Performance or lack off. Why SOE?

[Xon_dk]

So I dont get it. I tried to contact SOE in an email.and all I got was some standard generic reply.What's up with that?All I simply asked was if Everquest 2 ever will get fixed and made up to date in terms of effective use of graphic cards and processors.Personally I'm a bit surprised that i'm stuck at high quality to get the best performance.  I <u>can</u> run at extreme quality but very unreliable and i'd say 'moody' in fps.Specs.Q6600 at stock speeds 2.4 ghzNforce 680i motherboard, specificly Asus P8N32 SLIGeforce 8800 GT.Processor power and graphic processing power that is more then enough to play crysis and all other games i've met at full graphics at 1280x960. Yet.. EQ2 lags here and there, horrible performance, performance that from reading the forum seems greatly to vary but in general those with higher mhz cpu's seem to get the best performance.I absolutely love the way EQ2 is set up, the environment, the way things work, as a game it rocks the socks off any other mmorpg i've played and i've played a lot.Yet performance wise, well, yeah.Is the big company Sony Online Entertainment really unable to do upgrades and performance fixes that a lot of other mmorpgs have done even the free one's? What's up with that. Is sony really uncapeable of this?

[Kain-UK]

<p>I suspect they just have al ot of other projects going on right now...</p><p>But I know a lot of people would love to see EQ2 use all RAM... think it's crashing at 2GB or so right now cos of the 32-bit limit? Not sure of the exact number. Getting rid of that would be great, as would the ability to use multi-core CPU's and dual-GFX setups. I know i'm considering a quad core, loads of RAM and a couple of GFX cards as my next upgrade as Crysis makes my computer cry on anything more than Medium settings. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Rattfa]

I have a 2.3 dual core, 4gb RAM and GeForce 8600...I can run the game at extreme quality with very little lag in most zones. (Qeynos Harbour, Terens Grasp area of KP and Timorous Deep being notable exceptions). I don't find it a problem.I generally play at that quality, most of the time. I raid with the Balanced setting. Funnily enough I cannot play Crysis at max quality because it lags <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/97ada74b88049a6d50a6ed40898a03d7.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" />

[Xon_dk]

hmmm, maybe, it is those 4 gb that somehow does the trick? even though eq2 seems to not even want to fill up 2gb of ram?

[Xon_dk]

<cite>Kain-UK wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>I suspect they just have al ot of other projects going on right now...</p><p>But I know a lot of people would love to see EQ2 use all RAM... think it's crashing at 2GB or so right now cos of the 32-bit limit? Not sure of the exact number. Getting rid of that would be great, as would the ability to use multi-core CPU's and dual-GFX setups. I know i'm considering a quad core, loads of RAM and a couple of GFX cards as my next upgrade as Crysis makes my computer cry on anything more than Medium settings. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" /></p></blockquote>32 bit os' limit at 4gb actually.

[vochore]

<cite>Xon_dk wrote</cite><cite></cite><blockquote>32 bit os' limit at 4gb actually.</blockquote>actually i think that if you are running xp home you are limited to 2 gb,s of ram...you need xp pro to run 4 gb,s

[Xon_dk]

<cite>vochore wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xon_dk wrote</cite><cite></cite><blockquote>32 bit os' limit at 4gb actually.</blockquote>actually i think that if you are running xp home you are limited to 2 gb,s of ram...you need xp pro to run 4 gb,s</blockquote>Possible, using pro myself. Still for some reason seems that those with 4 gb of ram get significantly better performance then 2gb users even though eq2 doesn't use 2 gb right?Kinda upsetting and annoying how everything else runs perfect in high on mine but someone with a weaker cpu and graphic processor get better performance.

