rawsom
08-22-2008, 08:37 AM
Display drivers:<p>There are unofficial Omega Drivers. Link here: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.omegadrivers.net/" target="_blank">http://www.omegadrivers.net/</a></p><p>There are unofficial drivers for GeForce and ATI as well. What's so special about these is that these drivers are not optimized for any gaming conferences, shows or top high-tech games like half-life 2, crysis, doom 3, wow or any other most popular game. These are optimized for best performance in _most_ situations. For EQ2 these gave me about 25% boost to framerates (FPS, press F11 in game to see yours) compared to official drivers. Do not get version numbers get in your way, these support everything under the sun and all your nice features still work. You can not however get theatre mode with videos if you have multiple displays, clone only.</p>After this, VPU errors are gone and if you had AGP problems, those are gone as well.General:I have system mechanic pro, it works for most of this. Just remember to turn it off after you have done something, because it eats resources too. Link here: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.iolo.com/system-mechanic/pro/" target="_blank">http://www.iolo.com/system-mechanic/pro/</a>First of all, get a registry optimizer if you are running windows xp. I don't know why this helps, because I don't see much action in the registry when playing eq2. I suppose it is because internal processes of OS do their work in background while you play, and a big cluttered registry slows this down. You can't turn everything off.Turn of all anti-virus software that scans every file opened whenever you play. It slows down everything. Scanning executables only is fine.Just go with it and turn of all advanced theming in windows xp. You don't really need it, although old windows 98/2000/NT-style sure is ugly. I don't know why this helps either, but some of the graphics and availability of effects whenever in windowed mode or alt-tabbed causes problems if less than 2Gb of memory and EQ2 running. Whenever you alt-tab, not all of it goes to swap right away. This has minimal effect if you do not alt-tab ever or if you do not run in windowed mode. XP will swap these away in a few minutes when in fullscreen.Optimize your swap to a single block on harddisk. You do NOT want your swap to be cluttered all around your harddisk. Whenever something is read from it or written to it, your harddriver's seektimes will come into play in a negative way.I have heard legends and fairy tales that firewalls affect performance. This is not true by a long shot. If you have a huge security suite running (norton, f-secure et cetera), it is that suite that takes your performance. Turn it off. Get some small freeware firewall which is propably better anyway and btw does not put your performance down. Sygate personal firewall is fine, if they still give it away free. Online armor is another which does not take much CPU cycles, but you must turn off all advanced features (HIST and program guard, basically). Online armor is also dead solid.Optimize your RAM into a single block whenever your computer boots up. After that, run EQ2. Do this everytime. With system mechanic, you can also just unload all unneeded DLL-files and drivers into SWAP so that you'll get about 200-300Mb more memory for EQ2. Everything still works, btw.Network:Do not even think about running any BitTorrent-applications in background. Those are written to disk in small pieces, thus causing your harddisk to seek the right place for any data. All the time. This applies even if you have a limit for download/upload rate. I have 4/1Mbps connection and 50kb/s is just too much, although max is about 450kb/s. I have a new 500Gt harddisk going around 7200RPM. Some reasons for performance issues is because of CPU use, although small, causes glitches in eq2 every now and then.If somebody finds this helpfull, I'll write more when I have the time. With these and some other minor configuration I got my framerates up by at least 40%. These propably do not help everybody. Some of my meaningful system spec's below:AMD Athlon XP 2600+2Gb RAMAti Radeon X1650 512Mb RAM7200 RPM harddiskWindows XP SP3, with _all_ updates.Newest Omega Drivers for ATI RadeonI don't even have to play with sucky graphics.