want to wait on the hd4870 for now just to see where I stand.</p><p>Is anyone else as crazy as I am in this regard?  Anyone out there have a setup that plays this game at max settings over 30fps in all zones?  And I'm not talking average fps, I mean the fps never dips below 30fps.</p><p>Thoughts? comments?</p>

[Spyderbite]

I don't think the issues people have with performance are so much to do with "How much power" their computer has as it is "What kind of power" their computer has.My gf's computer is an XPS 720 with Dual Core intel procs, 2 gigs of ram and 256mb of video memory. I play at Very High Quality with satisfactory performance on it. However, I have a friend who went and blew $6000 on a high end gaming system. 4 gigs or RAM, quad proc, and about 1 gig total GPU. He can barely play beyond a tweaked High Quality mode. I don't think anyone has managed to narrow down the list yet as to what type of equipment run EQ2 the best but there is definitely a huge difference in performance on rigs that are similarily geared up as far as power goes, but different brands.I'm getting a newer version of my gf's computer next month. Same procs but Quad and 8 gigs of Ram and 1 gig GPU. Since its basically the same system I'm hoping I can pull off Extreme Quality for non-combat play.

[Grakkan]

I'm on an 8800GTS and a Quad core Q6600 and still can't get better than 30FPS either.64bit Vista Ultimate8GB DDR2 800 GSkill RAM150GB WD Raptor driveI too run a 24" monitor at the same resolution as well.

[Kokus]

<cite>Spyderbite@Venekor wrote:</cite><blockquote>I don't think the issues people have with performance are so much to do with "How much power" their computer has as it is "What kind of power" their computer has.My gf's computer is an XPS 720 with Dual Core intel procs, 2 gigs of ram and 256mb of video memory. I play at Very High Quality with satisfactory performance on it. However, I have a friend who went and blew $6000 on a high end gaming system. 4 gigs or RAM, quad proc, and about 1 gig total GPU. He can barely play beyond a tweaked High Quality mode. I don't think anyone has managed to narrow down the list yet as to what type of equipment run EQ2 the best but there is definitely a huge difference in performance on rigs that are similarily geared up as far as power goes, but different brands.I'm getting a newer version of my gf's computer next month. Same procs but Quad and 8 gigs of Ram and 1 gig GPU. Since its basically the same system I'm hoping I can pull off Extreme Quality for non-combat play.</blockquote><p>If I were to make an assumption as to why your friend with this $6000 machine who can only play at high quality, it probably would have to do with having a quad core cpu as.. well.. a quad core cpu costs more than a dual core, and are usually clocked at lower speeds than the dual core.. and since eq2 only uses 1 core... yeah..  I'm sure his machine rocks at other games though!  That was why I didn't go with the q6600 over the e8400 with them both sitting at about the same price.</p><p>If EQ2 took advantage of multiple CPUs/GPUs, I'm almost positive that all the performance issues that people have, would go away.</p>

[Miladi]

I can get over 30 FPS at almost max settings. I can set it to Extreme but I have to turn off shadows and flora to do it. I'd love to have shadows on, but they keep disappearing, and also knock off about 30-50 FPS when they're on. Cities on the other hand, I have to lower the graphics settings, or I'll crash out of the game with an out of memory error, and I only have 2GB of RAM. My system specs are in my signature.

[Arkinon]

First off its really not going to matter what your GPU is as EQ2 DOESNT really rely on it. It is CPU heavy... even the shadows that SHOULD be GPU are not. When the game was being developed SOE thought that CPUs would stay single core and that by this time we would be seeing 8-10 GHZ single core processors. Then pesky science stepped in and said umm no and chip makers divided the workload to 2 processors with multi threading technology. Now fast forward a couple of years and even the top end dual core processors are maxing out at 4 ghz and we now have quad core. This WILL ALWAYS be eq2s problem because they designed the game around technology that doesnt exsist instead of technology that was thriving... I mean what game company doesnt use utilize what a GPU has to offer. It was an assumption on SOEs fault and now we pay for it. This is on top of the memory leaks they caused with the memory update for vista, and then there is the crashing when you have all your settings maxed (probably from the same"fix&quot<img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> There is a rumor about them redoing the code so your GPU will take some of the stress but it wont be this xpac, and givin how long the skelly revamp has taken i will probably be playing another game by then. Side note is that EQ2 doesnt utilize dual core technology so it doest matter if you have a single double or quad, you will notice very little difference in gameplay. Dont forget there is also server side lag as well. So if the zone pop like in seb reaches a max amount then your going to get a slowdown not only from the amount of toons you have to render but because of the amount of info their server can handle as well. Vista is also part of the problem. There are many benchmark tests hat show Windows XP out performs Vista on most applications mainly because of the memory both cpu and ram that vista utilizes just for its os. There are a couple of things people can do. (and for the most part you have) First get a processor at at least 2.5ghz 64 bit, DC or QC. Get at least 3 gigs of ram. (the max that 32bit will recognize) or more if you get 64bit OS. Keep in mind it will subtract the size of you GPU from the total ram. Another problem with Windows. Also a faster RPM HD will help a little as well. Turn off shadows from solid objects like buildings and such (there is something about shadows that is bugged for memory usage that can cause you to crash if using a windows 32 bit OS.) You can leave Char shadows on, Set your spell particals to 1 per char (there are other settings you can adjust here as well), and turn off your targeting ring and glow effect on select. . Also Dont play in windowed mode. make sure all internet based applications are turned off such as IM and java. I have an AMD DC at 2.5, and 3 gigs of ram on a 7950 Nvidia 256. I run on nearly max settings with some custom tweeks for performance memory crashing issues for Windows 32 bit and run 30-40FPS in most areas and instances with around 15-20FPS in raids. This is with vent on as well. I also have a custom raid setting I switch to in zones like hate that can be laggy for raids that will bump me back up to 20-30FPS. Until SoE makes Some Core technology changes it wont matter how much of a gaming rig you have.

[orchard54]

I believe dual and quad core processors should have been created and sold for more business use, because lets face it, most home user PC's don't really need multi-cores. Not to mention game developers were doing just fine with single core games, then they get slapped with this mandatory technology change and have to figure out how to code games for this very different technology. Single core coded games were just starting to be almost perfectly coded and run swell on most people's systems!The list of games that utilize dual core is tiny, and I mean TINY! I think its safe to say that the creators of new hardware force change where it really isn't needed. Even on my old single core 2.2Ghz PC, I could run multiple tasks just fine, of course unless I was playing a game, but in that case I don't multitask when playing video games, I'm to busy playing the game! duh~But, since we or the game developers can't force what the hardware companies are doing, we are all forced to adapt. So unless SOE  (and any other game Dev) want to stay in this business, they have to bit the bullet and costs to produce/change their games to utilize current hardware. This issue has been brought up many times, and seems like it has been ignored completely. Even if a lead Dev announced that they will be working hard on utilizing the game for dual core, it would be enough to keep people anticipated until that comes out. So far, every day just seems farther and farther away from any change.