should i change my hardware

[Sluggo]

Here was my first setup.Resolution ix 1900x1200QX6700680i SLI2gigs of ram2 8800GTX's in SLISATA 10k rpm drives. 1kw power supplyCreative X-FIEven on balanced settings, the game was getting crappy performance.. would stick and stutter when turning no matter what zone i am inSo i overclocked to 4ghz on water...got a little better, but not much. So i am back on air.Then i Upgraded to XP64 and upgraded to 8 gigs of ram......No improvementUpgraded to Vista 64.. exact sameThen i decided to downgrade to an 850w psu because it was quieter......same performance. I even change the affinity of the cpu and make the game run o its own core with nothing else on it. If i turn the shaders off, the performance increases, but not much. heck even if i put it on max performance,, i still see a jump or 2.  But yet i can run call of duty 4, crysis, and assassins creed all on max settings and everything works great. I have seen systems that are half as powerfull as mine.. run the game better. What is the deal with it... i remember back in the old days...The game ran better with my old amd cpu and radeon x800....Does this game just not like nvidia?I am possibly planning on chaning out my mobo and also getting a radeon 4870.

[Aurumn]

IIRC there are issues with some of the 8800 series graphics cards. Other than that the only thing I can see offhand is maybe run a bit more than 2gb ram. I wouldn't go over 4gb though... no need to.

[Sluggo]

I already upgraded to 8gigs lol..no change in performance. I do a lot of 3d rendering and deal with huge files. So you think that maybe getting a 4870 or 2 would fix it?

[TSR-TrevorG]

I would like to give more information for you to go on with the 4870s, but I have no offical word on them from the compat lab yet.

[Sluggo]

what about the 3870's? Maybe it is just an nvidia problem and any ati card will work better

[Sluggo]

hmm i can get 2 4870s.... or i can get 2 4870x2s when they are available..... Dont think i will need 2 x2's though... just the 4870s will be fine

[Miladi]

On CPU intensive games, the QX6700 actually does worse than a C2D such as the E8400 (the chip I run) due to the fact that its only running at 2.6GHz per core. Adding more cores to the processor won't help a whole lot on a game that isn't using more than one at a time like EQ2. If you're comfortable with overclocking the CPU you might squeeze more frames per sec. out of it that way, rather than swapping hardware out. My E8400 (stock 3.0GHz) is running at 3.6Ghz with a modest OC and I have no issues from it. YMMV

[Sluggo]

i posted above that i have ran the game at 4ghz on water........Currently i am <a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a> on dual cascade phase change. Yep the game is single threaded and i know that more cores wont help. This game was written back in the days when it was a mhz race... not an efficiency race with cpu's...I guess they figured that by now, cpus would be stock at over 5ghz.Shadows are rendered on the cpu and so are some of the particles.... Now in some cases, GPUs are more powerful in terms of processing power. Doing a complete overhaul of the engine is probably not something that soe would want to do at this point. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.Possible fix!Last night i disabled SLI,, disabled DEP.I went into the bios on the 680i mobo... disabled CPU MaxVal, Disabled Thermal Control, Disavbled c1E Halt State, disabled execute disable bit.Before doing all of this, the game jerked and stuttered on balanced settings. After doing all of this,,,, i had it on extreme settings. I backed the shaders down to 25 and the game runs flawless now.......I even turned the cpu overclock off...going from 4.7ghz back to the stock 2.66ghz......and the amazing thing,,, the game ran the same... woohoo i guess.