[Zenith]

<p>Athlon 64 4400+ , 2gb Ram, 8800 GTX & Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz, 8600M, 2gb ram</p><p>Have to play at balanced just to move around and it stutters on both systems. I've tried XP, XP64, and Vista 32 with all similiar issues. Nothing else running, no spyware, etc clean installs each of them. The stutters even happen on extreme performance. On my older system with the 7800 GT SLI setup it actually performed better (though once again, eq2 + SLI = weird little shimmer lines scrolling down the screen. In JUST eq2 too.)</p><p>SoE's marketing team came up with that fancy "built for the future" slogan to cover up the really poor design of their 3d engine. Fact is the future came and went and instead of them taking the time to make the game support the now common future features (ex: dual cores, they're everywhere now. Laptops ship with em, desktops, they're pretty much the standard) the game actually tends to run worse for some folks on the newer gear. There's a few huge threads about the 8x00 series cards and stuttering, or people with dual cores getting really bad game performance.</p><p>SoE TSR's like to point fingers at everything else, it's your firewall/spyware/drivers/cloths/desk and whatever else. But lots of people with the newer stuff know their way around a pc, have everything else shut down, have the newest drivers, etc. Then the TSR's either ignore the posts or claim they have the identical setup at home and it runs great, kthxbye.</p>

[Dark_Grue]

<cite>Xon_dk wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>vochore wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xon_dk wrote</cite><cite></cite><blockquote>32 bit os' limit at 4gb actually.</blockquote>actually i think that if you are running xp home you are limited to 2 gb,s of ram...you need xp pro to run 4 gb,s</blockquote>Possible, using pro myself. Still for some reason seems that those with 4 gb of ram get significantly better performance then 2gb users even though eq2 doesn't use 2 gb right?Kinda upsetting and annoying how everything else runs perfect in high on mine but someone with a weaker cpu and graphic processor get better performance.</blockquote><p>I really hate this topic because it is a constant source of misinformation, much of which has been retold and repeated all over the Internet for a very long time now.</p><p>The available amount of memory addressing space is not, strictly speaking, an application issue. It starts with the hardware.</p><p>Large amounts of memoy addressing space above 3GB is reserved for the processor and other system components to talk with some devices by reading and writing memory addresses that exist between 3GB and 4GB. This is known as memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). For the MMIO space to be available to 32-bit operating systems, the MMIO space must reside within the first 4 GB of address space (see <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">KB 929605</a>). Remapping the MMIO space is <b>one</b> of several prerequisites for a 4GB system to be able to have all 4GB available (one of the others being the installation of a 64-bit operating system). OTherwise, you're stuck at around a little less than 3GB of memory available to the OS before you even start, regardless of the amount of actual physical memory installed. So, once you've started your 32-bit version of Windows with 3 or 4 GB pf physical memory, you're going to have about 3,120 MB of usable memory available.</p><p>Microsoft Windows NT (and it's derivatives, so we're talking NT up to and including Vista) have always provided applications with a flat 32-bit virtual address space that describes 4GB of virtual memory. The address space is usually split so that 2 GB of address space is directly accessible to the application and the other 2 GB is only accessible to the Windows executive software. So your application, in this case EverQuest 2, has 2GB of working memory available to it. Some commonly reported architectural limits in Windows include: </p><ul><li>2 GB of shared virtual address space for the system</li><li>2 GB of private virtual address space per process</li><li>660 MB System PTE storage</li><li>470 MB paged pool storage</li><li>256 MB nonpaged pool storage</li></ul><p>The above applies to Windows 2003 Server specifically (from <a href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418/en-us" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">KB 294418</a>), but also apply to Windows XP (including Home) and Windows 2000.