Radeon 4770 / Phenom 9500 Issues

[Nillons]

<p>Here's the specs:</p><p>Radeon HD 4770 512mb</p><p>AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core</p><p>3GB DDR2</p><p>Vista 32bit</p><p>I'm getting pretty frustrated, I've looked around and seen people running similar rigs to mine at Very High Quality, etc, getting 40-50 fps... I can't even hit 50 FPS on Extreme Performance. I'm not talking about being in some crazy zone, I can be in the Guild Hall staring straight at the floor with nothing else in view, and those are the BEST results I can get.</p><p>When I take a look at ATI Catalyst while the game is running, half the time it's not even needing to bump up the clock speed, the fan is never above 40%, and the temp never raises more than 2 degrees. It's like it's not even using the video card.</p><p>Does ANYONE have any kind of advice? Any more info you need?</p><p>-Scuds</p>

[Maergoth]

<p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=462668" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=462668</a></p><p>^---- Try that</p>

[Nillons]

<p>Nope, didn't help at all. I don't know what it is, it's still not taxing my video card at all... On extreme performance I was messing around with some settings, and it seems like the rendering distance had the greatest impact on FPS, yet still does nothing to really get the video card going. Also, it looks like the game is only utilizing one core, even with multicore support checked.</p><p>This is really aggrivating, and actually very depressing that I have a cheap laptop that can run the game better than my nice desktop. Any help would be appreciated.</p>

[Tro]

<p>Couple things:</p><p>1. Did you recently add the video card or have you  been running it for awhile before this started to happen?</p><p>2. Have you confirmed the correct (Current) driver is installed? If so you can try older versions just to see if it is a specific driver causing the issues..  Remember to uninstall the current driver b 4 installing a different one.</p><p>3. Download GPU-Z and when you launch it it should show you graphics card model. If it does not then I would assume the card is not using the ATI driver but maybe the windows equivalent which of course probably isn't tailored to gaming of any kind.</p><p>4. If all that is in order then maybe the card is failing..</p><p>Although I use a NVidia card, I noticed my temps only go up like 2-3 degrees when running EQ2 on balanced.</p><p>Just my 2cp...</p>

[Maergoth]

<p>Very little of your graphics card will be used by EQ2, ever. The only way you can kick it on and make it work is to force advanced settings through the card itself (Anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, etc).</p><p>It's almost impossible for EQ2 to bottleneck on the graphics card otherwise. The problem is probably going to lie with your processor.</p><p>I ran EQ2 with an nvidia 5600 and noticed NO difference in FPS or performance compared to my 8800gt.</p><p>Another thing to mention is that EQ2 DOES NOT FULLY SUPPORT MULTICORE. There are very few things that are coded to work on other threads, one of which being animations. On a dual core processor, my first core was constantly at 50% usage, my second core would never go above 5%.</p><p>While running the game, check two things:</p><p><strong>Is your CPU reading core 1 as 100% usage? (25% if your checking over-all usage) </strong></p><p><strong>How much memory is the game eating up?</strong></p><p>Those are the two biggest factors when diagnosing lag</p>

[TSR-DanielH]

<p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Here's the specs:</p><p>Radeon HD 4770 512mb</p><p>AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core</p><p>3GB DDR2</p><p>Vista 32bit</p><p>I'm getting pretty frustrated, I've looked around and seen people running similar rigs to mine at Very High Quality, etc, getting 40-50 fps... I can't even hit 50 FPS on Extreme Performance.</p></blockquote><p>What happens when you set it to High Quality or above?  Typically, especially with ATI cards, your FPS will not scale directly with the quality level you select.  Someone who gets 40-50 fps on Very High Quality may only see a 10-20 fps increase when scaling all the way back to extreme performance.  At Very High Quality I imagine you would probably get around 30-40 FPS with that system.  What system are you comparing your computer against?  Is it a specific one you can point out from the performance sticky thread?</p>

[Nillons]

<p><cite>Maergoth wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><strong>Is your CPU reading core 1 as 100% usage? (25% if your checking over-all usage) </strong></p><p><strong>How much memory is the game eating up?</strong></p></blockquote><p>Right at 100% (96-100%) on the 4th core, with very little going on on the other 3 (10% combined tops)</p><p>Memory is showing at just under 2 gigs.</p>

[Nillons]

