Never satisfied with in-game performance, heeeeelp

[don]

<p>Evening all! Well, as the title suggests... I am never satisified with how the game performs on my system, and thusly I always end up cancelling. It's shallow of me, but part of me can't get past a game that chugs when it really shouldn't. I believe the furthest I have made it was a 37 barbarian, before cancelling last time.</p><p>My specs:Win7 64-bit4gb ram5870 gpuQ9650 (quad-core) o/c @ 4.4ghz</p><p>On balanced all the way up to very high settings, I get the same performance. usually 10-40fps. The game just feels... I don't know... wrong? I'm not sure how to put it, but because I know and have seen it perform so much better on worse setups, I somehow feel like my experience is lacking (again, i'm pretty shallow... but knowing that someone else is experiencing a much prettier and smoother game makes me want to have the same experience). </p><p>Maybe my system isn't strong enough?</p><p>I'm just reaching out for some help this time as opposed to cancelling right away - i'm a bit of a system tweaker and get frustrated when I can't figure these things out myself. I think I need some serious help on this one, i'm willing to try anything. Currently i'm running the most up-to-date driversets for both gpu and DX.</p><p>thanks!</p>

[don]

<p>Things i've tried:Multi-core settings ingame, no differenceShader 3.0, no noticeable difference in the starting areasCPU/GPU shadows - gpu shadows sometimes gave me much worse performance (in the fae starting area)Particle complexity draw-distance slider thingy, - didn't see any difference from ranges 10-70 (didn't try lower or higher)</p><p>On the graphics card specific settings, I have AA set to application, AF set to 16x, and catalyst AI set to complex.</p><p>PS, i'm running ati drivers 10.9 - I had a lot of coffee and feel like my vision is vibrating, which has nothing to do with anything, but perhaps explains why I said they were the latest...</p>

[Tuckir_Dout]

<p>What kind of performance are you looking for?</p><p>I run:</p><p>windows xp</p><p>4gb ram(note only 3 gb actualy gets used by windows xp)</p><p>dual core 3.0 ghz processor</p><p>geforce 9800 graphics with 1 gb ram</p><p>I generaly get between 20-40 fps even in densely populated areas. my game settings are on High quality. the game runs very smoothly, the graphics are excellent. From reading your post you get almost exactly the same performance as I am. My ISP is a company called skybeam; a very low quality internet that gives me about 400 kbps bandwidth. </p><p>I dont know what to tell you to make it better for you. i cant imagine what else you are expecting out of it other then what you are getting.</p>

[don]

<p>Well, i'd love your performance. When I head to any city, or any location with more then 2-3 players, I dip into the teens and stay there. I'd like to stay at 30+fps all the time. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> </p>

[Tuckir_Dout]

<p><cite>donkx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Well, i'd love your performance. When I head to any city, or any location with more then 2-3 players, I dip into the teens and stay there. I'd like to stay at 30+fps all the time. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /> </p></blockquote><p>lol, well you might try getting a new graphics card. one with ram on it, 1 gb cards can run around 100$. if you like ; here is a site you might try looking at <a href="http://www.microcenter.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">www.microcenter.com</a> they have great prices and just about everything you could ever possibly want for a computer.</p>

[don]

<p>The ATI 5870 was top of the line a year ago, and has only recently begun to drop in price. I paid $350 for it when I decided it was time to go from a 9800gx2.</p><p>I think what I'm trying to get at is, I have a great computer that can't play EQ2, but i'm pretty sure others out there have experienced similar! <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[don]

<p>Dang, wish I could edit posts. I wanted to add, thanks for the quick replies and help so far. I do appreciate it. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Morogoth Drakul]

