Shader 3.0

[Dracodo]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;">A reply to many of the recent posts:</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Darkness:</strong>  I will be adding an ambient slider very soon.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Black objects:</strong>  I'm currently working my way through these objects.  These are objects that could not be auto-converted with the MASSIVE tool I built to generate new 3.0 shaders for the objects.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>GPU Shadows:</strong> Working on fixing these up.  There are flags that need to be set for some objects that I haven't added yet.  Getting to it ASAP.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Flat textures:</strong> These are also objects that could not be auto-generated for shader 3 from my tool.  They have to be hand made as well.  So I'm working through them too.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Bright torch:</strong> I plan to "soften" the torch some more by default.  Shader 1.0 has special shaders that "soften" the torch compared to other lights in the game.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>White outlining:</strong> I'm banging through these right now too.  A bug got through my auto-generating tool and killed most plants in the game and some other objects with this outline.  It's generally an easy fix, but I have to work my way through each and every one.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Performance:</strong>  There will likely be some performance updates as Shader 3.0 matures.  On "average" we have seen equal framerates between shader 1 and 3,  but since it's an average that means shader 3 will be much slower than shader 1 sometimes... and vice versa.  Also, the CPU still hogs some of those frames and is sometimes the actual bottleneck.  Dropping CPU intensive settings and running multicore could help as some of you have noticed.  I really hope to optimize the CPU side of the graphics engine in the very near future.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Other bugs: </strong>I'm working on them.  Thanks for your support.  I really appreciate it.  It's like you're all healers <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />.</span></p></blockquote><p>Thanks a lot for the info.  I spent a few minutes on test, and the game looks great.  For me, performance is about the same.  The cool thing about it is, there is room for improvement (no, i'm not saying you're doing a bad job, in fact quite the opposit.) I mean, this is before the system can be tweaked much.  Thanks again for the effort and have a happy holiday  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Xill]

<p>Does Shader 3.0 happen to be enabled on beta yet? I know the option was there but it wasnt working?</p><p>Oh and they look GREAT from the SS. Good job man keep up the good work.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Xill wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Does Shader 3.0 happen to be enabled on beta yet? I know the option was there but it wasnt working?</p><p>Oh and they look GREAT from the SS. Good job man keep up the good work.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not totally sure.  I was told they were supposed to be there on Beta, but it might not have been fixed to functional like Test.  Try putting r_usethreepointoshaders 1 in your eq2.ini (or eq2_recent.ini or eq2_default.ini) file.  That will force shader 3.0 to load when the game starts up instead of shader 1.</strong></span></p>

[vochore]

<p>not sure what i am doing wrong but i cant seem to get shader 3.0 to set for my game...i check 3.0 restart and nothing sems to have changed...recheck the 3.0 box and its unchecked,any 1 have a clue.</p><p>im using the new 195.62 nvidia drivers.all other system specs are in my sig.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>vochore wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>not sure what i am doing wrong but i cant seem to get shader 3.0 to set for my game...i check 3.0 restart and nothing sems to have changed...recheck the 3.0 box and its unchecked,any 1 have a clue.</p><p>im using the new 195.62 nvidia drivers.all other system specs are in my sig.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>There was an issue like this that went out but should have been corrected with a recent update.  Are you patched to the latest?  Otherwise, for a temporary fix, try the option I mentioned above to help out with Beta users.  It should work with Test as well.</strong></span></p>

[Carpediem]

<p>I was playing around with the new shader 3.0 today and noticed every armor set I looked at in the marketplace had a totally different appearance and most of them were really dull. I didn't check any other armor, so I don't know if this applies to everything.</p>

[Pahya]

<p>Updated the test server earlier today to check out Neriak specifically because I'd heard that it looked really nice in 3.0. And it does, it looks awesome. However, I noticed that the ceilings have lost their small blue ... glowies that made the cavern feel almost as if it had a night sky. While I enjoy that the city feels more like it's in a cave, and that cave feels positively cavernous ... I miss the pretty "sky". I hope that it's a bug, and not intended. </p>

[Araxes]

<p>The good:</p><p>Stone, finally, after 5 years, actually looks like stone.  Particularly stone walls, cliffsides, caverns, and so forth. </p><p>Same for tree trunks and tree bark.</p><p>Light spreads and reflects much more realistically, now.  Again most noticeable against flat geometry with large texture swaths, such as walls and the like.</p><p>The not so good:</p><p>Some character textures (dark chain or plate armors, just as example) are natively too dark; with a torch, then, they are far too bright.</p><p>Overall ambient light seems to be washing out everything.  Neriak, for example, is as bright as a football field at night.  (It occurs to me that I didn't adjust my ambient light slider down, though -- will try it next go around.)</p><p>Scale and fur (for isntance on iksar and ratonga and kerra) have slightly too much of a shine factor, now, IMHO.  (This may be result as the lighting is SO bright, at the moment.)</p><p>The strange:</p><p>Cannot change color of ogre skin, at all.  All ogres appear to have porcelain white skin, all the time.</p><p>Some (many) textures look drastically different in terms of color.  Neriak guard wargs (just as an example, but I imagine this issue happens elsewhere) are almost black; when illuminated by torchlight, the gold etching so obvious under shader 1.0 actually appears to be a very dark, deep purple.  Some may prefer this, I find it actually looks worse and seems to show less detail, not more. Arasai, conversely, are washed out - the rich, vibrant colors under shader 1.0 appear to be mostly blazingly bright, and sometimes not at all what they ought to be, under shader 3.</p><p>Many textures are white-washed.  For instance, all frostfell presents and decorations in Neriak are slate gray.  Two of my armor pieces have the same alpha appearance.  Obviously a bug and/or code in-progress, but just commenting on it. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Ara</p>

[Celline-Layonaire]

<p>Awesome work so far Imago <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/e8a506dc4ad763aca51bec4ca7dc8560.gif" border="0" /></p><p>But I wanna know one thing. Can you tell us what is the 'next big thing' after Shader 3.0 implementation?</p><p>Me REALLY hope it's flora system overhaul  =)</p>

[Kraa_Aarkyn]

<p><cite>Pahya wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Updated the test server earlier today to check out Neriak specifically because I'd heard that it looked really nice in 3.0. And it does, it looks awesome. However, I noticed that the ceilings have lost their small blue ... glowies that made the cavern feel almost as if it had a night sky. While I enjoy that the city feels more like it's in a cave, and that cave feels positively cavernous ... I miss the pretty "sky". I hope that it's a bug, and not intended. </p></blockquote><p>Imago is yet to re-enable the ambient lighting, I'm guessing these blue glowies are part of that. Hopefully the Neriak ceiling will be dancing with glowies again soon <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[vochore]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>vochore wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>not sure what i am doing wrong but i cant seem to get shader 3.0 to set for my game...i check 3.0 restart and nothing sems to have changed...recheck the 3.0 box and its unchecked,any 1 have a clue.</p><p>im using the new 195.62 nvidia drivers.all other system specs are in my sig.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>There was an issue like this that went out but should have been corrected with a recent update.  Are you patched to the latest?  Otherwise, for a temporary fix, try the option I mentioned above to help out with Beta users.  It should work with Test as well.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>yes i am patched fully for test unless testcopy is differant then normal test server.did the above fix tho and got it working.</p><p>what is working properly looks awesome and virtually no performance impact that i can see but many bugs...in my 5 room in sq i have a bunch of pictures that turned completely black,my windows when looking from some direction go blank,didnt have the time to go to other zones but will do a much more exctensive test tonight.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Really happy to hear your comments about the new look.  There "are" a lot of bugs.  There are "so" many objects in the game to verify.  Currently each week I ask QA to give me 15+ bugs to work on.  A lot of those bugs are the black textures you see on a lot of armor sets.  This last week I've been working on correct light priority and fading (so lights fade in and out instead of instantly flashing on or off).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Better, more accurate, bug free shader 3 coming your way...</strong></span><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /></p>

[TheSpin]

<p>I just wanna thank you Imago-Quem for taking such an interest in providing feedback and information about your progress.  It's really nice to physically see a Dev who's just as excited about what he's working on as your customers are to see your hard work.  Merry Christmas!</p>

[Kraa_Aarkyn]

<p><cite>TheSpin wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I just wanna thank you Imago-Quem for taking such an interest in providing feedback and information about your progress.  It's really nice to physically see a Dev who's just as excited about what he's working on as your customers are to see your hard work.  Merry Christmas!</p></blockquote><p>I wholeheartedly agree! Your a champion Imago, have a great Xmas</p>

[Trellium]

<p>I was posting on the performance thread that the Shader 3 seems to have helped my system when they were turned on. Overall I seem to have gotten a boost in performance (5-10fps in Qeynos), but at the same time not all the features seem to be in or working quite right. That's the bugs part we already know about.</p><p>My wife was reading a book and I made her stop to look at these changes (which didn't make her too happy). But, once she saw the game with Shader 3 on she was as just as amazed as I was. The single biggest thing that Shader 3 adds to EQ2 is a sense of <em><strong>depth</strong></em>. The houses look more like they are three dimensional, the lampposts are more detailed and also reflect light more realistically. And, on my system its more smooth and higher quality settings than before.</p><p>At the same time, the armor of the guards looks almost totally flat. Some npc's (ie the collections person in North Freeport) have a completely plastic face with no eyes at all). It's so funny to see somethings in the game go forward in quality so much, and others completely drop quality at all. More than anything else, this shows just how much work has to be done in the game to make Shader 3 work! Wow ... once its done this will be terrific.</p><p>We both think this is going to be a huge step forward for EQ2. Huge!</p><p>Thanks so very much, everyone at SOE who decided this was the right step and <span ><strong>Imago-Quem</strong></span> in particular. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/49869fe8223507d7223db3451e5321aa.gif" border="0" /></p>

[Trellium]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Shadows were not working though in either CPU or GPU modes (but were slowing things down as I could get another 15FPS by turning them off).  Turning Flora off gave the biggest performance increase though jumping up to ~42 FPS, and also this was steady when I spun around, so it appears that Flora is very significant to slow things down while moving.</p></blockquote><p>I thought I would check this out. Not sure what is happening because I changed my flora values from 0 to 100% (I usually keep it at about 25%) and had no change at all in framerates. I usually do, but for some reason the shader 3 makes them less of a system drag. I had more sluggishness when running or turning to bring new textures into view, but once they were loaded my system ran well with flora and GPU shadows on.</p><p>With Shader 3 I now have most settings at max, but will have to keep testing in various zones for the next few days.</p><p>My system specs are AMD Phenom X2 550 dual core CPU, 4GB DDR3 Ram, Ati 4850 512MB with 9.12 drivers, Windows 7 64bit. We haven't tried our other computers yet (this is our best computer).</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>-------------------------------</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>Alert:</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #ff0000;"><strong>-------------------------------</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I will be leaving the planet (mentally) for the next couple of weeks.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Shader 3.0 will be disabled from Beta for the next couple of weeks since there seems to be a bug on certain HW right now crashing the game if shader 3 is on.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Test may get the same bug sometime during the first week of January.  If it does, you can manually disable shader 3 by adding the following line to your eq2_recent.ini, eq2.ini, and/or eq2_default.ini file located in the same directory as the game's executable file.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>/r_usethreepointoshaders 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If "/r_usethreepointoshaders" is already in your ini file.  Make sure there is a 0 and not a 1 after it to make shader 3 disabled.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I am really very sorry if this affects anyone.  I'll be back cleaning this up ASAP.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>For those of you that want to see if it didn't actually break for you, you can add the following line to </strong></span><span style="color: #008000;"><strong> the ini files listed above </strong></span><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>to re-enable shader 3.0.  To re-disable shader 3 change the 0 to a 1.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>/r_temp_disable_shader3 0</strong></span></p>

[Titigabe]

<p>Hi to you!</p><p>Here are some screenshots I took while testing Shader 3.0 on Test today.</p><p>Not sure if it'll help, but I hope so.</p><p>My settings: Very High Quality default settings.</p><p>My config: INTEL i750 quad core - ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Catalyst 9.11) - 6 GB OCZ DDR3 RAM 1600</p><p>They were all taken in North Qeynos and I tried to catch them in different angles so that you can see the strange behaviour:</p><p><strong><span style="color: #ff9900;">On this one: the shadow of the sword is visible through the horse, it's the same for the folliage of the tree behind.</span></strong></p><p><img src="http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/525/eq2000099.jpg" /></p><p><span style="color: #ff9900;"><strong>On those two: the ambient light on the floor appears and disappears depending on which direction I'm looking (see compass). </strong></span></p><p><img src="http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/4868/eq2000100.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/8272/eq2000101.jpg" /></p><p><strong><span style="color: #ff9900;">On those three: shadows on the floor appear and disappear depending on wich direction I'm looking at.</span></strong></p><p><img src="http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/5630/eq2000102.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/9039/eq2000103.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/866/eq2000104.jpg" /></p><p>Inside the bank of North Qeynos: shadows have gone wild <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> Again, they change depending on direction I'm looking to.</p><p><img src="http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/6005/eq2000106.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/4646/eq2000107.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/3230/eq2000108.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4170/eq2000109.jpg" /></p><p>At North Qeynos, near the broker house ... the colours in the room are wrong, depending on what I'm facing and textures on the windows appear and disappear too.</p><p><img src="http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/8662/eq2000111.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img22.imageshack.us/img22/7743/eq2000112.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img704.imageshack.us/img704/7870/eq2000113.jpg" /></p>

[Guy De Alsace]

<p>Noticed similar problems. Also no shadows. Some people's headgear seems to be of a higher brightness than the rest of their body, plus - at least on robes- the hoods dont match the rest of the outfit.</p><p>Lighting inside buildings is completely knackered. Light levels change at random depending on facing, the window textures disappear and reappear dependent on facing as well.</p><p>Transparent textures such as the wolf animation when you cast "pathfinding" appear as solid white objects.</p><p>My hardware is old but is using latest drivers and is shader 3 compliant.</p>

[Transen]

<p>10 fps loss going from 1.0 to 3.0 with current setup:</p><p>DELL Dimension E520</p><ul><li>1.8 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo</li><li>ATI Radeon X1300 PRO PCI-E</li><li>2 GB DDR RAM</li><li>ST3808110AS / 7200 RPM / 144 GB(reported) Harddrive</li><li>Windows XP Media Center Edition</li></ul><p>Under the current conditions with 3.0 turned on, switchingtexture qualities doesn't seem to have any effect on theframerate where as it would have impacted performance under 1.0. </p><p>However, turning complex shaders off gains me 10 fps withoutloosing 3.0 texture effects. I do loose the 2 water layers and anylighting effects from torch or enviroment sources except for daylight lighting.</p><p>Transparency effects seem to be turned off under 3.0</p>

[TemberWolf]

<p><cite>Transen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>10 fps loss going from 1.0 to 3.0 with current setup:</p><p>DELL Dimension E520</p><ul><li>1.8 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo</li><li>ATI Radeon X1300 PRO PCI-E</li><li>2 GB DDR RAM</li><li>ST3808110AS / 7200 RPM / 144 GB(reported) Harddrive</li><li>Windows XP Media Center Edition</li></ul></blockquote><p>You have a POS graphics card. Get a mid-rang or higher card with at lest a 128 bit memory interface.</p><p>example:</p><p>ATi - 3650 or better. No a 4350 is not better because it's a higher number.</p><p>The first number (3) is the series, the second (6) is the class and the third (5) is the memory type. A 3670 has better memory than a 3650. Ati used to use pro and XT to do what the xx50 and xx70 now represent.</p><p>Also nVidia has the same numbering idea that ATi uses but they use GS GTS GT GTX to show difference in quality. i.e. 9800 GTX is better than a 9800 GT.</p>

[Trellium]

