When will the CPU bottle neck be fixed?

[Lalen]

<p>Ok, QA, devs, Dave, etc, you guys have all been avoiding this question even at FF and was even written off.  First of all, allow me to correct you, EQ2 bottlenecks on any 3x threading CPU and this needs to be fixed.</p><p><img src="http://michael-wells.net/files/2011/08/bottleneck-proof.jpg" /></p><p>(below image added, I noticed when I took the screenshot, the GPU stepped itself down becuse it wasn't being used, so in case a dev tries to point to that as being the issue, the below screenshot shows that when the GPU is forced into a max power state, the issue remains the same.)</p><p><img src="http://michael-wells.net/files/2011/08/bottleneck-proof2.jpg" /></p><p>Lets examine this a bit, a GeForce 570 should run this game @ least 40fps in any situation, I have 2 running SLI (in the pic above, it is running single for those "SLI makes it run slower" believers).</p><p>What do we see here exactly?  Well take a look first at the GPU meter, the GPU's core clock is running at only 48% utilization and the game @ 24fps.  Why?  The answer is in the CPU meter.  Lets look... Core 1 100%.... Right there, that is the problem.  At no time should a cpu have only one maxed core with the rest near idle (or near idle), espcailly a game that boasts multi core support in the Options menus.</p><p>This is an issue that could be fixed fairly quick and make a lot of people with new pc's very happy.  How do I know? EQ1 was designed without the ability to multi-thread, however, when a user forces CPU affinity to all cores when running EQ1, the game runs at a load-balenced 20-30% across this computer allowing the GPU to run at a comfortable 98% and a whopping 182FPS.  EQ2 has no excuse not to be running with thread balencing in a multi-core enviornment.</p><p>NVidia rates EQ2 as a Certified SLI game, so everyone knows, when running in SLI mode, the exact same behavior is present, except the GPU's are down around 20-25% utilization.</p><p>Again this is a CPU bottleneck and no multi-core CPU running faster than 2Ghz should ever bottleneck with this game.  I'm frankly disappointed that this issue was not fixed with the last UD and makes me very apprehensive when considering the purchase of another 50 dollar expansion when there are so many other MMO's that are designed to work with multi-core CPU's.</p>

[Gaige]

<p>EQ2 isn't really multi-threaded though, and it doesn't utilize SLi anyway.  I quit worrying about GPU upgrades a long time ago and focused on core speed and I can play this game with everything maxed except CPU shadows with a 2600K @ 4.8Ghz.</p>

[Lalen]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>EQ2 isn't really multi-threaded though, and it doesn't utilize SLi anyway.  I quit worrying about GPU upgrades a long time ago and focused on core speed and I can play this game with everything maxed except CPU shadows with a 2600K @ 4.8Ghz.</p></blockquote><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html" target="_blank">http://www.slizone.com/object/slizone2_game.html</a></p><p>It is certified by Nvidia (SLIZone is NVidia) as a SLI ready game.  The game does indeed utilize it, else when I /ex and switch to SLI rendering in the Nvidia Control Panel, I would get the same GPU utilization on the primary GPU.  Instead the utilization drops in half on the primary and the secondary takes up the rest, but it runs at the exact FPS, which is evident that there is a huge CPU bottleneck issue.</p><p>This means, if the bottleneck issue were fixed and the devs simply allowed the game's core rendering engine to run across all cores (its simply that EASY to do, one single line of text in the source code), a SLI'ed GTX460+ computer could run this game at over 100fps with ease.</p><p>I agree, ther eis no multi-threading in EQ2 which is a huge issue with all new PC's having at LEAST a quad core processor, which is a very dangerous trend, because when you add more cores, the core speeds are reduced (for heat and voltage issues).  This means that with EQ2 the way it is, as technology in CPU's advance, EQ2 falls further and further behind.  When a 2.5Ghz x8 CPU comes out, EQ2 will most likely not even run past 10fps without everything turned to minimal.</p>

[Gaige]