<p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Here's the specs:</p><p>Radeon HD 4770 512mb</p><p>AMD Phenom 9500 Quad Core</p><p>3GB DDR2</p><p>Vista 32bit</p><p>I'm getting pretty frustrated, I've looked around and seen people running similar rigs to mine at Very High Quality, etc, getting 40-50 fps... I can't even hit 50 FPS on Extreme Performance.</p></blockquote><p>What happens when you set it to High Quality or above?  Typically, especially with ATI cards, your FPS will not scale directly with the quality level you select.  Someone who gets 40-50 fps on Very High Quality may only see a 10-20 fps increase when scaling all the way back to extreme performance.  At Very High Quality I imagine you would probably get around 30-40 FPS with that system.  What system are you comparing your computer against?  Is it a specific one you can point out from the performance sticky thread?</p></blockquote><p>Any setting with the word "Quality" in it and I get less than 20 fps. Very High Quality gets me less than 10.  As far as comparing systems, I can't point out a specific one, it's just from looking around. My 3dMark06 score is 10200ish, which I would think is plenty good.</p><p>How much does actual network lag play a role? Any way to test this? What do the three numbers on the in-game FPS monitor stand for, and the graph actually mean? Thanks all.</p>

[Sydares]

<p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Maergoth wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><strong>Is your CPU reading core 1 as 100% usage? (25% if your checking over-all usage) </strong></p><p><strong>How much memory is the game eating up?</strong></p></blockquote><p>Right at 100% (96-100%) on the 4th core, with very little going on on the other 3 (10% combined tops)</p><p>Memory is showing at just under 2 gigs.</p></blockquote><p>Sounds familiar. <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Nillons]

<p>Installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and no change... Tried to add more RAM, but ended up with a bad stick, go figure... We'll see what that does, but I'm still confused as to why it is SO bad.</p>

[BDoodle]

<p>These are a few things that can help with performance, but will decrease visual quality:</p><p>First, changing the way Windows handles memory (globaly), namely configuring for a larger cache size, can give a slight boost to multicore performance. The effect may not be very visable in fps, but you can see, in Task Manager, that some of the load is taken off the main core running EQ2 and distributed to other cores.</p><p>Second, for a quick boost to fps, set texture resolutions to minimum. I've heard this called Gumby mode, cause it makes everything look like playdough blobs. But it's an easy way to quickly reduce the game memory footprint and gain some fps.</p><p>If you are looking at the performance graph/meters in Task Manager to find out memory usage, be aware that the graph shows page file usage, not physical memory usage. A better way to see physical memory usage is to use the Performance (System) monitor, a system administration tool. Using this tool you can monitor <strong>Memory, Available MBytes </strong>to see how much of your memory is available to be used by running processes.</p><p>{</p><p>If the foreground application, (EQ2 in this case,) load on your memory is greater than 50%,  the application will need to be constantly swapping out blocks of memory to the page file on your hard disk. Some figures will best show what this does to your application speed:</p><p>PC2-8500 DDR2-SDRAM (typical memory) data tranfer rate, 17GB/s</p><p>Serial ATA 3 (typical hard disk connection) data transfer rate, 0.6GB/s</p><p>You can easily see that you're going to get a performance hit as soon as the application reaches the point where it can't hold all the data needed at runtime in RAM.</p><p>(Intermediate solution available to Vista users - ReadyBoost - if you have a compatible USB memory stick. This moves some/all of your page file to the solidstate memory on the memory stick, which has faster access speed.)</p><p>}   // These are symptoms of a paging bottleneck, they may be part of what you are experiencing, but there may be more to these performance issues as well. I am continuing to look for ways to get better performance from this game, and will keep you up to date if I make any major breakthoughs.</p><p>BD</p><p>PS. I recently saw a review for a solid state storage device, (hard disk replacement,) that plugs into a PCIe slot, (PCIe data xfer, 8GB/s,) if you have a spare $30K.</p>

[Nillons]

<p>I did an 8GB ReadyBoost, seemed to help a little bit, maybe 3-4 FPS, but still nothing significant... I'll keep hoping... REAL multi-core support for the new expansion pack?</p>

[Sydares]

<p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I did an 8GB ReadyBoost, seemed to help a little bit, maybe 3-4 FPS, but still nothing significant... I'll keep hoping... REAL multi-core support for the new expansion pack?</p></blockquote><p>To dream the impossible dream. <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Trellium]

<p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I did an 8GB ReadyBoost, seemed to help a little bit, maybe 3-4 FPS, but still nothing significant... I'll keep hoping... REAL multi-core support for the new expansion pack?</p></blockquote><p>Multicore support is a non-trivial engine change. It's hard to design and optimize on a current gen game, let alone on one that was designed almost a decade ago.</p><p>We will likely see bits and pieces broken off to other cores and off to the video cards, which will help but won't scale automatically for two, three, four, six or eight core systems.</p>