<p><cite>TemberWolf wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Transen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>10 fps loss going from 1.0 to 3.0 with current setup:</p><p>DELL Dimension E520</p><ul><li>1.8 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo</li><li>ATI Radeon X1300 PRO PCI-E</li><li>2 GB DDR RAM</li><li>ST3808110AS / 7200 RPM / 144 GB(reported) Harddrive</li><li>Windows XP Media Center Edition</li></ul></blockquote><p>You have a POS graphics card. Get a mid-rang or higher card with at lest a 128 bit memory interface.</p><p>example:</p><p>ATi - 3650 or better. No a 4350 is not better because it's a higher number.</p><p>The first number (3) is the series, the second (6) is the class and the third (5) is the memory type. A 3670 has better memory than a 3650. Ati used to use pro and XT to do what the xx50 and xx70 now represent.</p></blockquote><p>The card does support Shader 3 though, so it will be interesting to see how SOE will handle optimizations on these older cards. We have one X1650 (I think it was) so will try that out as well.</p><p>But, we assumed that our Shader 3 support on the X1600 series will not perform as well as newer cards and probably will end up staying with Shader 1 or minimal settings.</p>

[Transen]

<p><cite>TemberWolf wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Transen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>10 fps loss going from 1.0 to 3.0 with current setup:</p><p>DELL Dimension E520</p><ul><li>1.8 Ghz intel Core 2 Duo</li><li>ATI Radeon X1300 PRO PCI-E</li><li>2 GB DDR RAM</li><li>ST3808110AS / 7200 RPM / 144 GB(reported) Harddrive</li><li>Windows XP Media Center Edition</li></ul></blockquote><p>You have a POS graphics card. Get a mid-rang or higher card with at lest a 128 bit memory interface.</p><p>example:</p><p>ATi - 3650 or better. No a 4350 is not better because it's a higher number.</p><p>The first number (3) is the series, the second (6) is the class and the third (5) is the memory type. A 3670 has better memory than a 3650. Ati used to use pro and XT to do what the xx50 and xx70 now represent.</p><p>Also nVidia has the same numbering idea that ATi uses but they use GS GTS GT GTX to show difference in quality. i.e. 9800 GTX is better than a 9800 GT.</p></blockquote><p>The info was provided as part of the feedback process, not to get people's opinions of my current setup.  I'm already well aware of what end of the spectrum my comp is at and when I can afford to do so, I will upgrade.</p>

[duddwin]

<p>Is this going to make performance better or worsed? on nagefin i get horible lag in citys and some zones (most zones)</p><p>i have:</p><p>2 nvidia 295 gts oc sli</p><p>amd x64 core duo</p><p>5 gigs of ram (even tryed 6)</p><p>windows 7 x64 ultimate</p><p>and all prossesses off in the backround except all needed</p><p>i defrag all the time and its a bit ridiculus that i can even still lag on low-ballanced settings and even attempting max is like 5 fps.</p><p>so i guess my question is.... is it going to make it worsed or better performance than it alredy is because as is, i lag WAY less on AoC max settings dx10.</p><p>Hopfully it will fix lag expecialy on a pvp server as it makes it extremly hard to even have a fair fight.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>duddwin wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is this going to make performance better or worsed? on nagefin i get horible lag in citys and some zones (most zones)</p><p>i have:</p><p>2 nvidia 295 gts oc sli</p><p>amd x64 core duo</p><p>5 gigs of ram (even tryed 6)</p><p>windows 7 x64 ultimate</p><p>and all prossesses off in the backround except all needed</p><p>i defrag all the time and its a bit ridiculus that i can even still lag on low-ballanced settings and even attempting max is like 5 fps.</p><p>so i guess my question is.... is it going to make it worsed or better performance than it alredy is because as is, i lag WAY less on AoC max settings dx10.</p><p>Hopfully it will fix lag expecialy on a pvp server as it makes it extremly hard to even have a fair fight.</p></blockquote><p>I assume you are serious here as that's a very odd configuration of machine!</p><p>Its going off topic a bit, but to comment on your machine spec its very underpowered for the processor compared to the GPU, even on a game that uses the GPU heavily the CPU will be a bottleneck.  And for a game like EQ2 which uses the CPU heavily its very bad.</p><p>For a normal modern graphics card heavy game I would recomend a PhenonII/Core 2 duo minimum with that graphics card and Toms hardware have done some studies to show the sorts of processors needed to not bottleneck high end graphics cards, its actually 4 graphics cards in all and EQ2 only supports the use of one anyway.</p><p>For EQ2 (which does not support the dual graphics cards that are inside each GTS295) you just need something like a ATI 4870 (which has more then enough power) and as fast a processor as you can get, a PhenonII is good, a Intel I7 varies from a bit better to a lot better depending how fast its close rate is.</p>

[Sreneth]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>duddwin wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is this going to make performance better or worsed? on nagefin i get horible lag in citys and some zones (most zones)</p><p>i have:</p><p>2 nvidia 295 gts oc sli</p><p>amd x64 core duo</p><p>5 gigs of ram (even tryed 6)</p><p>windows 7 x64 ultimate</p><p>and all prossesses off in the backround except all needed</p><p>i defrag all the time and its a bit ridiculus that i can even still lag on low-ballanced settings and even attempting max is like 5 fps.</p><p>so i guess my question is.... is it going to make it worsed or better performance than it alredy is because as is, i lag WAY less on AoC max settings dx10.</p><p>Hopfully it will fix lag expecialy on a pvp server as it makes it extremly hard to even have a fair fight.</p></blockquote><p>I assume you are serious here as that's a very odd configuration of machine!</p><p>Its going off topic a bit, but to comment on your machine spec its very underpowered for the processor compared to the GPU, even on a game that uses the GPU heavily the CPU will be a bottleneck.  And for a game like EQ2 which uses the CPU heavily its very bad.</p><p>For a normal modern graphics card heavy game I would recomend a PhenonII/Core 2 duo minimum with that graphics card and Toms hardware have done some studies to show the sorts of processors needed to not bottleneck high end graphics cards, its actually 4 graphics cards in all and EQ2 only supports the use of one anyway.</p><p>For EQ2 (which does not support the dual graphics cards that are inside each GTS295) you just need something like a ATI 4870 (which has more then enough power) and as fast a processor as you can get, a PhenonII is good, a Intel I7 varies from a bit better to a lot better depending how fast its close rate is.</p></blockquote><p>I have to agree here, your processor is a huge Bottle neck.  I have just 1 GTX 295 no SLI and I run with an i7 920 with  6 gigs and i raid on high quality with everything turned way up.</p><p>Shader 3.0 on running through nek forest by nek castle, i am seeing frame rates from 40fps to 90fps depending on what i am looking at.</p><p>SO far so good guys, keep it up!</p>

[Shenyen]

<p><cite>duddwin wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is this going to make performance better or worsed? on nagefin i get horible lag in citys and some zones (most zones)</p><p>i have:</p><p>2 nvidia 295 gts oc sli</p><p>amd x64 core duo</p><p>5 gigs of ram (even tryed 6)</p><p>windows 7 x64 ultimate</p><p>and all prossesses off in the backround except all needed</p><p>i defrag all the time and its a bit ridiculus that i can even still lag on low-ballanced settings and even attempting max is like 5 fps.</p><p>so i guess my question is.... is it going to make it worsed or better performance than it alredy is because as is, i lag WAY less on AoC max settings dx10.</p><p>Hopfully it will fix lag expecialy on a pvp server as it makes it extremly hard to even have a fair fight.</p></blockquote><p>There is no such thing as an AMD x64 Core Duo.</p><p>Athlon 64 X2 processors are made by Advanced Microdevices, Core 2 Duo is a processor made by Intel.</p><p>What CPU do you have? Model and clockspeed please^^ With such powerful graphic cards, you'd need the fastest processors to make the GPUs worth their high price, because of course they'll be always better than a single GTX 280, but they won't make a real difference if the CPU isn't powerful enough.</p><p>Also, you should get rid of that suboptimal ram-setup. Most modern CPUs use double-channel Ram, that means as in a RAID 0-harddrive-setup, the memory controller stores the data split up in 2 ram-modules to increase memory bandwidth.</p><p>To use this feature, you need an even number of memory modules of the same size. 4x1gig is okay, 2x2gig is okay, 2x2gig and 2x512mb would be also okay if you put the modules into the right ram slots, often color-coded so that the 2 2gig-modules would go into the blue slots and the 2 512mb modules into the 2 yellow slots (or whatever color you slots have).</p><p>The new Intel Core i7 is different, it has triple-channel Ram, so it should always use triplets of modules, 3x 1gig, 3x 2gig or even (on mainboards with 6 memoryslots) 6x 2gig^^</p><p>But i'd guess that you're using something like 1x 2gig and 3x1gig, which isn't an optimal setup and slows the ram down.</p><p>Also, since Windows Vista there is no need to defrag your harddrive, if you didn't disable that option, Vista and 7 should defrag automatically whenever there's nothing else to do^^</p><p>As for that PC with a Radeon X1300 - that GPU really sucks, it's a 4 year old "Not meant to play games, just display a picture" card and wasn't that great the day it was released^^</p><p>Find out if your PSU is trustworthy (Enermax, Antec, Seasonic or any other reliable manufacturer - as you have a DELL PC it likely will be an OEM PSU, so you would have to check the sticker on the side of the PSU what wattages it can provide) and can support newer graphics cards and change your graphics card... ANY graphics card is better than yours^^ Something in the Geforce 8800GT-range would be enough and way better than the one you have now.</p><p>As Nvidia keeps changing the name of their graphics cards, i have no idea what the Geforce 8800GT is called now (Maybe Geforce GT 240 or 250, i'm not sure). Something like the Radeon 3850 would also be great.</p><p>They'll cost less than 100$  and  will be much better than the old one and should be good companions to the not really great, but quite okay CPU you have.</p>

[TemberWolf]

<blockquote><p>The info was provided as part of the feedback process, not to get people's opinions of my current setup.  I'm already well aware of what end of the spectrum my comp is at and when I can afford to do so, I will upgrade.</p></blockquote><p>Touchy touchy. It just sounded like you where expecting more from SM3 and I was simply trying to explain the reason of your problem and provide a solution for you and others that may be experiencing the same thing. Also, this game was designed about 10 years ago before duel core came out, so the programmers had in mind only ever faster single core cpus. With that being said, the newer programmers have off-loaded some of the cpu processes to a second core to help somewhat, but the game is still largely based on raw cpu speed. Complex shaders are all about the CPU speed. I put a ati 4770 in my media center pc to see if the game would run better than the onboard ati 3200, but it only got a few frames higher. The reason is because it has a Sempron LE-1150. It's a pos cpu. XD That's why when you turned off the complex shaders you got an increase in performance and nothing happened when you changed the texture quality. Texture quality is mainly about how much vram you have.</p>

[guillero]

<p>Has Ryan returned to earth yet?</p><p>Jer</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Has Ryan returned to earth yet?</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, I'm back.  Sorry I haven't re-enabled shader 3 yet.  Still been working a ton though.  Recently I've been fixing more shader 3 bugs and most recently I have been upgrading our tools for the artists to build custom 3.0 shaders for later expansions/game updates.  It's coming along nicely.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>A lot of changes are being made to the game right now that are making it tricky to determine when and how long to enable shader 3 for Test.  I'm in the middle of working it out to see when I can re-enable shader 3 without causing issues with everyone else's changes.  It shouldn't be too long.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>PS. You can still enable shader 3 by adding: </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>r_temp_disable_shader3 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong> to you eq2.ini file where eq2 is installed. If shader 3 is currently crashing the game for you then remove this line from your ini file and let me know.</strong></span></p>

[Josgar]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Has Ryan returned to earth yet?</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, I'm back.  Sorry I haven't re-enabled shader 3 yet.  Still been working a ton though.  Recently I've been fixing more shader 3 bugs and most recently I have been upgrading our tools for the artists to build custom 3.0 shaders for later expansions/game updates.  It's coming along nicely.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>A lot of changes are being made to the game right now that are making it tricky to determine when and how long to enable shader 3 for Test.  I'm in the middle of working it out to see when I can re-enable shader 3 without causing issues with everyone else's changes.  It shouldn't be too long.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>PS. You can still enable shader 3 by adding: </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>r_temp_disable_shader3 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong> to you eq2.ini file where eq2 is installed. If shader 3 is currently crashing the game for you then remove this line from your ini file and let me know.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Do you need the old .ini line too? or just that one?</p>

[guillero]

<p>EDIT:</p><p>SM3.0 wasn't dissabled on Test Server tho. You could still activate it through the Options Meny ingame. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>I think in a lot of zones the whole lightning maps need to be redone. In some zones/instances it's way too bright now, while in other zones is quite dark.</p><p>Especially in zones like S. Quenos, N.Quenos and Q. Harbor it's really really bright now on some places. Building walls light up too much.</p><p>I also have to turn off my torch, as my character looked like a ghost and lightning up like a christmas tree hehe.</p><p>The parade armor sets, that are brightish white/silver look extremely bright white now and are like a magnified lightsource. <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />  So I had to drop the armor set on test as well, as it just hurts the eyes hehe.</p><p>Cloaks look completely dark black. And patterns don't show.</p><p>That's my feedback for now.</p><p>Jer</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>EDIT:</p><p>SM3.0 wasn't dissabled on Test Server tho. You could still activate it through the Options Meny ingame. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" /></p><p>I think in a lot of zones the whole lightning maps need to be redone. In some zones/instances it's way too bright now, while in other zones is quite dark.</p><p>Especially in zones like S. Quenos, N.Quenos and Q. Harbor it's really really bright now on some places. Building walls light up too much.</p><p>I also have to turn off my torch, as my character looked like a ghost and lightning up like a christmas tree hehe.</p><p>The parade armor sets, that are brightish white/silver look extremely bright white now and are like a magnified lightsource. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" />  So I had to drop the armor set on test as well, as it just hurts the eyes hehe.</p><p>Cloaks look completely dark black. And patterns don't show.</p><p>That's my feedback for now.</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks!  I'm looking into these issues next.  I've added in an ambient color I didn't have before that came from shader 1.0 inputs.  It was missing.  But obviously the initial value is too bright.  I'll readjust this value to help with the brightness.  The cape probably just hasn't been converted to shader 3 yet.  I'm trying to spot out these objects and convert them 1 by 1.  I know lighting on skin is a bit bright.  I'll be adjusting those shaders as well.  I'll check on the parade armor sets too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks again.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Josgar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Has Ryan returned to earth yet?</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, I'm back.  Sorry I haven't re-enabled shader 3 yet.  Still been working a ton though.  Recently I've been fixing more shader 3 bugs and most recently I have been upgrading our tools for the artists to build custom 3.0 shaders for later expansions/game updates.  It's coming along nicely.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>A lot of changes are being made to the game right now that are making it tricky to determine when and how long to enable shader 3 for Test.  I'm in the middle of working it out to see when I can re-enable shader 3 without causing issues with everyone else's changes.  It shouldn't be too long.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>PS. You can still enable shader 3 by adding: </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>r_temp_disable_shader3 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong> to you eq2.ini file where eq2 is installed. If shader 3 is currently crashing the game for you then remove this line from your ini file and let me know.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Do you need the old .ini line too? or just that one?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, remove the line:</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong><span>r_temp_disable_shader3 1</span></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>And replace it wit: </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong><span>r_temp_disable_shader3 0</span></strong></span></p>

[xpraetorianx]

<p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p>

[guillero]

<p><cite>xpraetorianx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p></blockquote><p>That's why I am afraid, seeing SM3.0 in action so far. That they will have to redo / retune all the lightning (light maps?) in all the zones.</p><p>Jer</p>

[duddwin]