</p><p>At this point usually the boot.ini parameters /3GB, <a href="http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/edc9f27d-76fb-4139-9555-20acc684c3af1033.mspx?mfr=true" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">/4GT </a>and /PAE often come up. They are all useless to you, and you do not want to use them regardless of how many completely anecdotal reports there are out theer regarding thier success. /3GB and /4GT are config settings for different versions of Windows that tell the operating system to change the partitioning of the 4GB 32-bit <i>virtual</i> address space so that applications can use 3GB and the OS kernel only 1GB, as opposed to the standard 2GB-each arrangement. It doesn't affect the 32-bit limit of 3GB of addressable <i>physical</i> memory issue, and most applications can't even utilize the additional space (one of the prerequisites is the application uses IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the process header), so all you are doing is needlessly sacrificing kernel memory space (for every applications virtual memeory space) for no actual gain at all.</p><p>The /PAE boot.ini switch, activates the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Physical Address Extension</a> mode that's existed in every PC CPU since the Pentium Pro. That mode cranks the address space up to 64 gigabytes (2^36), and the computer can then give a 4GB addressing block within that space. But this still doesn't help the 3GB-limited user for two reasons:</p><ul><li>First, it presents 64-bit addresses to system drivers, which causes the same compatability problems as a proper 64-bit OS, since now you must have PAE-aware 32-bit system drivers (which aren't common), instead of just plain-old 64-bit drives on a 64-bit OS (which, are starting to become more common, but are not nearly widely available for many common peripherals). You basically end up with even worse compatability problems that you'd have attempting to run a 64-bit version of windows, with all the disadvantages of a 32-bit OS; the biggest of which is that you still only have 3GB of addressible physical memory.</li><li>Second, for this reason, Microsoft changed the behaviour of the /PAE option in almost all versions of WinXP as of Service Pack 2 by disabling it entirely. This solved an endless amount of driver compatibility problems that existed with PAE, and limits all but the 64-bit versions of windows to a 4GB virtual addressing space for applications.</li></ul><p>The only way you're going to (reliably) have more that 2GB of usable addressing space available to applications is you must first have:</p><ul><li>A motherboard chipset that supports at least 8 GB of address space (e.g. Intel 975X, P965, 955X on Socket 775, Socket F, Socket 940, Socket 939, Socket AM2).</li><li>The CPU supports the x64 instruction set.</li><li>The motherboard BIOS supports the memory remapping feature and the feature is enabled.</li><li><b>An x64 version of Windows</b></li></ul><p>The last bullet point also implies that you have suitable 64-bit drivers for all your system devices as well. Until 64-bit operating systems are more commonly supported in the consumer marketplace, and driver support is ubiquitous, SoE cannot realistically rely upon or utilize the additional memory. Consumers running truely 64-bit operating system environments are barely even a blip on the graph in terms of market space right now for games manufacturers.</p><p>That doesn't excuse the current performance and archetechture of the game - there is still plenty of problem areas that can and should be addressed. The answer to fixing a memory leak <b>isn't</b> to throw more memory at it. It doesn't fix the leak, it just gives you a little more time before the leak buries you!</p>

