Graphic settings?

[Kaligorn]

<p>This game just runs bad.  I'm using:</p><p>ATI 4890 1gb</p><p>AMD 720 with 4 cores at 2.8ghz</p><p>Windows 7 Ultimate</p><p>Updated drivers</p><p>Sure, some areas are okay, but just seems like every where I go, if I turn at the right angle, I'll get drops in framerate below 30s, even with High Performance settings.  It looks terrible and runs not so good, or it looks great and runs horrendous.  What gives?  What settings should I be using?  I don't think it should be necessary to have a $2000 system to run a 5+ year old game with decent settings.</p>

[Seidhkona]

<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Complete Guide to Display Settings Options</span> <a href="http://tinyurl.com/EQ2Graphics" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/EQ2Graphics</a> A setting-by-setting guide to getting the best graphical performance out of EQ2.</p>

[Kaligorn]

<p>Is that guide still applicable?  It's 5 1/2 years old.</p>

[Ambrin]

<p>The two biggest increases to FPS are turning off fauna and shadows. Set complex shaders to 10m and turn down particle effects. You won't notice much visually, but you get a big boost in FPS.</p>

[Kaligorn]

<p>It seems to run the same either way. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" /></p>

[Seidhkona]

<p><cite>Kaligorn wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is that guide still applicable?  It's 5 1/2 years old.</p></blockquote><p>Yes, that guide is still excellent.</p><p>Shader 3.0 is about the only thing that isn't in the guide. Some people have good results with Shader 3.0, some not. To learn more, see the <a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=475005" target="_blank">comprehensive Shader 3.0 post</a>, specifically:</p><p style="padding-left: 30px;"><span ><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You will need a graphics card that supports 3.0 Shaders and more than 600 pixel shader instruction slots.  Generally, any ATI card equal to or greater than an HD 2400 will do and any Nvidia card equal to or greater than a Geforce 7000 series.  With the two cards listed you'll have to run the game with lower settings but you will still get to see a lot of the Shader 3.0 upgrades.  I would recommend a much more powerful card equal to or greater than the Nvidia 8800's to get decent frame rates at maxed settings.</strong></span></span></p>

[Rhak]

<p>It's because this 5 year old game is 75% CPU speed based and 25% GPU based (instead of flipped around like for 99% of the gaming market).</p><p>EQ2's engine was 'future-proofed' by believing that we'd have 12GHz single-core processors nowadays, instead of 3GHz quad-core processors (and limited graphic card power). Yes, the devs have done their best with GPU shadows and offering limited dual-core support, but the core engine is still heavily limited because of how it was designed ages ago.</p>

[woolf2k]

<p>High Performance setting is your best bet. </p><p>if your system can't handle the game at that level then you'll need a better system. like someone else said. this game is mostly cpu based and the advances made in gpu and multi cpu hasn't made much of difference in it's performance. </p><p>yep, sucks. </p><p>tweek the settings and try to find a happy medium between quality and performance and read the guide.</p><p>note: forget about shader 3 you'll take a fps hit if you use it.</p>

[Orlac]

<p>With the OPs system, the culprit is likely extraneous programs running in the background or using bandwidth.</p>

[Kaligorn]

<p>I wish I could agree.  When I play games, I have nothing else running, and I'm usually the only one, maybe two online at once with a 20mb/s fiber connection.  Besides, it's not a latency issue, it's a frame rate issue.</p>

[Armawk]

<p>I think you should be getting much better than that (I dont know much about your CPU but it should be more than up tot the task), and should be able to comfortably and smoothly run in very high quality pretty much untweaked anywhere but raiding. I mean you will always get momentary drops below 30 when you come across new content and it has to load it (large zone mmo with dynamic loading content) or when a lot of other players are around, but unless you watch framerate graphs for fun you should be unlikely to notice it in practice</p><p>One tip, may not be relevant. If you have cpu shadows enabled turn OFF environment shadows. For preference just use GPU shadows and CPU indoors. Maybe some tweaking downwards of particle affects too.</p><p>Another biggie for me is that I run EQ2 on my second hard drive, away from windows. i have found this is a good performance boost.</p><p>Also you say you have nothing else running, but you should check for unwanted processes, tray applications from adobe, apple, all that stuff as some of those thingds suck performance.</p><p>Also what anti-virus solution do you use?</p>