<p><cite>duddwin wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Is this going to make performance better or worsed? on nagefin i get horible lag in citys and some zones (most zones)</p><p>i have:</p><p>2 nvidia 295 gts oc sli</p><p>amd x64 core duo</p><p>5 gigs of ram (even tryed 6)</p><p>windows 7 x64 ultimate</p><p>and all prossesses off in the backround except all needed</p><p>i defrag all the time and its a bit ridiculus that i can even still lag on low-ballanced settings and even attempting max is like 5 fps.</p><p>so i guess my question is.... is it going to make it worsed or better performance than it alredy is because as is, i lag WAY less on AoC max settings dx10.</p><p>Hopfully it will fix lag expecialy on a pvp server as it makes it extremly hard to even have a fair fight.</p></blockquote><p>I meant AMD anthlon 64 x2 dual core 4800+ 2.50 GHz</p><p>Are you sure that is bottle necking it? i mean i know being on a pvp server will add a lot of lag and the new hot fix did help a bit but i cant max it still.</p><p>I had to have it on raid performance and now i can do ballanced and that is quite a big difference after the hot fix high is pushing it too far i lag too much, but reguardless it helped a lot i hope rumors wernt true that they are removing the macro part of the hot fix we will most likely get lag again, and have to have people in the game that come to raids with 20 skills in one macro and mess up the whole raid because they dont know how to play the game and are too lazy to press buttons.</p>

[zimmer]

<p>I have a 4400+ and it is a little slower but it maxes out all the time.</p><p>have you taken a look at the cpu resources under task manager and watched how high it goes?</p><p>I bet the cpu is being maxed occasionally.  it could still be a bottleneck as those cpu's are not overly fast compared to the core 2's now and especially i7's.</p><p>Even looking at a Phenom 2 which takes a nice performance per clock jump over the athlon x2</p>

[Seolta]

<p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>xpraetorianx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p></blockquote><p>That's why I am afraid, seeing SM3.0 in action so far. That they will have to redo / retune all the lightning (light maps?) in all the zones.</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p>I wish they would, because no matter what type of machine you have (i7 920 here) certain specific lighting areas on certain maps will take you from 60fps to slideshow instantly. For just one example, crank up the settings and go into the miner cave area of Blackburrow and start poking around.</p>

[duddwin]

<p><cite>zimmer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I have a 4400+ and it is a little slower but it maxes out all the time.</p><p>have you taken a look at the cpu resources under task manager and watched how high it goes?</p><p>I bet the cpu is being maxed occasionally.  it could still be a bottleneck as those cpu's are not overly fast compared to the core 2's now and especially i7's.</p><p>Even looking at a Phenom 2 which takes a nice performance per clock jump over the athlon x2</p></blockquote><p>my cpu and memory is never maxed and i lag past ballanced pretty bad</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>zimmer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I have a 4400+ and it is a little slower but it maxes out all the time.</p><p>have you taken a look at the cpu resources under task manager and watched how high it goes?</p><p>I bet the cpu is being maxed occasionally.  it could still be a bottleneck as those cpu's are not overly fast compared to the core 2's now and especially i7's.</p><p>Even looking at a Phenom 2 which takes a nice performance per clock jump over the athlon x2</p></blockquote><p>I'd say the CPU is the bottleneck there with EQ2, PhenonII's are about 20% faster at least per a clock then a Athlon x64, add in also the extra speed from the 1333Mhz DDR3 ram and things do get a lot better.</p><p>On my PhenonII 955 (Quad 3.2Ghz) I can play maxed out just about playable, although it does slow down here and there and I only have one ATI 4870 card, so for EQ2 you are definitely far from having too much CPU power but you have way too much graphics card power.</p><p>One other thing, the performance stats can show some funny things, one odd thing that can show up is thrashing, if the CPU is spending all its time swapping tasks it ends up having very little time to actually process things, hence you can see a very heavily loaded CPU go to a low percentage use.  This only happens though when there are masses of tasks being run at the same time.</p><p>The other thing that may happen is the ram could be a bottleneck, so if the CPU is spending forever waiting for megabytes of data to be passes around your not going to see much CPU activity even if you could benefit from a faster CPU.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p>Duplicate post</p>

[zimmer]

<p>your ram will not always fill right out.  just means more is swapping to the hard drive.</p><p>I do agree though that it would seem that even with a lot of client side power you can get slow down.  For what sometimes would seem no apparent reason.</p><p>what version of windows did you say you were running?</p><p>NM see you said win7 ultimate x64</p><p>usually good at mem management that one.  it is not the RC is it?  Full win 7?</p>

[swampthing]

<p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p>

[Dulissa]

<p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p>ha.</p>

[Tharzgak]

<p>Best of all would be SM 3.0 and actual parallelism support (multi-core balancing rather than the current off-loading method, this would require recompiling the application and working out the bugs from scratch but would benefit the server applications as well).  That might be too much to ask for though.  Unfortunately a task like that would basically be remaking the whole application portion of EQ2, but man, it would last SOE a long time.</p>

[Seolta]

<p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p>Well, it's diff. ppl working on those so not like it's an either/or proposition. Besides, BG is most likely delayed also(see the latest BG announcement on eq2players).</p>

[swampthing]

<p><cite>Seolta@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p>Well, it's diff. ppl working on those so not like it's an either/or proposition. Besides, BG is most likely delayed also(see the latest BG announcement on eq2players).</p></blockquote><p>well aware it's different people, isn't really the point.  THe point is i don't personally feel that battlegrounds have any business in EQ at all.  the game is too clunky and isn't balanced for this type of pvp.  The number one reason i quit playing wow was that i was tired of the constant class balance see saw thanks to pvp.</p><p>A graphics updated for eq2 should have been priority one.  Keeping your game looking modern is something mmorpg's really fail at.  Honestly this whole expansion is a big failure in my book, doesn't really add anything worthwhile.  There's not one must have feature in it for me other than a few more levels and a few more quests.</p>

[CYR3Z]

<p>has shader 3 been patched in game yet i heard the shadowing has but noting else?</p>

[krinkled]

<p><span style="font-size: small;">I agree 100% and hear from our website members constantly about this game desperately needing a graphics update.  It is the #1 issue, to modernize the engine and make it perform better.  Many people love the game but won't play it due to the graphics engine being so outdated, and not scaling in any way with modern hardware.  I am playing on a Core i7 and 5870 and the performance is still not much better than I was getting 2 years ago - many have said and I agree - I would have paid $40 just for a complete re-do of the game's graphics engine.  Our members also fear that PvP is going to introduce the constant whining about overpowered classes and nerf/buff cycle that plagues so many games.  That being said everyone is excited for the expansion but I cannot put in stronger terms how important it is to modernize this game's graphic's engine completely and make the game perform well.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The machine I mentioned gets 250+ FPS in FEAR with everything maxed which looks so much prettier than EQ2.  Yet EQ2 is really starting to look dated graphics wise and when the top gear still can barely pull 30 FPS in some areas there is a HUGE problem here.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Aion was very smart to just use the FarCry engine.  SoE should consider just buying the license rights to a graphics engine if they cannot make one.  It worked amazingly well for NCsoft.</span></p>

[QuaiCon]

<p><cite>krinkled wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: small;">Aion was very smart to just use the FarCry engine.  SoE should consider just buying the license rights to a graphics engine if they cannot make one.  It worked amazingly well for NCsoft.</span></p></blockquote><p>switching engine now won't be an easy task too, you would most likely have to rework all zones, charcter-, mob- and item graphics to fit the new engine. Which probably takes even longer than adding SM3 support on the current Engine.</p><p>For future productucts SOE is already using premade engines, like Unreal Engine 3 for DC Universe Online.</p>

[CYR3Z]

meh its allready being done! Checked on forums under test server

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Arombolosh@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>switching engine now won't be an easy task too, you would most likely have to rework all zones, charcter-, mob- and item graphics to fit the new engine. Which probably takes even longer than adding SM3 support on the current Engine.</p><p>For future productucts SOE is already using premade engines, like Unreal Engine 3 for DC Universe Online.</p></blockquote><p>Hmm, using a premade engine makes sense for a small company, but for someone of SOE's size with multiple MMO's in production then why not custom build one engine and use it across all of their games?</p><p>I'm not sure if there is a difference gamewise too with a MMO with lots of characters in the world and a normal FPS game, thinking here if say something like Planetside could have been done with the Unreal engine and still gotten the same sort of speed?  Could you realistically put say 100 players into view on Unreal and still play lag free, if so then why haven't I seen someone do it online?</p><p>Or is the Planetside game and graphics written in a way that is much more efficient for an MMO?  If so then for the longterm it would be cool if we could see a engine that worked for Planetside 2 and EQ3 and any other future MMO.</p>

[Khyell]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Arombolosh@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><p>Hmm, using a premade engine makes sense for a small company, but for someone of SOE's size with multiple MMO's in production then why not custom build one engine and use it across all of their games?</p><p>I'm not sure if there is a difference gamewise too with a MMO with lots of characters in the world and a normal FPS game, thinking here if say something like Planetside could have been done with the Unreal engine and still gotten the same sort of speed?  Could you realistically put say 100 players into view on Unreal and still play lag free, if so then why haven't I seen someone do it online?</p><p>Or is the Planetside game and graphics written in a way that is much more efficient for an MMO?  If so then for the longterm it would be cool if we could see a engine that worked for Planetside 2 and EQ3 and any other future MMO.</p></blockquote><p>Using a pre-made engine makes sense for <strong>all</strong> companies no matter how big or small. It takes dozens of developers (programmers, IT guys, project managers, etc) just to create a graphics engine, especially one with all the modern bells and whistles. After the engine is made, you must then have (or hire)  a QA team to thoroughly test it for bugs. Besides the sheer number of people, lets not forget that all of these people need to be paid, some of which have 6-digit salaries per year. For an MMO, the ongoing development can go on for many years, all the while you must keep these people employed in order to fix bugs and update the engine.</p><p>That's a whole separate software development cycle, and you havent even made a game yet. That costs money, and that money could have been used on game content instead of a graphics engine.</p><p>Lets also not forget that game engines, especially big ones like Unreal arent cheap but they cost significantly less than making your own, plus you get the added benefit of a dedicated support team if you do have any problems. Different companies have different needs, and depending on how they wish to use a licensed engine, they will have the same or different bugs. While fixing the bugs or updating the engine as per a particular company's request, they will then have the experience to fix other customers' bugs if they ever show up again.</p><p>It's nice to have the bragging rights to having your own engine, but it's ultimately not economical these days unless your game's vision cannot be reproduced with currently available, licensable game engines.</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Nargothrel@Lucan DLere wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>It's nice to have the bragging rights to having your own engine, but it's ultimately not economical these days unless your game's vision cannot be reproduced with currently available, licensable game engines.</p></blockquote><p>And that's still my question, I know Planetside for example isn't the most graphically advanced but it does somehow have 100+ people in the same area without lag, something other game engines that was designed for 32v32 fragfests I've yet to see capable of (and the market is utterly saturated with small scale "MMO's" these days).  So I'm still not sure if the graphics engine can be optimised for a MMO.</p><p>Its also a question of scale, if SOE have 4-5 MMO's out all using the engine it could well work out cheaper then buying something off the shelf, MxO ended with a very low population, but the continuing royality payments were the reason it came to an end at the time it did, with the potentially ultra long lifespan of a MMO your own engine looks appealing.</p><p>Plus to turn it around, if you have an engine that gives some sort of advantage for an MMO then why not sell it and allow others to license it, looking back at SOE's history they've made several graphical engines already, they have the expertise.</p>

[Khyell]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>And that's still my question, I know Planetside for example isn't the most graphically advanced but it does somehow have 100+ people in the same area without lag, something other game engines that was designed for 32v32 fragfests I've yet to see capable of (and the market is utterly saturated with small scale "MMO's" these days).  So I'm still not sure if the graphics engine can be optimised for a MMO.</p><p>Its also a question of scale, if SOE have 4-5 MMO's out all using the engine it could well work out cheaper then buying something off the shelf, MxO ended with a very low population, but the continuing royality payments were the reason it came to an end at the time it did, with the potentially ultra long lifespan of a MMO your own engine looks appealing.</p><p>Plus to turn it around, if you have an engine that gives some sort of advantage for an MMO then why not sell it and allow others to license it, looking back at SOE's history they've made several graphical engines already, they have the expertise.</p></blockquote><p>As a matter of fact, SOE did make the EQ2 engine with the intent of making it uniform across all their games. After the initial R&D costs, and the fact that development went so slowly that competitors were surpassing them in technology and features, they decided that it was time to shift focus away from it. There are many factors as to why companies choose not to do this.</p><p>Capcom was smart and started developing their proprietary engine years ago with uniform architecture in mind; that's some foresight on their part and it's paid off. Turbine created their Turbine Engine for the original Asheron's Call back in the day out of necessity, because as you have said there were no engines to support the type of streaming content they needed at the time. Turbine is a lucky case in that they had a good foundation to build upon and now all of their games use an advanced version of that same engine, even supporting DX10.1 with LoTR.  </p><p>However, not all companies are created equal and not all companies would have the same success. Just because you set out to make a uniform engine, doesnt mean you'll make it well and it also doesnt mean you'll make it better than your competitors will. There's a huge R&D cycle and that's an awfully big risk for a company no matter what the size which sony realised too late. Try to figure out how much EQ2 actually cost to make/launch and I'll guarantee you're way off. Think big budget hollywood movie, then aim higher. </p><p>I understand what you're after with an MMO specific game engine, and there are graphics engines/toolsets emerging designed specifically for MMOs in mind. For instance, Bioware is using the <a href="http://www.heroengine.com/" target="_blank">Hero Engine</a> for Star Wars: The Old Republic. They've praised it over and over again for the development time it has saved them. I'm sure we'll be seeing many more games using similar technologies.</p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>So...what is going on with this? Death to shader 3.0?</p>

[Gargamel]

<p>Not that any of this talk is related, but licensing an engine isn't cheap either.</p><p>Last I heard Bioware customized so much of the heros engine that there was little 'stock' left save for some physics items.</p><p>Not to mention it costs a ton... I'd ballpark around $2-3 million for the use of it (license, support, in-house custom coding, source code option, etc -- assuming 4yr production cycle) not to mention 1% off the top of revenue of the game.  </p><p>So yeah you save the time, and the cost of creating what you need up to that point, but these engines are hardly off the shelf solutions.  They are constructs, tools to do lighting and shading and physics.  Not some cute little GUI map maker thing like some might have played with back in the DOOM days.  There is a ton of investment, time, and coding (not to mention artwork, etc) do be done no matter which path you take.</p>

[Khyell]

<p><cite>Gargamel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Not that any of this talk is related, but licensing an engine isn't cheap either.</p><p>Last I heard Bioware customized so much of the heros engine that there was little 'stock' left save for some physics items.</p><p>Not to mention it costs a ton... I'd ballpark around $2-3 million for the use of it (license, support, in-house custom coding, source code option, etc -- assuming 4yr production cycle) not to mention 1% off the top of revenue of the game.  </p><p>So yeah you save the time, and the cost of creating what you need up to that point, but these engines are hardly off the shelf solutions.  They are constructs, tools to do lighting and shading and physics.  Not some cute little GUI map maker thing like some might have played with back in the DOOM days.  There is a ton of investment, time, and coding (not to mention artwork, etc) do be done no matter which path you take.</p></blockquote><p>Bioware did not customize the hero engine, but instead added modules it needed specific to SW: TOR, as the hero engine is a modular toolset. Not really a big deal and not really a huge overhead for them. Plus instead of paying engineers to sit around and scratch their heads to figure out how to make their mods work with Hero, they have the whole team over at Simutronics to help them, and possibly create new code for them, in order for the mods to work. And yes the Hero engine IS "some cute little GUI map maker thing like some might have played with back in the DOOM days." Download the evaluation version or watch their videos online and see for yourself. If it was just a graphics engine they wanted, they could have gotten something like the Crytek or Unreal.</p><p>That ballpark figure you mentioned; Go back to what I said about how much it costs to employ engineers per year. Lets say you have 10 engineers making AT LEAST $80k a year, where a lead engine programmer (esp. for an EA owned company) would probably make at least $100k. So multiply that by 3-5 years, add in facilities expenses like electricity, rent, water, travel, recreation (like company parties to keep up morale) and that $2-3 million dollars looks like a pittance.</p><p>But that's saying you're correct in your estimate, and you just might be; I dont know for sure. At least for the hero engine in particular, review their pricing plans. For a company of EA's size, they are definitely going with the 'subscription' method which also requires them to pay a percentage of royalties from the product in question for the duration of it's operation (this is an MMO engine after all), plus the initial licensing fees.</p><p>Vanguard's total budget pre-SOE was about $24 million dollars, and this was being developed by a small independent team. How much do you think it costs to employ a few hundred engineers, artists, writers, level designers, HR, marketing, and IT for a larger company like SOE or Blizzard or EA? Certainly a lot more than that, and again it makes that $2-3 million seem cheap. Maybe it just depends on what your idea of cheap is?</p>

