Performance problems

[Sillie]

<p>Hi,</p><p>I've recently built what I believe to be a very fast system but having problems with EQ2:</p><p>Intel 2600k overclocked @ 4.9 GHz, 2 x ATI 6970 (yeah I know crossfire doesn't really work with EQ2!), SSD disk, etc.</p><p>So, I thought this would be ample for EQ2 run in very high quality, however, just wandering around generally nets me only around 20-30 fps, and whats strange is if I go to windowed mode I can even pick up a further 10fps or so!</p><p>If I attempt a group instance at this quality level my FPS drops to 9-10 fps !!!! I've tried disabling crossfire, but no difference there.</p><p>I have installed the latest directx 9 and latest catalyst drivers.</p><p>I'm running in 2560x1600 resolution.</p><p>Any ideas on whats wrong? Perhaps the resolution is too high, or maybe the game running faster in windowed mode might be some clue?</p><p>Thanks for reading.</p><p>Sico</p>

[Diamyr]

<p><cite>Sillie wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Hi,</p><p>I've recently built what I believe to be a very fast system but having problems with EQ2:</p><p>Intel 2600k overclocked @ 4.9 GHz, 2 x ATI 6970 (yeah I know crossfire doesn't really work with EQ2!), SSD disk, etc.</p><p>So, I thought this would be ample for EQ2 run in very high quality, however, just wandering around generally nets me only around 20-30 fps, and whats strange is if I go to windowed mode I can even pick up a further 10fps or so!</p><p>If I attempt a group instance at this quality level my FPS drops to 9-10 fps !!!! I've tried disabling crossfire, but no difference there.</p><p>I have installed the latest directx 9 and latest catalyst drivers.</p><p><strong>I'm running in 2560x1600 resolution.</strong></p><p>Any ideas on whats wrong? Perhaps the resolution is too high, or maybe the game running faster in windowed mode might be some clue?</p><p>Thanks for reading.</p><p>Sico</p></blockquote><p>Bolded your problem.</p>

[TSR-JoshuaM]

<p>20-30FPS at such settings and resolution sounds very reasonable.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p>I'm very interested in confirming this with the 2560x1600 since my next monitor purchase looks to be that (Hazro are launching a 27" IPS screen for £500 soonish... along with a bare bones one with no scalar for £400 <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Really wondering if the lower input lag will be better on the non-scalar model).  And I'm also looking at one of those ATI 6970's too to run it...</p><p>So my question is, if you run EQ2 at 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) on this monitor do you see any significant performance difference?</p><p>As to be honest I find it surprising the resolution would have such an effect, since if I drop from 1600x1200 to 1280x1024 I don't see any real big performance gains on my 22" CRT (a old Sony trinitron badged as a Sun monitor).</p>

[TSR-JoshuaM]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I'm very interested in confirming this with the 2560x1600 since my next monitor purchase looks to be that (Hazro are launching a 27" IPS screen for £500 soonish... along with a bare bones one with no scalar for £400 <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Really wondering if the lower input lag will be better on the non-scalar model).  And I'm also looking at one of those ATI 6970's too to run it...</p><p>So my question is, if you run EQ2 at 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) on this monitor do you see any significant performance difference?</p><p>As to be honest I find it surprising the resolution would have such an effect, since if I drop from 1600x1200 to 1280x1024 I don't see any real big performance gains on my 22" CRT (a old Sony trinitron badged as a Sun monitor).</p></blockquote><p>Resolution is one of the largest contributing factors to your overall FPS.  If you drop resolution and do not see a performance increase, the bottleneck wasn't in your video card.</p>

[Lalen]

<p>I have a diffrent setup but it is a higher end gaming system.  I generally hit about 20-30 fps on the over-zones and 50-60 indoors.</p><p>I don't know what the issue is with EQII in this but it does seem to have a lot more stutter than other (very) high-end games.</p><p>My system:</p><ul><li>AMD Phenom II x6 1100T Black Edition 3.30GHz</li><li>16 GB 1600 Memory</li><li>Winblows 7 Ultimate</li><li>2x 1TB hard drives (64mb cache) w/ Raid Striping (Raid0)</li><li>2x NVidia Raedon 570 GTX SLI Config</li><li>Screen Res 1920 x 1080 (HDMI)</li><li>DirectX 11</li></ul><p>All drivers are the latest.</p>

[Lalen]

