Smoothing out Performance

[NrthnStar5]

<p>MSI 975X Platinum Power Up Edition mobo</p><p>Intel Core 2 E6600 (running at 2.86ghz)</p><p>4 GB DDR2 Ram 800mhz</p><p>evga GeForce 8800GT </p><p>Creative X-Fi </p><p>Now, When I play EQ2, running around open expansive lands performance is pretty good, depending on location of course.</p><p>My main gripe about performance is when you are around a group of NPC's... For example, when you are a newbie in Timorous Deep, several of the quest hubs are gazebo like structures with several NPC's standing about. When I go into an area like that performance is very stuttery, dropping to fps of 15-25. Is there any specific settings that allow to keep the graphical quality high yet smooth out performance so it isn't such a stark contrast?</p>

[TSR-TrevorG]

Shaodws, specular lighting, and flora will all cause dramtic issues in framerate if you turn these down or off.

[NrthnStar5]

<p>Shadows are off (Though for a 3 year old game, I shouldn't have to turn them off), Specular lighting is on , turning that off makes quite a bit of difference thought...</p><p>I have flora all the way up but I never noticed that to make much difference in FPS, flora displacement is off.</p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>I tried turning off Specular lighting, made no difference FPS wise. </p><p>What I am talking about here is the major dips in FPS when running around a city or town/hub. For example, when calling home I zone into TD at the docks, when running through that area my fps spikes up and down ranging from upper teens to middle 20's. When I just stand there i'll hover between 28-33 give or take. I hate running through TD and getting the spikes, I want to make it smoother, less choppy.</p>

[Nail]

I have basically the same problems in TD , its not really noticable in the older areas though. And Ive tried turning off / down things like shadows , spec lighting , flora and it makes no diff in framerate. I can stand on the island at the newb area in TD and get around 45fps on Very High but if I walk around it dips into the 20's and sometimes teens.Intel Core2Duo e8400 (3ghz , 6meg cache)4gig memoryAti HD2900XT 512meg

[TSR-DanielH]

If you're experiencing this you may want to try turning down the max number of characters rendered, especially the high quality versions(there should be separate sliders for each in the performance options). It sounds like your game is slowing down as it loads new character models. Since the NPCs are so dense in that area it could be that its drawing characters that are off screen or somewhat far away from you. Turning those options down will definitely improve performance to some degree.

[NrthnStar5]

<b>TSR-DanielH - Have you seen what the low quality players looks like?? They are horrible. I currently have my high quality characters set to 6 since that is a full group size and I'd like to see all my groupmates in high quality. This game is going on  4 years now... shouldn't really have to set things so low just to get smooth gameplay right?</b>

[Cassea]

In new zones they bumped up the graphic detail. What is your framerate in older zones?25-30fps in a crowded new zone is actually quite good and in line with other MMORPG's of similar graphic quality. You can't compare WoW as that game uses dumbed down graphics so obsolete computers can play the game but try Vanguard, Lotro or AoC and you'll get about the same aside from one serious failing that EQ2 currently has.... Shadows.Shadows (no one seems to know why LOL) are done on your CPU instead of your video card. This is why shadows takes a huge hit in EQ2. No matter how fast your CPU is, a cheap video card can do shadows faster.In Qeynos with my AMD 2x core 3100mhz with an Nvidia 9600GT video card I get about 30-45fps depending on how many people are near me and this is with shadows. When I go to a new zone this number drops from 5-10fps because SOE bumped up the graphics.Yes I agree that it should be better but as good as Lotro's graphics are (and I still use that game as the MMORPG benchmark regarding graphics) you still get studdering in towns near a ton of people because of the way that game works in regard to no zoning and having to load textures on the fly. EQ2, IMHO, is much better off with zoning as I am less bothered with a 10 second zone time and then relatively smooth play rather than near constant slight hitching that occurs in games that are zoneless.Sorry I got off the track a bit but your fps is actually pretty good and you have a sweet system per your listed specs. I wish everything was perfect but we all suffer from wanting the very best graphics but we have to realize that high resolution and turning everything up has a cost and this is lower fps. If we dropped the resolution down and lowered the graphics then we all could get 40+ fps sustained but I still remmember with EQ2 first came out and most people were happy to have a system that could handle "some" medium graphics settings and this was at the then standard 1024x768 resolution.Today that resolution is 1280x1024 or even higher and most people are able to play with settings much higher than medium.I'm playing at 1680x1050 with an average fps of 35-40 so I really can't expect much more.I will give a clue though... my fps increased 10fps (I'm running Vista) when I installed the free Creative Labs Alchemy program for my CL sound card. You see without this program your CL sound card runs in emulation mode that really slows down the game. With this Alchemy program it will translate the EQ2 "Directsound" code that Vista does not support into something Vista can understand and use "hardware" sound instead of software sound.See if that helps. It's increased my FPS about 25%!-JB