[guillero]

<p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So...what is going on with this? Death to shader 3.0?</p></blockquote><p>Yeah I would like to know this as well. What is going on?</p><p>So much progress was already being made. It was mostly lighting issues that was left.</p><p>Jer</p>

[woolf2k]

<p>I don't see it on the update list. with GU and SF. </p><p>Was this cancelled or delayed?</p>

[Gungo]

<p>next live update was the last word.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>xpraetorianx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>There will be lighting adjustments as we work our way through the zones, so don't worry.  Our lead Artists are looking over the conversion to make sure things look right.</strong></span></p>

[swampthing]

<p>thats nice, but when is it going live? Some kind of official word would be nice.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>xpraetorianx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p></blockquote><p>That's why I am afraid, seeing SM3.0 in action so far. That they will have to redo / retune all the lightning (light maps?) in all the zones.</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>There are no lighting maps used (prior to the expansion), but general lighting will be scaled and even some zones scaled for lighting to make sure those places still look correct.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Seolta@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Jerokane@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>xpraetorianx wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Running around Tomb of the Mad Crusader is nearly pitch black...   Cool if there was a bit more lighting to light up the area, but its like someone turned off the lights in the most of that zone.</p></blockquote><p>That's why I am afraid, seeing SM3.0 in action so far. That they will have to redo / retune all the lightning (light maps?) in all the zones.</p><p>Jer</p></blockquote><p>I wish they would, because no matter what type of machine you have (i7 920 here) certain specific lighting areas on certain maps will take you from 60fps to slideshow instantly. For just one example, crank up the settings and go into the miner cave area of Blackburrow and start poking around.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The new Shader 3.0 lighting model does run a lot more math in the background to give higher definition to the lighting effects.  This will cause some machines to choke.  Over time we hope some bottlenecks can be smoothed out and the general performance to increase.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>zimmer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I have a 4400+ and it is a little slower but it maxes out all the time.</p><p>have you taken a look at the cpu resources under task manager and watched how high it goes?</p><p>I bet the cpu is being maxed occasionally.  it could still be a bottleneck as those cpu's are not overly fast compared to the core 2's now and especially i7's.</p><p>Even looking at a Phenom 2 which takes a nice performance per clock jump over the athlon x2</p></blockquote><p>I'd say the CPU is the bottleneck there with EQ2, PhenonII's are about 20% faster at least per a clock then a Athlon x64, add in also the extra speed from the 1333Mhz DDR3 ram and things do get a lot better.</p><p>On my PhenonII 955 (Quad 3.2Ghz) I can play maxed out just about playable, although it does slow down here and there and I only have one ATI 4870 card, so for EQ2 you are definitely far from having too much CPU power but you have way too much graphics card power.</p><p>One other thing, the performance stats can show some funny things, one odd thing that can show up is thrashing, if the CPU is spending all its time swapping tasks it ends up having very little time to actually process things, hence you can see a very heavily loaded CPU go to a low percentage use.  This only happens though when there are masses of tasks being run at the same time.</p><p>The other thing that may happen is the ram could be a bottleneck, so if the CPU is spending forever waiting for megabytes of data to be passes around your not going to see much CPU activity even if you could benefit from a faster CPU.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU performance optimizations have been a hot topic of discussion around the office, specifically for the rendering engine.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Sorry, Battlegrounds did take the focus over this past month.  On the other hand, I've been given nearly 100% of my time to work on Shader 3.0.  And that's even with the 10-14 hour days.  This last month was spent on upgrading the tools our artists use for upcoming game updates and expansions.  They're now able to use Shader 3.0 much better than the general game overhaul has done.  Now the artists can build 3.0 shaders a bit more to their taste and artistic abilities.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>CYR3Z wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>has shader 3 been patched in game yet i heard the shadowing has but noting else?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Shader 3.0 has been on Test, and to be re-enabled ASAP.  It was disabled a couple weeks over winter due to a crashing bug and my absence and then again to prep the game for the expansion release.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>krinkled wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: small;">I agree 100% and hear from our website members constantly about this game desperately needing a graphics update.  It is the #1 issue, to modernize the engine and make it perform better.  Many people love the game but won't play it due to the graphics engine being so outdated, and not scaling in any way with modern hardware.  I am playing on a Core i7 and 5870 and the performance is still not much better than I was getting 2 years ago - many have said and I agree - I would have paid $40 just for a complete re-do of the game's graphics engine.  Our members also fear that PvP is going to introduce the constant whining about overpowered classes and nerf/buff cycle that plagues so many games.  That being said everyone is excited for the expansion but I cannot put in stronger terms how important it is to modernize this game's graphic's engine completely and make the game perform well.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">The machine I mentioned gets 250+ FPS in FEAR with everything maxed which looks so much prettier than EQ2.  Yet EQ2 is really starting to look dated graphics wise and when the top gear still can barely pull 30 FPS in some areas there is a HUGE problem here.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;">Aion was very smart to just use the FarCry engine.  SoE should consider just buying the license rights to a graphics engine if they cannot make one.  It worked amazingly well for NCsoft.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>And that's exactly what I'm here for.  The Shader 3.0 update was a huge task combined with massive amounts of effort, massaging a very different technology into a framework optimized and built solely for shader 1.0.  I hope soon I can add some speed to the game!</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><span ><a href="../user/profile.m?user_id=137848"><strong><span style="color: #3333ff;">Jerokane</span></strong></a></span><cite> wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span><p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So...what is going on with this? Death to shader 3.0?</p></blockquote><p>Yeah I would like to know this as well. What is going on?</p><p>So much progress was already being made. It was mostly lighting issues that was left.</p><p>Jer</p></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Stiiilllll coming.  Sorry it's taken a couple delays.  There's so so so much to do {whimper}. If I can bang out these last few bugs it should be ready for live very soon now.</strong></span></p>

[Karian]

<p>So Shader 3.0 will not going Live with GU55 ?</p><p>Right or Right ?</p>

[Hamervelder]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Sorry, Battlegrounds did take the focus over this past month.  On the other hand, I've been given nearly 100% of my time to work on Shader 3.0.  And that's even with the 10-14 hour days.  This last month was spent on upgrading the tools our artists use for upcoming game updates and expansions.  They're now able to use Shader 3.0 much better than the general game overhaul has done.  Now the artists can build 3.0 shaders a bit more to their taste and artistic abilities.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Dude, the only thing you need to be working on is a tall cold one, sitting back in a deck chair by the pool and relaxing for awhile, after pulling so many long days.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>thats nice, but when is it going live? Some kind of official word would be nice.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Sorry, I can't give official words.  Well I could but I would get into trouble.  It's near ready though.  Just needs a little more time on the Test server and a few widespread bug fixes.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>swampthing wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>seems like it's a safe assumption at this point that SM 3 won't be in at expansion launch.  Personally, would have rather had SM3 over battlegrounds.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Sorry, Battlegrounds did take the focus over this past month.  On the other hand, I've been given nearly 100% of my time to work on Shader 3.0.  And that's even with the 10-14 hour days.  This last month was spent on upgrading the tools our artists use for upcoming game updates and expansions.  They're now able to use Shader 3.0 much better than the general game overhaul has done.  Now the artists can build 3.0 shaders a bit more to their taste and artistic abilities.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Dude, the only thing you need to be working on is a tall cold one, sitting back in a deck chair by the pool and relaxing for awhile, after pulling so many long days.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>LOL, true that.</strong></span> <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/e8a506dc4ad763aca51bec4ca7dc8560.gif" border="0" /></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Kyala@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So Shader 3.0 will not going Live with GU55 ?</p><p>Right or Right ?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Right.  Not with 55.</strong></span></p>

[Karian]

<p>And where ist now the Battlegrounds ? I found nothing in the Patchnotes <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>So no Shader 3.0 and no Battlegrounds in G55 .. only some Quests has changed .. YEAH !</p>

[Dharken]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Kyala@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So Shader 3.0 will not going Live with GU55 ?</p><p>Right or Right ?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Right.  Not with 55.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Appreciate the update and the work on it. From the Streaming event one could tell Shader 3.0 was a question asked to more than one person who sat in front of the Camera. =)</p><p>Appreciate the hard work and looking forward to 3.0. ^_^</p>

[guillero]

<p>It's sertainly nice to hear from Ryan again. Was getting a little worried tho hehe. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/499fd50bc713bfcdf2ab5a23c00c2d62.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Jer</p>

[wintermu]

<p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p>

[Ama]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p>

[Josgar]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium;"><div><p>If there was a High Performance and a High Quality version of Shader 3.0 and Shader 1.0 was completely ditched, what would the effect on the game be?</p></div></span></p>

[Dharken]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Hey Imago... With what you said above its brought a question to mind. As eventually EQ2 will move to Shader 3.0, are you expecting a lot of hardware upgrades needed from players (such as a minimum requirements change) or will this not be an issue.</p><p>Also (and pardon the dumb question) will players have the ability to toggle between Shader 1 and 3.0 or is 3.0 a complete overhaul to replace 1?</p>

[Ama]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Thanks for the reply i'm always intrigued by the newest forms of technology be it programming, physical hardware, or the combination of the two making gaming a better experience for players.  Quickly learned while studying various aspects of gaming if things don't come together just right a game degrades very quickly.  I'm quite curious how the ATI Radeon 5870 card would handle the shader 3.0 material unless it's more reliant on ram/processing power. </p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Dharken wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Hey Imago... With what you said above its brought a question to mind. As eventually EQ2 will move to Shader 3.0, are you expecting a lot of hardware upgrades needed from players (such as a minimum requirements change) or will this not be an issue.</p><p>Also (and pardon the dumb question) will players have the ability to toggle between Shader 1 and 3.0 or is 3.0 a complete overhaul to replace 1?</p></blockquote><p><cite>Josgar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite></p> <blockquote><p><span style="font-size: medium; font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><div><p>If there was a High Performance and a High Quality version of Shader 3.0 and Shader 1.0 was completely ditched, what would the effect on the game be?</p></div></span></p></blockquote> <p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>There is no plan to ditch Shader 1.  If it were, players would have to upgrade their systems to 2003+ hardware supporting Shader 3. And the game would need some more updates, converting all particles and water effects into Shader 3 as well.  Also, the art work done so far has been optimized for Shader 1, not Shader 3.  So we would have to take a good look at that too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Currently there is no plan to replace Shader 1, only to provide an additional option to run the game in Shader 3 with enhanced visuals.</strong></span></p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p>

[Dharken]

<p>Beauty! Just what i was hoping.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm curious Imago what is the primary aim of the shader 3.0 system? Are you improving performance in the shader system, trying to improve quality with more dynamic shadows and such or is it a combination of the two?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>To be honest, the aim changed a few times from a year and a half ago up through this last December.  Originally it was only to provide the pathway to building new modern graphical effects.  Then, once a prototype came out that looked much better than the original shaders did without re-doing art work, the plan added improved visuals.  As time went by data analysis teased us with potential for increased performance.  Yet developing and integrating a Shader 3.0 system into a system based on Shader 1 for both performance and improved visuals weren't necessarily set in stone at one time, but were desired and hoped for by a few members here at SOE.  In the end the requirements for visual improvements and support for the Shader 1 architecture did not allow for both to live at the same time.  It was either performance or quality.  Since almost all of the effort was directed at better visual effects from the beginning we finished it off with that.  There was some time spent in finding ways to keep the visuals while improving performance; and we found ways to get closer to that, but the more performance we aimed for the closer Shader 3.0 would look like Shader 1.  It wasn't worth the cost.  Today Shader 3.0 is there to extend the capabilities of our artists, stand as a pathway to other graphical effects like faster, better shadows and depth of field, and provide a general improvement over the earlier zones in the game.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Thanks for the reply i'm always intrigued by the newest forms of technology be it programming, physical hardware, or the combination of the two making gaming a better experience for players.  Quickly learned while studying various aspects of gaming if things don't come together just right a game degrades very quickly.  I'm quite curious how the ATI Radeon 5870 card would handle the shader 3.0 material unless it's more reliant on ram/processing power. </p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>EQ2's 3.0 shaders are much more reliant on GPU processing power compared to its 1.0 shaders.  Internally we have seen the 5870 card out-perform Shader 1 while still processing all of the new Shader 3 goodness.</strong></span></p>

[wintermu]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>re Imago-Quem:</cite></p><p>This must be very sweet to work on! I really appreciate you posting these details. I am quite excited personally as I feel running ps 3.0 native will bring much performance to the game.</p><p>I completely understand the delay. While the newer unified shader architecture cards (I'm on gtx 285) will show enhanced performance with ps 3.0, I know from experience that the 1st gen ps 3.0 cards will take a huge hit. However, to me this is very much a usability and interface thing because there is only so much optimization that can be done. It is more important for players to be aware of the feature and be given control over which model is used, as opposed to hiding it within a performance profile or labeling it enigmaticly.</p><p>Age of Conan was a great example at how to do this the wrong way. Through out the beta process, their graphics options ui changed quite considerably. They had huge a struggle with how granular a level of control over the rendering options to show to the player. The result in early retail took a lot of control out of the players' hands.</p><p>I remember the at one point the game let me specify a shader model manually, but at the time of release, they had implemented an ICKY system that would switch shader models up on the player during gameplay depending on performance. AHHHH that was so frustrating, especially because the feature that casued this auto-switch was labeled in a way that had nothing to do with shader models, doh!</p><p>Ok ramble over, get back to work brightening up zones that lack lightmaps <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I absolutely LOVE graphics programming.  So, yes, it is fun to work on this project.  Though graphics programming is yet another layer of complexity on top of Software Engineering, I love it nonetheless.  Somehow, it being more difficult seems to make it that much cooler.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm not a dev, I do usability and UX, but I am quite into hardware and overclocking. I have really enjoyed watching the gpu architecture evolve alongside directx over the years.</p><p>I like how a lot of the ps 3.0 features are sort of shortcuts that accomplish "more with less" (normal mapping, parallax mapping, complex shaders, hdr/tonemapping). I remember a point before ps 3.0 where there was this tension between limitations on transister count and heat/power consumption vs poly count. It's baddass that this was resolved by looking at the trickery of human perception to make us think we're seeing more detail when there's much less going on in terms of poly-count! It's also pretty crazy that intel is pushing realtime raytracing again after so many years with the larabee stuff.</p><p>You can really feel how much things have changed by looking back at eq2 whose initial allure (graphically) was high poly-count models and environments <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /> Nowadays, we can achieve so much more immersion with dynamic dof, hdr, and the other tricks. btw If people have no idea what im talking about, check out early U3 tech demo, they show you what these features accomplish for the end user <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m7T5ay_8DI</a> Another good example of this is Oblivion, ironicly also U3.</p><p>In any event, I really like watching the architecture evolve alongside the dx api. I'm also glad that most ps 3.0/4.0 stuff finally stopped looking/feeling like stock U3 engine lol. (or maybe im just used to the ubiquity of the engine by now)</p><p>I'm still going to buy the gt100 fermi and roast marshmellows on it tho  ^_^</p><p>Cheers!</p><p>p.s. This also reminds me of the performance issues during the development of Vanguard. They had to go with unreal 2.5 and ended up tacking on u3 era modules like the partile system and other things. If they somehow had the time or money to wait for licensing u3 from the get go, I wonder how the game would have faired at release. hdd thrashing was a huge issue for them until they went back and overhauled and culled their assets.</p><p>Oh, and in the spirit of the history of graphics programming, check out this really sweet demoscene retrospective. Brings back memories <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=13033&howmanycomments=-1" target="_blank">http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=130...manycomments=-1</a></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes and no.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Under certain settings Shader 3 outperforms Shader 1 by over 100 FPS.  But old (around 2004) graphics cards just don't process 3.0 shaders very well, so they won't likely see much of this gain.  On current default settings Shader 1 slightly outperforms Shader 3.0 (in respect to FPS, not workload).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If you choose to run point lights + shader 3.0 then you will likely see a performance drop at the cost of the quality upgrade.</strong></span></p>