<p><cite>TSR-JoshuaM wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I'm very interested in confirming this with the 2560x1600 since my next monitor purchase looks to be that (Hazro are launching a 27" IPS screen for £500 soonish... along with a bare bones one with no scalar for £400 <img src="../images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Really wondering if the lower input lag will be better on the non-scalar model).  And I'm also looking at one of those ATI 6970's too to run it...</p><p>So my question is, if you run EQ2 at 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) on this monitor do you see any significant performance difference?</p><p>As to be honest I find it surprising the resolution would have such an effect, since if I drop from 1600x1200 to 1280x1024 I don't see any real big performance gains on my 22" CRT (a old Sony trinitron badged as a Sun monitor).</p></blockquote><p>Resolution is one of the largest contributing factors to your overall FPS.  If you drop resolution and do not see a performance increase, the bottleneck wasn't in your video card.</p></blockquote><p>I think it would be a good idea t some point to make a change to the engine so that the UI can be displayed at a much higher resolution without also increasing the resolution of the textures (this is done in many games actually).  This would give the user the bennifit of having more screenspace without the performance hit of loading 2GB of textures into the video buffers =)</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>TSR-JoshuaM wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I'm very interested in confirming this with the 2560x1600 since my next monitor purchase looks to be that (Hazro are launching a 27" IPS screen for £500 soonish... along with a bare bones one with no scalar for £400 <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />  Really wondering if the lower input lag will be better on the non-scalar model).  And I'm also looking at one of those ATI 6970's too to run it...</p><p>So my question is, if you run EQ2 at 1920x1080 (or 1920x1200) on this monitor do you see any significant performance difference?</p><p>As to be honest I find it surprising the resolution would have such an effect, since if I drop from 1600x1200 to 1280x1024 I don't see any real big performance gains on my 22" CRT (a old Sony trinitron badged as a Sun monitor).</p></blockquote><p>Resolution is one of the largest contributing factors to your overall FPS.  If you drop resolution and do not see a performance increase, the bottleneck wasn't in your video card.</p></blockquote> <p>Well on my system with an AMD PhenonII 955 3.2Ghz and a ATI 4870 1Gb graphics card I can stand at the docks in the Moors of Ykesha at extreme settings getting 17-18FPS (shader 3.0, gpu shadows and every setting at the maximum, the only setting off is the range blurring thing) at resolution 1600x1280@60Hz. </p> <p>If I drop it downto 1024x768@60Hz I see absolutely no difference in FPS, so from that I guess my graphic card is overkill for the resolution I am running at.  If the original poster could do the same test it should give an idea if the graphics card is the bottleneck or not (e.g. stand on the second grate at the docks and swap the resolution between 2560x1440 and something much lower - if the FPS does not shift then I think the graphics card has been proven to be fast enough to cope).</p> <p>Although I expect the new video effects like Ambient Occlusion and the high quality shadows will scale with the speed of the graphics card, at least this would confirm though if the basic polygon rendering resolution is constrained by the graphics card or not.</p>

[Sillie]

<p>Thank you all for your comments so far, I'll run the Moors test later to see what FPS I get.</p>

[Sillie]

<p><cite>Sillie wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Thank you all for your comments so far, I'll run the Moors test later to see what FPS I get.</p></blockquote><p>OK, I've run the Moors test, not good at all!</p><p>Processor: 2600k @ 4.9 GHzRam: RipjawsX 2 x 4GBGraphics Card: 2 x 6970Operating System: Windows 7 x64Screen Resolution: 1920x1200 (high quality)Frames Per Second: In Windowed Mode=40, Full screen=25</p><p>Same test again in high quality but this time at 2560x1600 nets me 27 fps in full screen!!</p><p>CPU utilisation shows me plodding along at 8/19/30/34 (on four cores- I disabled Hyperthreading just to test). GPU utilisation at 42% on both cards.</p><p>Latest ATI drivers, clean installation of Windows.</p><p>Anyone have a Eureka moment, maybe, hoping? <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Something is slowing this thing down as the CPU and GPU are not maxed here.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p>I'm afraid I cannot think of anything here, the only thing I think your recent test has to me proved is that your high resolution of 2560x1440 is not the bottleneck here for performance, and your graphics card can more than handle it.  I'm starting to wonder if the bottleneck is purely ram accessing and EQ2 shifts a lot around.</p><p>This would then explain why the processor is idling a lot even when under heavy load since its waiting on ram access, its just a theory though.</p><p>But what puzzles me a lot here is why EQ2 for you is running so much faster in a window?  This seems a very big issue if something with the way it communicates with Windows is losing 30% of performance in full screen mode!</p><p>(By the way - thankyou for running that test, at the same time as proving the resolution is not the problem (at least to me) you've proved that graphics card can certainly handle the resolution there!</p>

[Rqron]

<p>Its not your video card, it is the responce time for updates from the eq2 servers..this has been tested over and over. I get tired of the same ole SOE mantra saying its the customers fault. That so reminds me of the internet providers help desk that know the system is out but put the user through hell telling them its your fault lets get over your setting.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Scharra@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Its not your video card, it is the responce time for updates from the eq2 servers..this has been tested over and over. I get tired of the same ole SOE mantra saying its the customers fault. That so reminds me of the internet providers help desk that know the system is out but put the user through hell telling them its your fault lets get over your setting.</p></blockquote><p>Low FPS has nothing to do with SOE's servers, or the user<->server machine response times, because the client updates the screen asynchronously to the server (hence if there is lag we see things jumping around).  All the client cares about is the 3D scene it is trying to render as many times a second as it can.So there is nothing that would hold up or slow down the users display update process involving the server.</p>

[Sillie]

<p>Hi again,</p><p>Thanks for everyones inputs so far, it really does help.</p><p>Aside from the fact that running in Windowed mode seems to increase the FPS (can't count the number of times I've reinstalled drivers, directX, etc!), I guess I'll just have to admit defeat, SOE & EQ2 can still beat up the latest and greatest processors (going by single core performance).</p><p>As much as a shame as it is, I guess the only way I'm going to get real good performance and quality at the same time in Everquest is to wait for Everquest Next (whichever year that might be!).</p><p>For anyone else out there reading this and think you can get great performance from upgrading your average performing PC purely for Everquest 2- don't bother, waste of money unless you play other (multi-threaded) games.</p>