[vochore]

<cite>Dark_Grue wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xon_dk wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>vochore wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Xon_dk wrote</cite><cite></cite><blockquote>32 bit os' limit at 4gb actually.</blockquote>actually i think that if you are running xp home you are limited to 2 gb,s of ram...you need xp pro to run 4 gb,s</blockquote>Possible, using pro myself. Still for some reason seems that those with 4 gb of ram get significantly better performance then 2gb users even though eq2 doesn't use 2 gb right?Kinda upsetting and annoying how everything else runs perfect in high on mine but someone with a weaker cpu and graphic processor get better performance.</blockquote><p>I really hate this topic because it is a constant source of misinformation, much of which has been retold and repeated all over the Internet for a very long time now.</p><p>The available amount of memory addressing space is not, strictly speaking, an application issue. It starts with the hardware.</p><p>Large amounts of memoy addressing space above 3GB is reserved for the processor and other system components to talk with some devices by reading and writing memory addresses that exist between 3GB and 4GB. This is known as memory-mapped I/O (MMIO). For the MMIO space to be available to 32-bit operating systems, the MMIO space must reside within the first 4 GB of address space (see <a rel="nofollow" href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605" target="_blank">KB 929605</a>). Remapping the MMIO space is <b>one</b> of several prerequisites for a 4GB system to be able to have all 4GB available (one of the others being the installation of a 64-bit operating system). OTherwise, you're stuck at around a little less than 3GB of memory available to the OS before you even start, regardless of the amount of actual physical memory installed. So, once you've started your 32-bit version of Windows with 3 or 4 GB pf physical memory, you're going to have about 3,120 MB of usable memory available.</p><p>Microsoft Windows NT (and it's derivatives, so we're talking NT up to and including Vista) have always provided applications with a flat 32-bit virtual address space that describes 4GB of virtual memory. The address space is usually split so that 2 GB of address space is directly accessible to the application and the other 2 GB is only accessible to the Windows executive software. So your application, in this case EverQuest 2, has 2GB of working memory available to it. Some commonly reported architectural limits in Windows include: </p><ul><li>2 GB of shared virtual address space for the system</li><li>2 GB of private virtual address space per process</li><li>660 MB System PTE storage</li><li>470 MB paged pool storage</li><li>256 MB nonpaged pool storage</li></ul><p>The above applies to Windows 2003 Server specifically (from <a rel="nofollow" href="http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418/en-us" target="_blank">KB 294418</a>), but also apply to Windows XP (including Home) and Windows 2000.</p><p>At this point usually the boot.ini parameters /3GB, <a rel="nofollow" href="http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/edc9f27d-76fb-4139-9555-20acc684c3af1033.mspx?mfr=true" target="_blank">/4GT </a>and /PAE often come up. They are all useless to you, and you do not want to use them regardless of how many completely anecdotal reports there are out theer regarding thier success. /3GB and /4GT are config settings for different versions of Windows that tell the operating system to change the partitioning of the 4GB 32-bit <i>virtual</i> address space so that applications can use 3GB and the OS kernel only 1GB, as opposed to the standard 2GB-each arrangement. It doesn't affect the 32-bit limit of 3GB of addressable <i>physical</i> memory issue, and most applications can't even utilize the additional space (one of the prerequisites is the application uses IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE in the process header), so all you are doing is needlessly sacrificing kernel memory space (for every applications virtual memeory space) for no actual gain at all.</p><p>The /PAE boot.ini switch, activates the <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension" target="_blank">Physical Address Extension</a> mode that's existed in every PC CPU since the Pentium Pro. That mode cranks the address space up to 64 gigabytes (2^36), and the computer can then give a 4GB addressing block within that space. But this still doesn't help the 3GB-limited user for two reasons:</p><ul><li>First, it presents 64-bit addresses to system drivers, which causes the same compatability problems as a proper 64-bit OS, since now you must have PAE-aware 32-bit system drivers (which aren't common), instead of just plain-old 64-bit drives on a 64-bit OS (which, are starting to become more common, but are not nearly widely available for many common peripherals). You basically end up with even worse compatability problems that you'd have attempting to run a 64-bit version of windows, with all the disadvantages of a 32-bit OS; the biggest of which is that you still only have 3GB of addressible physical memory.</li><li>Second, for this reason, Microsoft changed the behaviour of the /PAE option in almost all versions of WinXP as of Service Pack 2 by disabling it entirely. This solved an endless amount of driver compatibility problems that existed with PAE, and limits all but the 64-bit versions of windows to a 4GB virtual addressing space for applications.</li></ul><p>The only way you're going to (reliably) have more that 2GB of usable addressing space available to applications is you must first have:</p><ul><li>A motherboard chipset that supports at least 8 GB of address space (e.g. Intel 975X, P965, 955X on Socket 775, Socket F, Socket 940, Socket 939, Socket AM2).</li><li>The CPU supports the x64 instruction set.</li><li>The motherboard BIOS supports the memory remapping feature and the feature is enabled.</li><li><b>An x64 version of Windows</b></li></ul><p>The last bullet point also implies that you have suitable 64-bit drivers for all your system devices as well. Until 64-bit operating systems are more commonly supported in the consumer marketplace, and driver support is ubiquitous, SoE cannot realistically rely upon or utilize the additional memory. Consumers running truely 64-bit operating system environments are barely even a blip on the graph in terms of market space right now for games manufacturers.</p><p>That doesn't excuse the current performance and archetechture of the game - there is still plenty of problem areas that can and should be addressed. The answer to fixing a memory leak <b>isn't</b> to throw more memory at it. It doesn't fix the leak, it just gives you a little more time before the leak buries you!</p></blockquote><p>well since im no where near as tech savy as you are and i only understand about 1/3 of all your technobabble</p><p>it looks like that if you want to get the absolute best  performance out of eq2 a 32 bit proc. computer with a max of 2 or 3 gigs of ram is the way to go....i always wondered why my 4 year old computer running an overclocked athlon 2500 barton core with 1.5 gigs of ram could run on high settings and still have good fps in game.</p>

[tecninja]

Why optimize the current code, they have new things to sell, and deadlines to push said new things out the door.