[wintermu]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p>I'm hoping for a performance increase on my setup with ps 3.0 too. My experience is pretty similar to yours, but I attributed the poor eq2 performance at higher settings to be due both to both CPU bottlenecking AND not running on my card's native pixel shader. Also: it would be impossible to implement, but I still have a pipe dream of one day seeing eq2 having SMP haha (symmetric multiprocessing, i.e. running more than 55% total use of your multicore cpu).</p><p>I get pretty underwhelming performance at 1080p with 4gb ddr3, 1 gtx 285, and q9550 quad clocked at 3.7ghz. Usually 20-40fps in most places. SF overland zones really lag my box. I had to slide down the LOD and max poly for environment quite a bit to stay over 20fps in some places. Maybe the addition of physx support and ps 3.0 will help free up my cpu for these scenes with lots of depth.</p>

[Thundy]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes and no.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Under certain settings Shader 3 outperforms Shader 1 by over 100 FPS.  But old (around 2004) graphics cards just don't process 3.0 shaders very well, so they won't likely see much of this gain.  On current default settings Shader 1 slightly outperforms Shader 3.0 (in respect to FPS, not workload).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If you choose to run point lights + shader 3.0 then you will likely see a performance drop at the cost of the quality upgrade.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I hate to be such a negative ninny, but reading all your posts is starting to get my ire up. I've got an e8400 w/8800GT and there is *no excuse* for a five year old game to run as poorly as it does on hardware exponentially more powerful than existed on the day of release in 2005. The NUMBER ONE PRIORITY on improving EQ2's engine should be on the speed and performance of the game.</p><p>If all Shader 3.0 is going to do is make the game look prettier (I think it already looks good on quality settings) without offering me a significant speed boost then I really see no point to all of your work.</p>

[Guy De Alsace]

<p>I just bought a new computer and I'm still baffled as to why it chugs so much in places. Playing Oblivion and Half Life 2 with ultra-high resolution textures and I get three times the fps than I do with EQ2...its also STILL the only game in the known universe of space and time that I know of that doesnt support AA within the game.</p>

[wintermu]

<p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes and no.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Under certain settings Shader 3 outperforms Shader 1 by over 100 FPS.  But old (around 2004) graphics cards just don't process 3.0 shaders very well, so they won't likely see much of this gain.  On current default settings Shader 1 slightly outperforms Shader 3.0 (in respect to FPS, not workload).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If you choose to run point lights + shader 3.0 then you will likely see a performance drop at the cost of the quality upgrade.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I hate to be such a negative ninny, but reading all your posts is starting to get my ire up. I've got an e8400 w/8800GT and there is *no excuse* for a five year old game to run as poorly as it does on hardware exponentially more powerful than existed on the day of release in 2005. The NUMBER ONE PRIORITY on improving EQ2's engine should be on the speed and performance of the game.</p><p>If all Shader 3.0 is going to do is make the game look prettier (I think it already looks good on quality settings) without offering me a significant speed boost then I really see no point to all of your work.</p></blockquote><p>I think the important part here is that you will be able to select which shader model to use. It's very likely that you will be able to switch between the two in real time and evaluate the performance impact on your system. Aesthetically, the biggest difference will be the lighting and the appearance of depth on surfaces. Also I think with shader 3.0 it's possible that they're making the spell effects look cleaner around characters and mobs.</p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p>So a card that was released in 2008 should stand a fair chance at gaining performance frame rate wise out of this. As for the fellow that has the 8000 series GS I both agree with you but also cannot argue for you. That card technologically speaking is nearly three generations back now. The 8800GT now known as the 9800GT however is still an excellent piece of hardware. As far as the GS goes its definitely an older generation card at this point.</p><p>I do agree with you however that the focus of this project should have been performance impact. Not visual quality. However, if there's a possibility that my GTX 260 will gain out of the change, i'll reserve my judgement for patch day.</p>

[wintermu]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So a card that was released in 2008 should stand a fair chance at gaining performance frame rate wise out of this. As for the fellow that has the 8000 series GS I both agree with you but also cannot argue for you. That card technologically speaking is nearly three generations back now. The 8800GT now known as the 9800GT however is still an excellent piece of hardware. As far as the GS goes its definitely an older generation card at this point.</p><p>I do agree with you however that the focus of this project should have been performance impact. Not visual quality. However, if there's a possibility that my GTX 260 will gain out of the change, i'll reserve my judgement for patch day.</p></blockquote><p>In comparison with the gt200 cards, the g90's make up for their lack of 'stream processors' (nvidia slang) with higher core clockspeed as compared to the previous 8000 series cards. Both the g90's and gt200's have excellent shader model 3.0 performance as long long as you have a good cpu to back things up! If you're on a budget you can get excellent performance from the 9800gt @ -85$ and the gt220 for ~60$. Just consider that you have to use a performance profile that is reasonable for your hardware. I'm sure an important part of this update is tweaking the performance profiles for shader 3.0 so that you can use the newer spec without sacrificing a lot of performance.</p>

[Zanthiana]

<p>I'm looking forward to the shader update.  So much so that I bought a ATI 5750 on SF Launch day to replace my 8600GT.  I was extremely disappointed on two fronts: No shader upgrade, and my new $150 5750 card picked up a whopping 3-5 fps over my 'old' 8600GT?!  It's running with new drivers and a freshly installed copy of Direct X 11, and I got 5 more frames per second?  Now, to be fair, apparently my 8600GT was more capable than I thought, and the bottle neck is probably my AMD 64 X2 5000+ CPU.  I run EQ2 fully cranked, minus shadows.  I average mid-teens, and frequently drop to single digit frame rates.  As you can imagine, this has killed me many many times. </p><p>So....my long round about question here is:  Should I go back to my 8600GT, or take the ATI back and get a newer nVidia, say a 260 series, or upgrade the CPU to say a quad core AMD?  I don't really want to dump an XBox or PS3 worth of cash into my PC just to make EQ2 run at an 'abysmal' <40fps...but those 3fps moments are a bummer.</p><p>(And by the way, is the shader stuff on Test?  I'd love to give it a try on my hardware, even it is only 1 testing zone or something...)</p><p>(And one more ninja edit: I see that the GPU Shadows are 3.0, so I'll turn them on with the new card and see.  In theory, my frame rate should stay the same, but I'll get nice shadows...)</p><p>OK: can pretty much ignore me now!  LoL.  I read through a lot of this thread, and have now setup my client with a pretty good balance of 'Looks Good/Run Faster' and am now getting 40-45 fps on average, and I don't drop below 20fps now.  SO, I'm mostly happy.  Turns out, I can't really return the card.  Can only exchange, and only if it is defective.  <img src="/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Thundy]

<p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes and no.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Under certain settings Shader 3 outperforms Shader 1 by over 100 FPS.  But old (around 2004) graphics cards just don't process 3.0 shaders very well, so they won't likely see much of this gain.  On current default settings Shader 1 slightly outperforms Shader 3.0 (in respect to FPS, not workload).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If you choose to run point lights + shader 3.0 then you will likely see a performance drop at the cost of the quality upgrade.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I hate to be such a negative ninny, but reading all your posts is starting to get my ire up. I've got an e8400 w/8800GT and there is *no excuse* for a five year old game to run as poorly as it does on hardware exponentially more powerful than existed on the day of release in 2005. The NUMBER ONE PRIORITY on improving EQ2's engine should be on the speed and performance of the game.</p><p>If all Shader 3.0 is going to do is make the game look prettier (I think it already looks good on quality settings) without offering me a significant speed boost then I really see no point to all of your work.</p></blockquote><p>I think the important part here is that you will be able to select which shader model to use. It's very likely that you will be able to switch between the two in real time and evaluate the performance impact on your system. Aesthetically, the biggest difference will be the lighting and the appearance of depth on surfaces. Also I think with shader 3.0 it's possible that they're making the spell effects look cleaner around characters and mobs.</p></blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Zanthiana@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So....my long round about question here is:  Should I go back to my 8600GT, or take the ATI back and get a newer nVidia, say a 260 series, or upgrade the CPU to say a quad core AMD?  I don't really want to dump an XBox or PS3 worth of cash into my PC just to make EQ2 run at an 'abysmal' <40fps...but those 3fps moments are a bummer.</p><p>OK: can pretty much ignore me now!  LoL.  I read through a lot of this thread, and have now setup my client with a pretty good balance of 'Looks Good/Run Faster' and am now getting 40-45 fps on average, and I don't drop below 20fps now.  SO, I'm mostly happy.  Turns out, I can't really return the card.  Can only exchange, and only if it is defective.  <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/9d71f0541cff0a302a0309c5079e8dee.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>I know you've sorted it now <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />  But just a comment, the 5750 card you have is way faster then a 260 series NVidea (a 260GTX = 4870 roughly on performance according to Toms Hardware). </p><p>For the next stop on performance I'd go for a better CPU, while you can drop a PhenonII in you'll be stuck with DDR2 on that motherboard (I assume its also AM2?) so its a dilema how much more you want to spend on something tied to the older ram.  Maybe a cheap AM2 6000 (twin 3Ghz CPU's, I think there used to be AM2 socket PhenonII dual cores around too which would be nicer) would be worth it as a upgrade since your processor is a dual 2.2Ghz one, although its just a few more FPS and probably not a night and day difference, if its cheap it could be great for tiding your system over to wait for another years upgrades.</p><p>A PhenonII is 20% faster per a clock so a 3.2/3.4Ghz quad would be real nice upgrade (or an Intel I5/I7), if they deepened the multi-core support in EQ2 though things would get much better for a lot of us <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU performance optimizations have been a hot topic of discussion around the office, specifically for the rendering engine.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>From a selfish point of view I'd really really like to see more multiprocessor support (although at times I wonder just how much real improvement can be had from the current multi-cpu architecture when all the overhead of splitting tasks up is done?).</p><p>It also seems to be the one area that would benefit both owners of high end and low end gear very well, at least according to the steam survey last year showing 70% of users now had dual core or more (and it must have grown a lot since then), especially when a lot of cheaper systems have a great sounding CPU and a mediocre graphics card, plus its the simple solution when EQ2 is so heavily CPU reliant currently.</p><p>As for graphics I did notice on test that with or without Shader 3.0 (shader 3.0 inside one cave ran more then 2x as fast as 1.0, but outside in Faydwer was about 10% slower on average back in December) the flora was the biggest hog, spinning fast around with it off was extremely smooth, with it on it I had slight juddering/50% slower frame rates.  I think after a while it smoothed out on the juddering which I guess was the flora being in cache instead of ram perhaps?  If so moving it to the graphics and the massive memory bandwidth it has there sounds like it could take a big load off the CPU/main memory.</p><p>All in all though the shader 3.0 is looking great, thanks for all the hard work your putting in there, its appreciated!</p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>Awesome Work Imago, This game already looked awesome but this Shader update adds allot more depth to the textures and makes the game look allot less dated, cant wait for it to come live <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />.</p><p>At the moment on test server it doesent allow you to activate cpu shadows which in my opinion, with antialiasing enabled, look allot better than the gpu ones as they take into account lightsources other than the sun, have a longer draw distance and look sharper and less pixilated. Also, at the moment the gpu shadows have a slider that makes you choose bettween distance and quality, will that be changed in the future? And are there any plans to make the Gpu shadows be effected by lightsources other than the sun cause at the moment, even though they have a horrible impact on preformance in most cases, Cpu shadows look allot better.</p>

[Jeeshman]

<p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>In comparison with the gt200 cards, the g90's make up for their lack of 'stream processors' (nvidia slang) with higher core clockspeed as compared to the previous 8000 series cards. Both the g90's and gt200's have excellent shader model 3.0 performance as long long as you have a good cpu to back things up! If you're on a budget you can get excellent performance from the 9800gt @ -85$ and the gt220 for ~60$. Just consider that you have to use a performance profile that is reasonable for your hardware. I'm sure an important part of this update is tweaking the performance profiles for shader 3.0 so that you can use the newer spec without sacrificing a lot of performance.</p></blockquote><p>I'm sorry, I don't mean to sound like a jerk but wintermute is wrong about which nvidia cards have stream processors.  The first nvidia card to use stream processors was the <strong>8 series.</strong>  The 8800 GTX has <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_8800_GTX" target="_blank"><strong>128 programmable stream processors</strong></a> that can be programmed as (scalar) pixel or vertex shaders.  G80 series, G90 series, AND GT200 series cards should handle shader 3.0 perfectly fine.</p><p>In  my opinion, there is NO REASON WHATSOEVER to upgrade your card if you have an nvidia 8800GT or 8800GTX or higher.  Even an 8600GT would probably work fine, although it may depend on the speed of the CPU it's paired with.</p><p>Wintermute is right about the CPU being important.  Upgrading your video card has had little impact on EQ2 performance because back in 2002 when the game was being designed, the programmers thought that CPU clockspeed would keep increasing rapidly and the game's graphics were designed around this theory.  The game (using shader 1.0) is extremely CPU dependant, which is why<em> the single best way to improve EQ2 performance is to upgrade to a faster CPU</em>.</p><p>I use an intel Core 2 Duo E8400 overclocked to 4.0 GHz and one nvidia 8800GTX when playing EQ2 and I keep just about everything maxed out, even during raids.  I don't anticipate shader 3.0 being a problem on my system.  Thundy, I think you'll be fine!</p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>You should probably stop mentioning the launch date, as the technology Imago is working on *now* is not early 2000 tech benchmark. To be crude, a stale cake with fresh icing is probably going to taste like a stale cake with fresh icing on it. Nothing he can do about the inherent graphics engine of the game itself. You have the option of staying with what your card can handle, or attempting to have it run newer technology which both makes the game look prettier and run smoother on cards that can handle it. That's it. If you want the benefit of the newer tech, you need a newer card.</p><p>This is the world of computing, tech can go obsolete in six months. It's expensive and there a sharp curve =(</p>

[Guy De Alsace]

<p><cite>Zulaika@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>You should probably stop mentioning the launch date, as the technology Imago is working on *now* is not early 2000 tech benchmark. To be crude, a stale cake with fresh icing is probably going to taste like a stale cake with fresh icing on it. Nothing he can do about the inherent graphics engine of the game itself. You have the option of staying with what your card can handle, or attempting to have it run newer technology which both makes the game look prettier and run smoother on cards that can handle it. That's it. If you want the benefit of the newer tech, you need a newer card.</p><p>This is the world of computing, tech can go obsolete in six months. It's expensive and there a sharp curve =(</p></blockquote><p>I think thats the nail on the head. EQ2's engine stinks so badly and getting it to do what its currently doing is actually quite a feat in and of itself. Getting it doing even more is quite obviously extremely difficult.</p><p>I think at some point though there will be a point reached where the engine cannot be made to go any further. Shader 3 might be it.</p>