<p>Certified for SLi just means there a profile, it doesn't mean the profile utilizes dual GPUs in a worthwhile way.  It basically means you can run SLi without crashing (hopefully).</p><div><p><cite>Lalen@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Instead the utilization drops in half on the primary and the secondary takes up the rest, but it runs at the exact FPS, which is evident that there is a huge CPU bottleneck issue.</p></blockquote><p>Right.  All SLi does is this game is split the load over the two GPUs, it doesn't actually utilize SLi, as I said.</p></div><div><p><cite>Lalen@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I agree, ther eis no multi-threading in EQ2 which is a huge issue with all new PC's having at LEAST a quad core processor</p></blockquote><p>No one knew that multi-core was the future in 2000, when this game was in development.  At the time Netburst P4s were the big deal and they were ramping up clockspeed like crazy so this game was designed with that in mind which is why it runs so good on processors above 4Ghz.</p></div>

[Lalen]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Certified for SLi just means there a profile, it doesn't mean the profile utilizes dual GPUs in a worthwhile way.  It basically means you can run SLi without crashing (hopefully).</p></blockquote><p>What I'm getting at, it would use it in a worthwhile way if EQ2 had no CPU bottlenecking issues.  Using the ASUS overclocking tool and boosting up core 1 to 4.8Ghz (and reducing core 5 & 6 to 2.0ghz) while EQ2 is playing, GPU0 goes up to 26%, GPU1 goes up to 23%... Overall framerates are improved by 8FPS. There is no louder prophecy that the game is bottlenecking on modern machines than that.</p><p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><div><p>Right.  All SLi does is this game is split the load over the two GPUs, it doesn't actually utilize SLi, as I said.</p></div></blockquote><p>.... This is exactly what SLI is... Two cards share both GPU load and video buffers and output a completed scene to one monitor (in single display mode).  There are some other types of SLI that may not work, for instance, dedicating a card to Anti Aliasing, or physicx, yes these do not work as EQ2 doesn't yet support those technologies from a driver forced prospective.</p><p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><div><p>No one knew that multi-core was the future in 2000, when this game was in development.  At the time Netburst P4s were the big deal and they were ramping up clockspeed like crazy so this game was designed with that in mind which is why it runs so good on processors above 4Ghz.</p></div></blockquote><p>No one knew in 1997 when EQ1 was being developed that there would be multi-core CPU's -- yet EQ1 runs flawlessly if you force binding the cores through the task manager.  The fact of the matter is, they may not have known, but they changed the game from a hyper-threading game to a game that can offload some portions of the tasking to another core making it impossilbe for someone to forcefully bind the game to multiple CPU's (the programming right now actually and purposely FORCES the game not to!!!  In another words, it was programed after Multi Core PC's were marketed to DISALLOW a muti core pc to run the game on more than TWO cores).</p><p>Take a look at the affinity bindings here, this is without any modification:</p><p><img src="http://michael-wells.net/files/2011/08/bottleneck-proof3.jpg" /></p><p>For a game that does not support multi-threading it is sure tricking the OS into believing that it is!</p>

[Gaige]

<p>/shrug</p><p>I seriously doubt you'll get what you're hoping for... look how shader 3.0 went.</p>

[Lalen]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>/shrug</p><p>I seriously doubt you'll get what you're hoping for... look how shader 3.0 went.</p></blockquote><p>Hope can be a powerful mindset <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p><p>I agree, SM 3.0 had a LOT of potential, but I've completely given up on it and am no longer sending in screenshots and bug reports a they're just being ignored entirely by the dev team no matter who submits the reports.</p><p>GermInUSA "was" working on them, but no one has seen him around in a while, and not the first SM3.0 fix has been released since March.</p><p>As of right now SM 3.0 lighting is horrid -- max 5 lights per scene (confirmed) is just way too few for housing and places like kelethin and especailly when using darkness shading/detection.  All in all, SM3.0 isn't worth turning on in any senerio any longer <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" /> and would be simpler and lighter on the patches if it were just removed all together.</p>

[wullailhuit]

<p>When eqnext comes out , sad , but more than likely true 8(</p>