[Xon_dk]

<cite>Dark_Grue wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>4 gb stuff.</cite></blockquote>I am well aware of how things work in the memory department, however how they work isn't the exact issue here. the issue 'seems' to be that people with 4 gb memory, regardless of how much is assigned or if it even is assigned correctly on their setup, seem to get a much better performance from EQ2 then those with 2 gb of memory. When EQ2 on its own doesn't take up those 2 gb fully to begin with, it only makes the performance matter more absurd.<span class="name"><b>tecninja wrote: </b></span><span class="postbody">Why optimize the current code, they have new things to sell, and deadlines to push said new things out the door.</span>As long as they can demand money for people playing EQ2 and still demand the same amount of money they did when EQ2 was new.I would say that we as consumers have a right to also demand that SOE steps up to the plate and keep their code up to date. I mean sure SOE can be making other things, but why would I ever want to play such games, when SOE cant keep old games performance wise updated to newer hardware?How can we as consumers trust SOE to keep their new games up to date? and not simply let them die after a while?

[Zenith]

<p>You know what's a bit sad, other mmorpg's have updated their code to support or at least run smoothly on the new hardware. WoW just put in actual dual core support in their last major patch and it made a huge improvement for dual core folks performance.</p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Alondnar@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>You know what's a bit sad, other mmorpg's have updated their code to support or at least run smoothly on the new hardware. WoW just put in actual dual core support in their last major patch and it made a huge improvement for dual core folks performance.</p></blockquote>They patched around the dual core/X2 issue, same as a number of games did when the technology released, they did not patch in parallel processing capablities, the performance monitoring profile that i run does not show their client utilizing all cores on this box when it is running as a correclty written parallel processing applicatin should, such as Oracle 10g cluster server does.

[Noellee]

<cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Alondnar@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>You know what's a bit sad, other mmorpg's have updated their code to support or at least run smoothly on the new hardware. WoW just put in actual dual core support in their last major patch and it made a huge improvement for dual core folks performance.</p></blockquote>They patched around the dual core/X2 issue, same as a number of games did when the technology released, they did not patch in parallel processing capablities, the performance monitoring profile that i run does not show their client utilizing all cores on this box when it is running as a correclty written parallel processing applicatin should, such as Oracle 10g cluster server does.</blockquote>Well at least they're trying.Hmm... there was a great post here but it was deleted. The truth is out there? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/908627bbe5e9f6a080977db8c365caff.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" />

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Noellee@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Alondnar@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote><p>You know what's a bit sad, other mmorpg's have updated their code to support or at least run smoothly on the new hardware. WoW just put in actual dual core support in their last major patch and it made a huge improvement for dual core folks performance.</p></blockquote>They patched around the dual core/X2 issue, same as a number of games did when the technology released, they did not patch in parallel processing capablities, the performance monitoring profile that i run does not show their client utilizing all cores on this box when it is running as a correclty written parallel processing applicatin should, such as Oracle 10g cluster server does.</blockquote>Well at least they're trying.Hmm... there was a great post here but it was deleted. The truth is out there? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/908627bbe5e9f6a080977db8c365caff.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" width="15" height="15" /></blockquote>They did it here also, curious - what was the basic informtion in the post that you claim was deleted?

[Naubeta]

Turn off smooth fonts.

[Xon_dk]

Oddly enough after latest hotfix and with a bit of tweaking EQ2 is running better, with almost all shadows on.also I wonder if it is because all textures are now at high but characters are maximum, there seems to be much less disk trashing after this. maybe the problem lies in using maximum textures (even if eq2 when using that still doesn't use up all of the 2gb ram)