[Albrig]

<p>I must be in some kind of alternate reality.</p><p>Everquest 2 for me is performing higher than the last time I was here over a year ago. I've been away for awhile but I was frequently seen with the GPU shadows test forum.</p><p>The biggest change I have noticed is with using Intel's X25-M G2 SSD. The Client-side of things still loads in models and ground features, trees and rocks, objects; constantly as you move through the zone. For a mechanical HDD, this is a nightmare. For an SSD, this problem has gone. This formula works for LOTRO and it works for WoW as both these engines stream data and geometry detail on the fly. Eq2 does it to a lesser extent, but obviously not nearly so optimized.</p><p>There was never a problem with the game engine that raw power couldn't fix, and I can tell that the Everquest2.exe has undergone significant enhancements. CPU shadows works better than ever. GPU shadows - well it has potential, but either it doesn't like the engine or the engine doesn't like the shadow implementation.</p><p>I'm currently non-SF and therefore, non-Shader 3.0. The performance I'm getting is staggering to say the least. Core i7 920 D0 stepping at 4Ghz, nVidia GTX275, Intel X-25M G2 SSD - it OBLITERATES everything that is being said here and it obliterates the game engine in non-shader 3.0 at this time.</p><p>It's an interesting problem. LOTRO exhibits, to a similar degree, the same performance problems (or did), but SSD's introduction has slapped those away leaving LOTRO performing as it should.</p><p>What is going on with the player base. Why do I have zero problems. Why can I get in a group with high spell detail with 4 simultaneous spells and maintain 60fps constantly?</p><p>Are you all in window-mode with 10 applications running in the background?</p>

[wintermu]

<p>Hey I diddn't mean to imply that the g80 cards don't have stream processors.. They are definitely shader 3.0 native cards! I was trying to convey my experience of owning a 8800gtx then -> 9800gt -> then gtx285. My point was that the g80 series will RUN the sharder 3.0 stuff fine, but may have trouble at higher resolutions and/or higher settings due to the lower clockspeed. I have seen plenty game benchies where the budget g90's with less stream processors (but higher clockspeeds) best the g80's in fps.</p><p>I wasn't trying to suggest that you would NEED to upgrade to a g90 or gt200 series card to enjoy sharder model 3 in eq2. However, I was guestimating that you would see less of a performance IMPACT on your fps from going to shader model 3.0 on a g90 or gt200 series card. I also was trying to suggest that part of this project probably involved tweaking the performance profiles to minimize this impact for the widest bredth of configurations.</p><p>From my persronal experience with the 8800gtx: it's a great card for being 3 gens old, but at higher resoluations I've had to pair down settings to retain my fps becaues of its slower core and shader clockspeed as compared to the other two gen's.</p><p>FYI on the newer gen, you can expect to need a beefier cpu if you were to go from a g80 series card to a higher end gt200 as these cards are MORE CPU DEPENDANT, regardless of what game you're playing. I wouldn't advise the guy with a e8400 and g80 to jump to a high end gt200 like a gtx 285 and expect to see the performance scale well. A less beefy card like the gt260 or gt220 would better match this system. I.E. don't waste your money on a very high end GPU unless you are on an intel quad for example.</p>

[zimmer]

<p>Wintermute check your PM's</p><p>please</p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I must be in some kind of alternate reality.</p><p>Everquest 2 for me is performing higher than the last time I was here over a year ago. I've been away for awhile but I was frequently seen with the GPU shadows test forum.</p><p>The biggest change I have noticed is with using Intel's X25-M G2 SSD. The Client-side of things still loads in models and ground features, trees and rocks, objects; constantly as you move through the zone. For a mechanical HDD, this is a nightmare. For an SSD, this problem has gone. This formula works for LOTRO and it works for WoW as both these engines stream data and geometry detail on the fly. Eq2 does it to a lesser extent, but obviously not nearly so optimized.</p><p>There was never a problem with the game engine that raw power couldn't fix, and I can tell that the Everquest2.exe has undergone significant enhancements. CPU shadows works better than ever. GPU shadows - well it has potential, but either it doesn't like the engine or the engine doesn't like the shadow implementation.</p><p>I'm currently non-SF and therefore, non-Shader 3.0. The performance I'm getting is staggering to say the least. Core i7 920 D0 stepping at 4Ghz, nVidia GTX275, Intel X-25M G2 SSD - it OBLITERATES everything that is being said here and it obliterates the game engine in non-shader 3.0 at this time.</p><p>It's an interesting problem. LOTRO exhibits, to a similar degree, the same performance problems (or did), but SSD's introduction has slapped those away leaving LOTRO performing as it should.</p><p>What is going on with the player base. Why do I have zero problems. Why can I get in a group with high spell detail with 4 simultaneous spells and maintain 60fps constantly?</p><p>Are you all in window-mode with 10 applications running in the background?</p></blockquote><p>You Sir, have a far larger "waste" budget than us family men who don't make but enough to pay our bills. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> That SSD and i7 says it all. <img src="/smilies/8a80c6485cd926be453217d59a84a888.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Guy De Alsace]

<p>I'm getting single figure framerates on my brand new Dell XPS8000 machine with i7, 6Gb memory and stuff if I run it in full detail with AA on in some places. Moors especially. Though I dont know if an Nvidia GTS240 is any good as a card. It has 1Gb on board though. I've used ATI for years so Nvidia cards are a mystery to me.</p>

[Guy De Alsace]

<p>Double post sorry. </p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I must be in some kind of alternate reality.</p><p>Everquest 2 for me is performing higher than the last time I was here over a year ago. I've been away for awhile but I was frequently seen with the GPU shadows test forum.</p><p>The biggest change I have noticed is with using Intel's X25-M G2 SSD. The Client-side of things still loads in models and ground features, trees and rocks, objects; constantly as you move through the zone. For a mechanical HDD, this is a nightmare. For an SSD, this problem has gone. This formula works for LOTRO and it works for WoW as both these engines stream data and geometry detail on the fly. Eq2 does it to a lesser extent, but obviously not nearly so optimized.</p><p>There was never a problem with the game engine that raw power couldn't fix, and I can tell that the Everquest2.exe has undergone significant enhancements. CPU shadows works better than ever. GPU shadows - well it has potential, but either it doesn't like the engine or the engine doesn't like the shadow implementation.</p><p>I'm currently non-SF and therefore, non-Shader 3.0. The performance I'm getting is staggering to say the least. Core i7 920 D0 stepping at 4Ghz, nVidia GTX275, Intel X-25M G2 SSD - it OBLITERATES everything that is being said here and it obliterates the game engine in non-shader 3.0 at this time.</p><p>It's an interesting problem. LOTRO exhibits, to a similar degree, the same performance problems (or did), but SSD's introduction has slapped those away leaving LOTRO performing as it should.</p><p>What is going on with the player base. Why do I have zero problems. Why can I get in a group with high spell detail with 4 simultaneous spells and maintain 60fps constantly?</p><p>Are you all in window-mode with 10 applications running in the background?</p></blockquote><p>Actually, I have a less capable system (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.5GHz, and Radeon 9xxx card) but I also run at max settings with shadows on with about 30~ fps. All I need to do in raids to prevent noticeable video lag, is drop my particle effects for each person from 8 to 1 and I'm good to go. Some peoeple computers, for some reason, does not play nice with EQ2.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Zulaika@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I must be in some kind of alternate reality.</p><p>Everquest 2 for me is performing higher than the last time I was here over a year ago. I've been away for awhile but I was frequently seen with the GPU shadows test forum.</p><p>The biggest change I have noticed is with using Intel's X25-M G2 SSD. The Client-side of things still loads in models and ground features, trees and rocks, objects; constantly as you move through the zone. For a mechanical HDD, this is a nightmare. For an SSD, this problem has gone. This formula works for LOTRO and it works for WoW as both these engines stream data and geometry detail on the fly. Eq2 does it to a lesser extent, but obviously not nearly so optimized.</p><p>There was never a problem with the game engine that raw power couldn't fix, and I can tell that the Everquest2.exe has undergone significant enhancements. CPU shadows works better than ever. GPU shadows - well it has potential, but either it doesn't like the engine or the engine doesn't like the shadow implementation.</p><p>I'm currently non-SF and therefore, non-Shader 3.0. The performance I'm getting is staggering to say the least. Core i7 920 D0 stepping at 4Ghz, nVidia GTX275, Intel X-25M G2 SSD - it OBLITERATES everything that is being said here and it obliterates the game engine in non-shader 3.0 at this time.</p><p>It's an interesting problem. LOTRO exhibits, to a similar degree, the same performance problems (or did), but SSD's introduction has slapped those away leaving LOTRO performing as it should.</p><p>What is going on with the player base. Why do I have zero problems. Why can I get in a group with high spell detail with 4 simultaneous spells and maintain 60fps constantly?</p><p>Are you all in window-mode with 10 applications running in the background?</p></blockquote><p>Actually, I have a less capable system (Intel Core 2 Duo, 3.5GHz, and Radeon 9xxx card) but I also run at max settings with shadows on with about 30~ fps. All I need to do in raids to prevent noticeable video lag, is drop my particle effects for each person from 8 to 1 and I'm good to go. Some peoeple computers, for some reason, does not play nice with EQ2.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>For EQ2 you're gonna want a CPU with high Ghz.  Quad core will help if you're running other applications while playing the game.  Multi-core will help when running character animations as well.  The game was originally designed for increasing Ghz's in CPU's, but since Intel and AMD, etc, have moved towards multi-core instead of increasing core speed it conflicts with EQ2's framework design.  It is part of the reason why you don't see EQ2 increasing in performance as hardware advances.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>For Shader 3.0, newer graphics cards will be more optimized for 3.0 shaders and will run faster.  The EQ2 3.0 shaders are very heavy, computing a lot of math on your GPU per pixel to get the new look.  But if you have a slow CPU it will prevent shader 3 and even 1 from rendering as fast as they can.  Same goes if you have little RAM, a slow hard drive, a slow internet connection, or other applications running at the same time.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Again, Shader 3.0 was meant for a graphical update, not a performance boost.  3.0 shaders don't automatically give you a performance boost.  They allow you to pack more graphical effects into one shader and optimize for "new" effects like deferred lighting, shadow maps, depth of field, etc..  These effects have not been implemented in EQ2 yet, except shadow maps, but EQ2 now has the framework to support these effects.  (Shadow maps were created within the shader 1.0 framework and have not been optimized for shader 3 rendering).  The zone and character layouts of EQ2 were designed for the shader 1.0 framework, so running them in shader 3 will be just as slow unless we re-designed every area and optimized them for the shader 3 framework.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>EQ2 performance is a hot topic within the team right now, so we will "likely" be attacking it soon, specifically for rendering.</strong></span></p>

[NViDiaFReaK]

<p>any word on when we can expect Shader 3.0 to be pushed to live?</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>NViDiaFReaK wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>any word on when we can expect Shader 3.0 to be pushed to live?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You won't hear it from here unless it's already been said somewhere else.  Generally, if it's been on Test for over a month it will be on Live in the next Game Update.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's going back up on Test as soon as QA runs a quick pass over it again to make sure I re-enabled it correctly.</strong></span></p>

[NViDiaFReaK]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>NViDiaFReaK wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>any word on when we can expect Shader 3.0 to be pushed to live?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You won't hear it from here unless it's already been said somewhere else.  Generally, if it's been on Test for over a month it will be on Live in the next Game Update.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's going back up on Test as soon as QA runs a quick pass over it again to make sure I re-enabled it correctly.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Well thanks for the quick response.. 3.0 is beautiful  and i cant wait to explore SF with it on..</p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Guy De Alsace wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I'm getting single figure framerates on my brand new Dell XPS8000 machine with i7, 6Gb memory and stuff if I run it in full detail with AA on in some places. Moors especially. Though I dont know if an Nvidia GTS240 is any good as a card. It has 1Gb on board though. I've used ATI for years so Nvidia cards are a mystery to me.</p></blockquote><p>Well your CPU is great, but the graphics card is middle of the road for these days, <a href="http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/best-gaming-graphics-card,review-31807-7.html" target="_blank">check out this list from Toms hardware </a>out to get a rough idea where your graphics card is at, NVideas of that generation handle AA better then ATI's of that generation, even then it is the weakest link of your system.</p><p>The other thing to check is to make sure the memory your dell has is actually running at the same speed at the I7's front side bus, Dell have a bad habit of selling lower speed memory, from memory I think your memory should be 1333Mhz at least (might even be 1600Mhz), if not it will slow things down a little.</p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p>Removed the body of this post. Seeing as to how a new set of the 3.0 shaders will be put on test after they've been QA'd i'm reserving judgement until after i've had a chance to test the new shaders. I can't judge the ones currently on test as that would be rather unfair.</p>

[VBGod]

<p>Great to hear that cogs are turning again.</p><p>Battle grounds? MehNew starting zone? Not botheredShader 3.0 update? Absolutely THE most important thing SOE should be working on!</p><p>Thanks Imago for taking the time to post updates. The community loves you for it.</p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p><cite>Hubert@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Great to hear that cogs are turning again.</p><p>Battle grounds? MehNew starting zone? Not botheredShader 3.0 update? Absolutely THE most important thing SOE should be working on!</p><p>Thanks Imago for taking the time to post updates. The community loves you for it.</p></blockquote><p>The Shader 3.0 currently on test is absolutely terrible. You'll lose about 30 frames dependant upon what architecture you're using and what frequency your processor is running at right now. However, Immy said he was compiling new code and submitting it to QA, so the Shaders currently on test is not what is going to be re-uploaded onto test in the next month or so. So I think it's safe to say that once THOSE Shaders go on test we'll be able to draw opinions on just how important this update is. If it's only about quality and not about the performance of the engine it could just be a rehash of the launch fiasco all over again. We shall see what we see.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Hubert@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Great to hear that cogs are turning again.</p><p>Battle grounds? MehNew starting zone? Not botheredShader 3.0 update? Absolutely THE most important thing SOE should be working on!</p><p>Thanks Imago for taking the time to post updates. The community loves you for it.</p></blockquote><p>The Shader 3.0 currently on test is absolutely terrible. You'll lose about 30 frames dependant upon what architecture you're using and what frequency your processor is running at right now. However, Immy said he was compiling new code and submitting it to QA, so the Shaders currently on test is not what is going to be re-uploaded onto test in the next month or so. So I think it's safe to say that once THOSE Shaders go on test we'll be able to draw opinions on just how important this update is. If it's only about quality and not about the performance of the engine it could just be a rehash of the launch fiasco all over again. We shall see what we see.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Shader 3.0 has been added, as an option, and designed to run *near the speed of Shader 1.0 but with higher quality graphics on higher end hardware.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>*Near the speed of Shader 1.0 in respect to the average FPS across different zones and scenes.</strong></span></p>

[Nolrog]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>Hmm, using a premade engine makes sense for a small company, but for someone of SOE's size with multiple MMO's in production then why not custom build one engine and use it across all of their games?</blockquote><p>AFAIK, SOE doesn't do that though.  The engine for EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard (I think Vanguard runs on Unreal) are completely different.  I would expect that DCUO and Agency have different engines as well.  Although, there is a rumor out there that they are making a Star Wars (Clone Wars?) game based on the FR engine, so maybe they're going in that direction.</p><p>There's a lot of synergy to be had if they had multiple games in one engine.  They could make one set of character models and use them in all those games.  Zone art could be made once and then reused (zone populations are controlled separately, so one could be a total undead zone, while the exact same zone graphics in the other game could be goblins or kobolds or something.)  Would be a great money saving move.</p>

[Nolrog]