[NrthnStar5]

<p>Thanks for the response Cassea. I would not have guessed the creative ALchemy program to make any difference but I will definitly give that a shot.</p><p> I play Lotro as well and I've also played Vanguard and AOC. Of course slow downs are expected in populated areas. The difference that I've experienced with the above games compared to EQ2 is that with EQ2 there are spikes in FPS that cause alot of stuttering. </p><p>Lotro can be a little hitchy but overall the experience is alot smoother even when fps is in the 20's. EQ2 just seems alot more stuttery (if that is a word lol) in those scenarios then other games, so I just want to try to smooth that out. </p><p> I will try the creative ALchemy though, hopefully that makes things even better!</p>

[Nail]

I understand that in all mmo's when a new exp is released that area has higher quality graphics as the dev's have pushed the engine farther , but to compare I can run Vanguard on max settings and get the same general performance , acctually better in vanguard than in TD.

[Cassea]

<cite>Nailuj wrote:</cite><blockquote>I understand that in all mmo's when a new exp is released that area has higher quality graphics as the dev's have pushed the engine farther , but to compare I can run Vanguard on max settings and get the same general performance , acctually better in vanguard than in TD.</blockquote>Yes but Vangard is a new game that came out 5 years after EQ2. As such it can take advantage of multi-core CPU's and uses the full feature set of modern video cards. Many of the features that modern video cards support did not even exist over 5 years ago. Multi-core CPU's did not exist. Vista did not exist.What this means is twofold:1. It's not fair to compare a new game engine to one written 5+ years ago.2. EQ2 needs a full graphics engine revamp!We all seem to automatically assume that a game that is over 5 years old should run faster because it's old but in this case the Star Wars Galaxies graphics engine that is the base of EQ2 was created to scale up and get better and better over the years. If Sony would have guessed on a few points a bit better (mainly programed the game to be mulit-core aware) and we would not be having this discussion.Original system requirements:Windows 98Pentium 3 1000mhz (about half the speed of a P4 2000mhz or AMD 2000+)0.5 gig RAMWe hit the brick wall at the 6000+ mark in regard to CPU speed or 6x the speed.So Sony "assumed" that CPU speeds would just keep going up and up and up and for years they did. As the years moved forward we moved from 800x600 to 1024x768 ro 1280x1024 to 1680x1050 or even 1600x1200 resolution. The game looked better and better each year as hardware improved until something happened.CPU and Video Cards no longer used "brute force" to get faster as they have done for years. CPU's added more cores and video cards changed how they output graphics. Instead of video cards using a general purpose pipeline that worked for everything, they added specialized pipelines for doing special effects.The EQ2 game engine does not take full advantage of these new pipelines as these pipelines did not exist when teh game was made.So all this talk means one thing... EQ2 needs some serious loving and needs it now! As people upgrade to faster multi-core systems they expect a faster game performance. They expect EQ2 to "try" and keep up with the new techs of today. I love EQ2 and I hope and pray that they are given the freedom (and $$$) to be able to at least rewrite much of the game core to bring it up to the current standards.I hope some of the excellent programmers that created the game engine are still around. My fear is that they are long gone and that it will be near impossible to rewite portions of code that has to be numbered in the multi-millions as far as lines of code.-JB

[Pitt Hammerfi]

<p>The number 1 performance issue with eq2 over the 3 years i have been playing is.... wait for it...</p><p>----Complex shader distance----</p><p>Setting this to -1 will turn off shaders, which includes things like lighting, specular, shadows.</p><p>You can have everything in the game set to max, textures, number of high detail characters etc etc as long as complex shaders are switched off.</p><p>In a raid or crowded areas with complex shaders on, you can expect 5-20fps, with it off expect 30-80+</p><p>I would like to see EQ2 one day sort out the shader programming, because its not very efficient, and has a Huuuge performance impact. </p>