<p><cite>donkx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>The ATI 5870 was top of the line a year ago, and has only recently begun to drop in price. I paid $350 for it when I decided it was time to go from a 9800gx2.</p><p>I think what I'm trying to get at is, I have a great computer that can't play EQ2, but i'm pretty sure others out there have experienced similar! <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>Geforce 465 is what I have. In window mode 1680x1050 I tend to get anywhere from 20-30fps sometimes it dips down lower and in a warfield with as many people lagging up the place as there is i will get maybe 8fps. In fullscreen mode I get more around 30-60fps. Why the big difference? In Vista and Win7 fullscreen mode makes the OS not take up resources for rendering the desktop and such other stuff which may appear insignificant to you at first but those fps wont lie when you see em, they hog more then you think.</p><p><a href="http://www.nvidia.com/object/buy_now_results_ci.html?id=GFGTX465" target="_blank">http://www.nvidia.com/object/buy_no...tml?id=GFGTX465</a></p><p>also remember the game is high CPU intensive but not completely dependant on it. never go with default settings such as "HIGH/EXTREME/BALANCE" doing so only makes you use resources that are better used in giving you better performance. some of those options can be turned down or completely off and you would not likely know it or miss it.</p>

[Kotoko]

<p>What's your motherboard's manufacturer?  Did it come with any "tweaking/overclocking" utilities, such as ASUS AI Suite II?</p><p>You're on windows 7, so fortunately you can really dig into the guts of what the game's doing.  Try this for me:</p><p>Run EQ2 in a window (just so you can have it running and in the background).  Open Task Manager, and go to the performance tab (the one with the cpu and memory usage graphs).  At the bottom you'll see a button labelled resource monitor.  Click that and it'll open up quite an improvement over previous versions of windows monitors (even vista's).</p><p>From here, you'll be able to watch your memory usage and peak usage, cpu usage and peak frequency (usage should be low, frequency should be HIGH), and disk read/write activity.</p><p>If you have extremely high disk activity (lots of reads and or writes), its an indicator that something in the background is definitely going on..most likely indexing or antivirus active protection doing its routine thing.</p><p>What we're particularly interested in is CPU.</p><p>Usage indicates exactly that...how much cpu is being used.  Maximum frequency indicates what speed the cpu's RUNNING at.  100% means it's operating at its "listed" frequency.  If it's over 100%, its running slightly over-spec (think 3ghz running at 3.1ghz or so), and if it's significantly under 100% (like 80% or so), it means its actually in power save mode.</p><p>In the CPU TAB (not the cpu dropdown list on the overview tab), you'll want to sort by process name, scroll down to the EQ2 process, and check the box to the left.  Then open up the Handles and Modules windows below the process list, and you'll see each handle and module that's specifically opened by the game.</p><p>Here, you can go down the handles and look for anything out of place, specifically, any file owned by your hardware manufacturers. </p><p>Sadly there's still no easy way to export this directly from that monitor aside from scrolling down and taking screenshots..but if you can somehow get that posted here, we can look over what files are being hooked by the game and see if the problem's in there.</p>

[Kaitak]

<p>In order to evaluate and verify performance it is useful to use a standardized test. A TSR has set up a test everyone can do so we can share performance of our systems and see if people are experiencing a performance hit due to hardware or if their system falls in line with others.</p><p><a href="http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=444036">http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...topic_id=444036</a></p><p>My system does 62 fps on the test, my post is on page 10.</p>

[Shareana]

This post has moved: <a href="/eq2/posts/preList.m?topic_id=445320&post_id=5487752" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">/eq2/posts/preList.m?topic_id=44532...post_id=5487752</a> Constructive posts please <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />

[Peogia]

<p><cite>Shareana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>This post has moved: <a rel="nofollow" href="/eq2/posts/preList.m?topic_id=445320&post_id=5487752" target="_blank">/eq2/posts/preList.m?topic_id=44532...post_id=5487752</a> Constructive posts please <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></blockquote><p>deleting post with out reason abusing power? nice corruption in this franchise</p>

[TSR-JoshuaM]

<p>Let's not jump to conclusions.  If anyone needs any direct help you can ask me or PM me as well.  I will be a presence on this board from here on out.</p>