<p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote>If all Shader 3.0 is going to do is make the game look prettier (I think it already looks good on quality settings) without offering me a significant speed boost then I really see no point to all of your work.</blockquote><p>Go back and look at some of the screen shots if you haven't seen them already.  The iksar scales look amazing in 3.0 versus 1.0. </p><p>People want the game to continue to grow graphically so that it can compete with newer games on the market, so they need to continually spend time on adding new features to the engine.  I would venture to guess that when we see the zones that were built for shader 3.0, they will look even better than the older graphics that were converted.</p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>So, I finally got test loaded up to try this Shader 3.0 out. I noticed a difference right away from the character select screen. Textures seemed revitalized and appeared to have more depth.</p><p>I logged into a character in Freeport, and ran around there a little bit. Then I went out to the commonlands, and took a stroll to the spires. I tried zoning to Sundered Frontier, and during the loading the game crashed. Tried logging in about 3 more times, and everytime I tried to get a character logged in, the game would crash. It did not matter what character it was.</p><p>My time experiencing this was brief but here is what I took from it.</p><p>Performance - Better then what I expected. Performance is Freeport and Commonlands were both quite good (Upper 30-40's FPS). Performance profile was set at Very High Quality</p><p>Appearance - Looked quite nice. Does this affect atmosphere effects? Commonlands seem to have a more hazy look, while the Graveyard in Freeport had nicer Fog.</p><p>Textures - Several textures looked like they were not ready or created yet for SM3.0. </p><p>Crashing - I am assuming the crashing is related to SM3.0</p><p>Lighting - There seems to be an obvious balance issue between light and dark. Some things looked way too dark, others too bright.</p><p>Overall, I think with some spit and polish, this could turn out really nicely.</p><p>For reference, my system:</p><p>AMD Phenom II 965 BE</p><p>4GB DDR2 800 MHZ </p><p>ATI 4870 w/10.2 Catalyst</p><p>Soundblaster xTreme Music</p><p>Latest Direct X files</p><p>Windows 7 64 bit</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So, I finally got test loaded up to try this Shader 3.0 out. I noticed a difference right away from the character select screen. Textures seemed revitalized and appeared to have more depth.</p><p>I logged into a character in Freeport, and ran around there a little bit. Then I went out to the commonlands, and took a stroll to the spires. I tried zoning to Sundered Frontier, and during the loading the game crashed. Tried logging in about 3 more times, and everytime I tried to get a character logged in, the game would crash. It did not matter what character it was.</p><p>My time experiencing this was brief but here is what I took from it.</p><p>Performance - Better then what I expected. Performance is Freeport and Commonlands were both quite good (Upper 30-40's FPS). Performance profile was set at Very High Quality</p><p>Appearance - Looked quite nice. Does this affect atmosphere effects? Commonlands seem to have a more hazy look, while the Graveyard in Freeport had nicer Fog.</p><p>Textures - Several textures looked like they were not ready or created yet for SM3.0. </p><p>Crashing - I am assuming the crashing is related to SM3.0</p><p>Lighting - There seems to be an obvious balance issue between light and dark. Some things looked way too dark, others too bright.</p><p>Overall, I think with some spit and polish, this could turn out really nicely.</p><p>For reference, my system:</p><p>AMD Phenom II 965 BE</p><p>4GB DDR2 800 MHZ </p><p>ATI 4870 w/10.2 Catalyst</p><p>Soundblaster xTreme Music</p><p>Latest Direct X files</p><p>Windows 7 64 bit</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the testing Northern Star 5.  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I agree, there are a few objects here and there that are too bright or too dark.  I'll be making my way through the objects in the game to make sure everything eventually looks just right.  The tool I built to generate 3.0 shaders based on the 1.0 shader effects didn't cover everything just perfectly so I have to manually tweak a few shaders by hand... as expected.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm still working out some kinks in the global lighting, so you might see some color variation, that will change later, between shader 1 and 3 for now.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You might see a few objects here and there that are pure black.  These are art peices our artists were working on at the same time I was trying to convert them to shader 3.  The artists had them locked, so there are a number of objects I have to catch that slipped through this way.  Don't be shy to point out your zone and location if you see one.  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm looking into the crash now, but I haven't had any crashing reports.  You can try adding </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>r_usethreepointoshaders 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>in your eq2.ini file to disable shader 3 and get back into the game.  If r_usethreepointoshaders is already in that file, which it probably is, then change the 1 to a 0 so it's disabled.</strong></span></p>

[Albrig]

<p>It's impressive that a clear indication of performance not improving, but visuals are, is about what we all need to know about the people trying to do something more for eq2 and the player base with an expanding population that is getting the idea into their heads that visual and performance is the key expectation.</p><p>Does eq2 need shader 3.0? No.</p><p>Does eq2 need performance enhancement? Yes.</p><p>Could they (ahem) just say whatever it takes to keep the player base guessing about which is actually happening for as long a possible? Yes.</p><p>Did they? No.</p><p>It's nice to see a rock and a hard place in action with greatly benefitting results once in awhile.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So, I finally got test loaded up to try this Shader 3.0 out. I noticed a difference right away from the character select screen. Textures seemed revitalized and appeared to have more depth.</p><p>I logged into a character in Freeport, and ran around there a little bit. Then I went out to the commonlands, and took a stroll to the spires. I tried zoning to Sundered Frontier, and during the loading the game crashed. Tried logging in about 3 more times, and everytime I tried to get a character logged in, the game would crash. It did not matter what character it was.</p><p>My time experiencing this was brief but here is what I took from it.</p><p>Performance - Better then what I expected. Performance is Freeport and Commonlands were both quite good (Upper 30-40's FPS). Performance profile was set at Very High Quality</p><p>Appearance - Looked quite nice. Does this affect atmosphere effects? Commonlands seem to have a more hazy look, while the Graveyard in Freeport had nicer Fog.</p><p>Textures - Several textures looked like they were not ready or created yet for SM3.0. </p><p>Crashing - I am assuming the crashing is related to SM3.0</p><p>Lighting - There seems to be an obvious balance issue between light and dark. Some things looked way too dark, others too bright.</p><p>Overall, I think with some spit and polish, this could turn out really nicely.</p><p>For reference, my system:</p><p>AMD Phenom II 965 BE</p><p>4GB DDR2 800 MHZ </p><p>ATI 4870 w/10.2 Catalyst</p><p>Soundblaster xTreme Music</p><p>Latest Direct X files</p><p>Windows 7 64 bit</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the testing Northern Star 5.  <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I agree, there are a few objects here and there that are too bright or too dark.  I'll be making my way through the objects in the game to make sure everything eventually looks just right.  The tool I built to generate 3.0 shaders based on the 1.0 shader effects didn't cover everything just perfectly so I have to manually tweak a few shaders by hand... as expected.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm still working out some kinks in the global lighting, so you might see some color variation, that will change later, between shader 1 and 3 for now.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You might see a few objects here and there that are pure black.  These are art peices our artists were working on at the same time I was trying to convert them to shader 3.  The artists had them locked, so there are a number of objects I have to catch that slipped through this way.  Don't be shy to point out your zone and location if you see one.  <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm looking into the crash now, but I haven't had any crashing reports.  You can try adding </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>r_usethreepointoshaders 0</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>in your eq2.ini file to disable shader 3 and get back into the game.  If r_usethreepointoshaders is already in that file, which it probably is, then change the 1 to a 0 so it's disabled.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I did find a crash going into the Sundered Frontier and have fixed it.  Test should be updated soon.</strong></span></p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>Thanks Imago! I'll keep trying and do some more testing, and of course report back here with any findings.</p>

[Shade Slayer]

<p>Although I admit I'm excited about the graphical upgrade, I think the focus should be on performance at this time. I have a pretty monstrous rig. i7 cpu, evga gtx285 gpu, 6 gigs DDr3 2000 RAM. With indoor shadows at high quality in densly lit areas, I can still drop under 10 frames. That seems insane considering I can run Crysis at full settings smoothly. Is there any hope for reasonable performance?</p>

[drelfid]

<p><cite>Shade Slayer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Although I admit I'm excited about the graphical upgrade, I think the focus should be on performance at this time. I have a pretty monstrous rig. i7 cpu, evga gtx285 gpu, 6 gigs DDr3 2000 RAM. With indoor shadows at high quality in densly lit areas, I can still drop under 10 frames. That seems insane considering I can run Crysis at full settings smoothly. Is there any hope for reasonable performance?</p></blockquote><p>I have a very similar system and I've got to agree, performance should be the focus.  With the highest detail settings this game already looks good.  Seriously, it can be stunning in places.  Most of the Shader 3.0 stuff I've seen doesn't look all that much different to what we have now.  Seems like an awful lot of work for such a small payoff.</p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion, infact its one of the only games to consitantly make my jaw drop <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />. This is allot to do with the art style of the world itself, I think that they have done an amazing job with their "realistic fantasy" aproach, this is what makes me feel this shader update is one of the most important updates to eq2 for a long time as it doesent only make the game look better but it starts shifting allot of the processing from CPU to GPU which for the majority of people will improve as the main problem with the game's preformance is that it is far too processor relliant and doesent support multicore as they were planning for single cores to get allot faster than they have rather than multicores, hopefully this will lay the foundation for future preformance improvements.Also imago was telling us earlier in this post that it will make it easier to implement some of the designs for new content and more elaborate design which will hopefully mean that future content will be able to be created quicker and the end result will be better. Another benefit of Shader 3.0 which I have noticed on the test server is that it realy does bring out defenition and depth in the textures. I never realised just how detailed they were before as they just looked very flat with the current shader model despite being very high resolution.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">One question, think I've asked twice on this post allready <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />, will the current CPU shadows be implemented in the final version of shader 3.0? Because at the moment theres no shadows attall indoors and in my opinion CPU shadows with antialiasing on and the lighting resolution turned down to about 630 in options look awesone despite not rendering on trees and being a bit of a processor hog <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">Looking forward to the release of this update, have been postponing my playthrough of sentinel's fate so I can play through it with shader 3.0 enabled <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></span></p>

[MurFalad]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p><img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>I'm wondering on meshes, textures etc, I assume this means that to make the game totally optimised for Shader 3.0 we would need to redo all the art assets?  Or is this the code that reads the art assets in?</p><p>I'm just wondering if its feasible to rewrite everything to work with Shader 3.0 perfectly, or would this be several years work to redo everything?</p>

[vexation]

<p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion</span></p></blockquote><p>Just echoing this sentiment. The game looks great in higher settings, even in balanced settings - in fact I don't personally know anyone that has ever complained about how eq2 "looks" - it's the performance that everyone has a problem with. I've played on a variety of rigs and I nearly always end up playing the game in extreme performance mode because I'm tired of it dropping below 30fps in groups / raids.. sometimes going as low as 10-15.</p><p>I hoped (and still hope) that Shader 3.0 will bring performance benefits rather than incurring a further cost. I'll be really disappointed if after all this time we just see another 5fps lost for some shiny surfaces and spell effects.</p><p>On another note, I know a bunch of people have complained about the lag in Tox Forest - I'm sure it's already been considered but could it be something as simple as the skybox changes (I only say that because I noticed an FPS hit when the sky changes but I guess it could be anything in that area)? The same people tend to complain about Terens Grasp and Kunzar Jungle, can't remember whether the skybox changes there too. /shrug</p>

[nucn]

<p>soe:just add a simple graphic tool to adjust</p><p>gamma,contrast,brightness and the game will look instantly 10 time better right now those setting on my comp are off and the game is so collorfull its almost impossible to set without a baseline graphic toll(a la warhammer)</p>

[Sart]

<p><cite>Shade Slayer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Although I admit I'm excited about the graphical upgrade, I think the focus should be on performance at this time. I have a pretty monstrous rig. i7 cpu, evga gtx285 gpu, 6 gigs DDr3 2000 RAM. With indoor shadows at high quality in densly lit areas, I can still drop under 10 frames. That seems insane considering I can run Crysis at full settings smoothly. Is there any hope for reasonable performance?</p></blockquote><p>What i7 do you have?  What is the processor speed?  I have a i7 920 @ 4.1 ghz, 6 gigs DDR3 1600 ram, 2x5870 Asus Crossfire, with EQ2 on a 300 gig velociraptor and the win7 OS on an SSD drive.  My setting at max in almost all zones gives me 50-60 fps.  The key, which has been mentioned many, many times in the EQ2 forums, is that your processor speed has the biggest impact on your framerates.  It doesn't matter if you have 8 cores if all 8 are running at 2.66 per.  Try getting your cores up to at least 3.6 to help your frame rates.  Unfortunately I don't think this engine will ever be able to be fixed to adjust the fact that it was written in the hopes that processor would be getting faster, not multiplying; it was a bet they lost.  So, overclock your CPU to enjoy better framerates. (Old PC in sig below, need to fix lol)</p>

[Hyst]

<p><img src="http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/3269/eq2000002.jpg" /><img src="http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/5422/eq2000003.jpg" width="800" height="500" /><img src="http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/3843/eq2000001.jpg" /><img src="http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/5254/eq2000000.jpg" />I have see some problems in east freeport :</p>

[Sart]

<p><cite>nucnud wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>soe:just add a simple graphic tool to adjust</p><p>gamma,contrast,brightness and the game will look instantly 10 time better right now those setting on my comp are off and the game is so collorfull its almost impossible to set without a baseline graphic toll(a la warhammer)</p></blockquote><p>All of these settings can be found in the last option set at the bottom of your graphical settings- just scroll down to the bottom.</p>

[Shade Slayer]

<p><cite>Sartil wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Shade Slayer wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Although I admit I'm excited about the graphical upgrade, I think the focus should be on performance at this time. I have a pretty monstrous rig. i7 cpu, evga gtx285 gpu, 6 gigs DDr3 2000 RAM. With indoor shadows at high quality in densly lit areas, I can still drop under 10 frames. That seems insane considering I can run Crysis at full settings smoothly. Is there any hope for reasonable performance?</p></blockquote><p>What i7 do you have?  What is the processor speed?  I have a i7 920 @ 4.1 ghz, 6 gigs DDR3 1600 ram, 2x5870 Asus Crossfire, with EQ2 on a 300 gig velociraptor and the win7 OS on an SSD drive.  My setting at max in almost all zones gives me 50-60 fps.  The key, which has been mentioned many, many times in the EQ2 forums, is that your processor speed has the biggest impact on your framerates.  It doesn't matter if you have 8 cores if all 8 are running at 2.66 per.  Try getting your cores up to at least 3.6 to help your frame rates.  Unfortunately I don't think this engine will ever be able to be fixed to adjust the fact that it was written in the hopes that processor would be getting faster, not multiplying; it was a bet they lost.  So, overclock your CPU to enjoy better framerates. (Old PC in sig below, need to fix lol)</p></blockquote><p>I have a 920 also. The default is 2.66 ghz and I'd be afraid to OC anywhere near 4. What cooling do you have? You know it shortens the life right? Although I could easily buy another cpu.</p>

[Sart]

<p>I have the Corsair H50, which I was very skeptical about trying after running a full water cooling setup, but it holds it own at 4.1. Everything is in a Cooler Master Cosmos 1000 case.</p>

[Albrig]

<p>It's the Corsair H50 water cooling CPU block - which is what I use.</p><p>OCing will shorten the life expectancy of the Core i7 920 at 4Ghz from 10 years to about 9.5 years.</p>

[Albrig]