[Nillons]

<p>Now running 16GB of ReadyBoost, and upgraded to 4GB of RAM.... Still crappy... This sucks.</p>

[Nillons]

<p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>  At Very High Quality I imagine you would probably get around 30-40 FPS with that system.  What system are you comparing your computer against?  Is it a specific one you can point out from the performance sticky thread?</p></blockquote><p>"Ati radeon 3870 HD</p><p>Phenom 9500</p><p>4 gigs of ram ( 800)</p><p>Can run on very high in groups with no problem at all. Extreme quality however, I have some issues in groups ( but not much solo). I wouldnt recommend running in extreme for any system, it isnt really needed since very high is still incredibly gorgeous."</p><p>This is from a different forum, but a similar system... My ram is a bit slower and video card is quite a bit better... Any advice? How much does network lag affect FPS?</p>

[Nillons]

<p>Ok, this has gotten a little unreasonable... I've been dropping down to <strong><em>6 FPS in Moors in VERY HIGH PERFORMANCE</em></strong> mode. There is some underlying issue here. I just purchased a new laptop and can run those same settings and same zone at 30+ FPS, so I have no clue what is going on. Suggestions?</p>

[Trellium]

<p><cite>Nillons wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Ok, this has gotten a little unreasonable... I've been dropping down to <strong><em>6 FPS in Moors in VERY HIGH PERFORMANCE</em></strong> mode. There is some underlying issue here. I just purchased a new laptop and can run those same settings and same zone at 30+ FPS, so I have no clue what is going on. Suggestions?</p></blockquote><p>Do you have shadows on? There is that current issue with GPU shadows. Trying to drop them to CPU might help, or turn them off.</p><p>But on very high performance, they default off as I recall.</p><p>No antivirus running? How about other background apps? I found that WinAmp hits my system pretty hard, but not like what you have (a big 6 second lag spike every 20 seconds or so). Just mentioning it to see what might be a cause.</p>

[Brook]

<p>Problem is you have a slow processor.</p><p>You cant really compare it to a similar system that happens to do well because of things like chipset manufacturers and firmware updates that are done to some chipsets and the compatibility of parts that make up the motherboard.</p><p>The Phenom 9500 is rated at 2.2 GHz, thats kind of a subpar speed for this game tbh, the amount of cores really doesn't make any notable difference with this game its the clockspeed thats king here. and while yours meet min requirements your never going to get much out of that chip.</p>

[Nillons]

<p><cite>Brook wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Problem is you have a slow processor.</p><p>You cant really compare it to a similar system that happens to do well because of things like chipset manufacturers and firmware updates that are done to some chipsets and the compatibility of parts that make up the motherboard.</p><p>The Phenom 9500 is rated at 2.2 GHz, thats kind of a subpar speed for this game tbh, the amount of cores really doesn't make any notable difference with this game its the clockspeed thats king here. and while yours meet min requirements your never going to get much out of that chip.</p></blockquote><p>Yet I have a 2.4 GHz laptop that runs FPS almost 3x higher in the exact same scenario. Does .4 GHz really make THAT much of a difference?</p>

[Brook]

<p>What screen res are you using on the desktop system. What screen res on the laptop?</p><p>You cant look at any one thing when you run into problems, without knowing your full system specs the best we can do here is pure speculation. To me, 2.2 GHz is not enough, drop a AMD 6000 x2 in that rig of yours and you would probably see 1.5 times the performance mainly because it runs at 3.0GHz, OR it might run even slower because your screen settings are to high , your chipset on your MB is garbage, you have a bad soundcard driver etc..</p><p>Personally I had a nice ATI card in my box and switched to Nvidia with half the memory the ATI card had and my framerates doubled, its not that either company makes a bad product, its that sometimes there are unknown compatibility issues in some of the stuff we run.</p><p>My wifes rig is running one of the new I7 cores with a slower processor than I have and even with onboard graphics her average framerate is between 75-90  on higher settings while mine is 35-50. Go figure.</p><p>Here is something to do, set everything to its lowest setting in game and bring up the settings one by one till you find something that looks acceptable to you and doesnt hit your framerate to bad.</p><p>Honestly anything at 30fps running without hitching is good, your eyes will not be able to tell the difference above 3o anyway.</p>