<blockquote><p>I have a 920 also. The default is 2.66 ghz and I'd be afraid to OC anywhere near 4. What cooling do you have? You know it shortens the life right? Although I could easily buy another cpu.</p></blockquote><p>You need a high quality PSU, high quality motherboard and one the better Air Coolers, or go the Corsair H50 route.</p><p>It helps if the fab stepping on the Core i7 is D0. Getting 4Ghz out of it so easy you will probably fall over when it happens.</p><p>You'll fall over again when Everquest 2 is running.</p><p>In the classical zones, my frames are between 100fps, to 208fps; being the highest I've ever seen it. This is near Very High Quality with a custom configuration. Even with CPU shadows, it takes about 40% away from those fps figures in a full group with Particle Effects on High with the custom configuration. No idea about Raid conditions. Never Raided.</p><p>Kylong Plains - that's a tricky zone. But it can hold just above 60fps and in a full group; Particles Effects on Average however.</p><p>I remember Kylong Plains on my last CPU - the E8400. Unpleasant even at a custom High Detail with a good part of the custom config l on lower settings. Would never see 40fps with that CPU if someone else happened to be in my view in the zone.  CPU shadows; forget it.</p>

[Sart]

<p>What are your exact pc specs, and your exact in game specs that you are getting 208 fps in old world zones at near very high quality settings? </p>

[Gaige]

<p>Probably 1024 x 768 resolution, tbh.  No way he is getting 208 fps at a real resolution.</p>

[Sart]

<p>That is what I thought- I forgot to mention I run at 1920 by 1080.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Sartil wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>What are your exact pc specs, and your exact in game specs that you are getting 208 fps in old world zones at near very high quality settings? </p></blockquote><p>Here's how it works right now.</p><p>I show my custom configured recent_eq2.ini file.</p><p>I show what you should do in nVidia's control panel to get it working right, and...</p><p>I have given out several optimization tips over a certain period of time, which you can find, instead of repeating it every 6 months.</p><p>...and then...</p><p>About a handful of people get the expected results from probably a couple dozen responses indicating a negative.</p><p>I get a minimum of 100fps in most classical zones. And I can use CPU shadows with that same frame rate; the detail is mid-way between High and Very High, with the obvious modification for Particle Effects, Model detail, and a very less important other things.</p><p>At one point, I said that the developers must have optimized the everquest2.exe code to achieve this - but that was at least a year ago and more. No developer disputed my explanation of this.</p><p>A few days later, few were reporting seeing the performance increases I was seeing.</p><p>My PC is high-end. Similar to yours.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Probably 1024 x 768 resolution, tbh.  No way he is getting 208 fps at a real resolution.</p></blockquote><p>1680x1050</p><p>But I am. Will screenshot it.</p>

[Sart]

<p>I took a quick look at your posts, and after what you recently posted about specs somewhere between high and very high in certain areas of your settings I believe it, no need to post [Removed for Content].  I have seen too many people make wild claims about their fps when they don't feel like backing it up with specs, but i believe you. Back on topic though, I am excited for the shader changes and hope they make it to live soon.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Sartil wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I took a quick look at your posts, and after what you recently posted about specs somewhere between high and very high in certain areas of your settings I believe it, no need to post [Removed for Content].  I have seen too many people make wild claims about their fps when they don't feel like backing it up with specs, but i believe you. Back on topic though, I am excited for the shader changes and hope they make it to live soon.</p></blockquote><p>I don't believe the people who say they get 'no performance benefit' when I give configuration tips.</p><p>User - "Nope. Nothing changed m8; sorry what you suggested does F*ALL"</p><p>Me - "o_O"</p><p>Though an odd few have reported significant performance increases. But they're not even the number of fingers on one hand. I know what's causing these anomalies. Poor PC configuration. Background services. Anti-virus software (you don't need it unless you're stupid), unmodified msconfig, unmodified netsh, unmodified GPU drivers. Mechanical HDD < I mean that just puts a nail in it all for starters. No Core i7 < which pretty much trumps 90% of the Eq2 player base not having on. It's a tricky situation, but I still managed decent performance with a E8400 with a pseudo High Detail setting and solid 60-100fps in all classical zones with the very odd behaviour reported with Kylong Plains, which just flattens it down to 40fps and it won't go above it - doing nothing.</p><p>Went into Sundered Frontier today. That's a big zone download on my streaming client, close to 100Mb (most classical zones (even the biggest ones) barely reach 20Mb; there's no doubt that the new zones from RoK, ToS to SF are not just bigger, they can contain far, far more object and entity data within the zone.</p><p>I got between 77fps and 113fps in Very High Detail, with a custom config for the obvious adjustments so it doesn't clobber the CPU/GPU - no group, but I reckon in one I would lose a significant 40-50fps - no doubt in my mind that would happen. So I would expect as a median, about 30fps and not a frame below in a full group situation. Playable, but not enjoyable.</p><p>The most alarming thing I can report is the horrendous spin-up spin-down noise my GPU fan makes in Sundered Frontier. Whiiirrr. WHIIIIIIRRRRRRR. Whiiirrrrr. WHA-ZIIIIRRRRRRRRRR. Whiiiiir - as I move about.</p><p>Shader 3 is likely to pull a few ball bearings off.</p><p>The Shader 3 changes will do one thing; allow high-end PC users to enjoy. Anyone slightly below that line is likely to scratch their head and wonder what it's all about.</p><p>But this is a good move by the developers.</p><p>The developers of the biggest baddest mmorpg ever to come about in the last 10 years wouldn't agree, but then SoE's developers don't go on holiday in a 100ft Yacht either.</p><p>*update</p><p>Never inserted an image before (never done it).</p><p><img src="http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/5995/eq2000187.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img443.imageshack.us/img443/8719/eq2000182.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/5586/eq2000133.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img31.imageshack.us/img31/294/eq2000102c.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/6140/eq2000139.jpg" /></p>

[GoldSpider]

<p>So if I understand the comments in this thread correctly, Shader 3.0 is going to do little to nothing to improve gameplay for about 90% of the player base.</p><p>At least the devs are consistent.</p>

[Gaige]

<p>Ah no AA, flora, draw distance or complex shaders among other things.  Makes sense now.  I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for FPS.  As long as I can maintain 30 I'm cool.</p><p><a href="http://img641.imageshack.us/i/eq2000004.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8435/eq2000004.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p>i7 860 @ 4Ghz, 8GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz, ATi 5850, Intel G2 SSD</p><p>1920x1200, 8x AA, modified VHQ setting (mostly less particles, less lighting) - max texture quality, max flora, max complex shader, max draw distance, max animation, with GPU shadows (when they're not buggy).</p><p>I bought all this hardware I want the game to look good and be playable, not barren while I'm getting 100fps.</p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p><cite>Bruknok@Nagafen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So if I understand the comments in this thread correctly, Shader 3.0 is going to do little to nothing to improve gameplay for about 90% of the player base.</p><p>At least the devs are consistent.</p></blockquote><p>Why, I do wonder where your statistics come from...</p>

[zimmer]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Ah no AA, flora, draw distance or complex shaders among other things.  Makes sense now.  I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for FPS.  As long as I can maintain 30 I'm cool.</p><p><a href="http://img641.imageshack.us/i/eq2000004.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8435/eq2000004.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p>i7 860 @ 4Ghz, 8GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz, ATi 5850, Intel G2 SSD</p><p>1920x1200, 8x AA, modified VHQ setting (mostly less particles, less lighting) - max texture quality, max flora, max complex shader, max draw distance, max animation, with GPU shadows (when they're not buggy).</p><p>I bought all this hardware I want the game to look good and be playable, not barren while I'm getting 100fps.</p></blockquote><p>Looks a little better.  I am not a fan of the flora system though.  not sure what it is but I prefer it off.  I would like to run with aa and draw distance, gpu shadows etc.</p><p>maybe not the animation at max further away though.  I think no matter I would tweak it.</p><p>somewhere in between your two comparisons.  I get 7-12 avg in stonebrunt right now so either way it would be better than what I get.  Nice to see what it looks like with stuff cranked.</p>

[Shade Slayer]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><blockquote><p>I have a 920 also. The default is 2.66 ghz and I'd be afraid to OC anywhere near 4. What cooling do you have? You know it shortens the life right? Although I could easily buy another cpu.</p></blockquote><p>You need a high quality PSU, high quality motherboard and one the better Air Coolers, or go the Corsair H50 route.</p><p>It helps if the fab stepping on the Core i7 is D0. Getting 4Ghz out of it so easy you will probably fall over when it happens.</p><p>You'll fall over again when Everquest 2 is running.</p><p>In the classical zones, my frames are between 100fps, to 208fps; being the highest I've ever seen it. This is near Very High Quality with a custom configuration. Even with CPU shadows, it takes about 40% away from those fps figures in a full group with Particle Effects on High with the custom configuration. No idea about Raid conditions. Never Raided.</p><p>Kylong Plains - that's a tricky zone. But it can hold just above 60fps and in a full group; Particles Effects on Average however.</p><p>I remember Kylong Plains on my last CPU - the E8400. Unpleasant even at a custom High Detail with a good part of the custom config l on lower settings. Would never see 40fps with that CPU if someone else happened to be in my view in the zone.  CPU shadows; forget it.</p></blockquote><p>I have an incredible silverstone 1000 watt psu and <span style="border-bottom: 1px dashed #0066cc; background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer;">Thermaltake</span> Big Typhoon VX Gaming <span style="background: transparent none repeat scroll 0% 0%; cursor: pointer;">CPU Cooling Fan. I'm still nervous about OCing to 4ghz. I also have 2 very fast 160 mm fans. I run at 1900x 1080 res so I doubt I could ever hit the higher frames. My frames are great until there's a lot of lighting and  shadows.</span></p>

[Gaige]

<p>Overclocking is impossible to mess up anymore.  BIOS are designed for it, chips and boards are designed for it.  The i7 features thermal throttling and you can't "kill" it or even shorten its lifespan.  Even if you're manually overclocking if the chip gets too hot it will automatically lower its own vcore and clockspeed to reduce the heat back to normal levels.  Besides, these things are designed by Intel to operate at 90c and higher temperatures.</p><p>If you have an i7 with aftermarket cooling and you're not overclocking it, you're doing yourself a disservice.</p>

[Clazz]

<p>I must be missing something, I got onto test last night and I can't find an option anywhere to turn on shader 3.0</p><p>I went to  display/performace but nothing there. I also pasted that command Imago mentioned into my .ini file but i don't think it worked. Any tips on getting Shader 3.0 working on my computer?</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I must be missing something, I got onto test last night and I can't find an option anywhere to turn on shader 3.0</p><p>I went to  display/performace but nothing there. I also pasted that command Imago mentioned into my .ini file but i don't think it worked. Any tips on getting Shader 3.0 working on my computer?</p></blockquote><p><strong><span style="color: #008000;">I believe it got disabled again due to some full game updates coming out (aftermath of the GU/expansion).  I'm out of the office for a few days (which my wife is very happy about) to make up 3 months of 10-14 hour overtime days.  It should be back up in the next week or so.  Really really sorry about the on off on off on of shader 3.  Hopefully this is the last time until it goes Live.</span></strong></p>

[Detor]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Overclocking is impossible to mess up anymore.  BIOS are designed for it, chips and boards are designed for it.  The i7 features thermal throttling and you can't "kill" it or even shorten its lifespan.  Even if you're manually overclocking if the chip gets too hot it will automatically lower its own vcore and clockspeed to reduce the heat back to normal levels.  Besides, these things are designed by Intel to operate at 90c and higher temperatures.</p><p>If you have an i7 with aftermarket cooling and you're not overclocking it, you're doing yourself a disservice.</p></blockquote><p>Actually, that's wrong. See: <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/budget-p55-motherboard,2436-15.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...rd,2436-15.html</a></p><p>Sure, if you have a $200+ enthusiast board you're pretty much good to go, but the $100-150 motherboards can absolutely die to overclocking very quickly because several manufacturers didn't produce boards with VRMs that can handle the extra current. (power usage can double or more the wattage that the processor is drawing)  When the motherboard's voltage regulators are near failure there have been reports that the motherboard took the CPU with it due to high voltage spikes.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Ah no AA, flora, draw distance or complex shaders among other things.  Makes sense now.  I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for FPS.  As long as I can maintain 30 I'm cool.</p><p><a href="http://img641.imageshack.us/i/eq2000004.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8435/eq2000004.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p>i7 860 @ 4Ghz, 8GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz, ATi 5850, Intel G2 SSD</p><p>1920x1200, 8x AA, modified VHQ setting (mostly less particles, less lighting) - max texture quality, max flora, max complex shader, max draw distance, max animation, with GPU shadows (when they're not buggy).</p><p>I bought all this hardware I want the game to look good and be playable, not barren while I'm getting 100fps.</p></blockquote><p>Anti-aliasing is not really required. There's a significant difference between a static image and actual motion.</p><p>I would only use 4xAA anyway. It's fantastic to look at, but I have to drop Particles Effects to x2 Average and Off-screen shadows and Model Detail to 2, as the CPU shadows get AA applied to them as well.</p><p>I only use CPU shadows (and that's High, with Off-screen included. Draw distance is about 800. Maximum Texture Quality, Complex Shader at 150 (because that's all you need). Maximum animation, Maximum LOD. Maximum LOD bias. x4 High Detail Models, x4 High Detail Particle Effects.</p><p>This is all up there with your configutation with the exception of AA and Flora. Flora works well but, I just don't like the implementation and for what you get, it's too much of a performance hit in very unexpected occasions with it on.</p><p>Screenshots without AA always look... not great. In motion, it's a different thing. It's like 'Screenshot' captures jagged lines more than anything else. At over 60fps, you just aren't drawn to them.</p><p>Mostly AA softens the image - making it look more realistic, or graphically appreciative. But it's just the AA-crowds' fixation of the technology than it getting rid of the F*Ugly characteristics of polygons.</p><p>I'm likely to get 60fps in a full group in Sundered Frontier with my settings. You on the other hand would probably crash and burn.</p>

[VerdicAysen]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Ah no AA, flora, draw distance or complex shaders among other things.  Makes sense now.  I'm not willing to sacrifice quality for FPS.  As long as I can maintain 30 I'm cool.</p><p><a href="http://img641.imageshack.us/i/eq2000004.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/8435/eq2000004.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p>i7 860 @ 4Ghz, 8GB DDR3 @ 2000Mhz, ATi 5850, Intel G2 SSD</p><p>1920x1200, 8x AA, modified VHQ setting (mostly less particles, less lighting) - max texture quality, max flora, max complex shader, max draw distance, max animation, with GPU shadows (when they're not buggy).</p><p>I bought all this hardware I want the game to look good and be playable, not barren while I'm getting 100fps.</p></blockquote><p>Anti-aliasing is not really required. There's a significant difference between a static image and actual motion.</p><p>I would only use 4xAA anyway. It's fantastic to look at, but I have to drop Particles Effects to x2 Average and Off-screen shadows and Model Detail to 2, as the CPU shadows get AA applied to them as well.</p><p>I only use CPU shadows (and that's High, with Off-screen included. Draw distance is about 800. Maximum Texture Quality, Complex Shader at 150 (because that's all you need). Maximum animation, Maximum LOD. Maximum LOD bias. x4 High Detail Models, x4 High Detail Particle Effects.</p><p>This is all up there with your configutation with the exception of AA and Flora. Flora works well but, I just don't like the implementation and for what you get, it's too much of a performance hit in very unexpected occasions with it on.</p><p>Screenshots without AA always look... not great. In motion, it's a different thing. It's like 'Screenshot' captures jagged lines more than anything else. At over 60fps, you just aren't drawn to them.</p><p>Mostly AA softens the image - making it look more realistic, or graphically appreciative. But it's just the AA-crowds' fixation of the technology than it getting rid of the F*Ugly characteristics of polygons.</p><p>I'm likely to get 60fps in a full group in Sundered Frontier with my settings. You on the other hand would probably crash and burn.</p></blockquote><p>^ This person obviously has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, or is phrasing his responses incorrectly. You're not going to crash and burn with that hardware setup. See an enormous frames dip here or there, possibly. Because the 5850 in the eyes of a CPU oriented framework means dog food. But you're not going to crash and burn.</p>

[Kain-UK]

<p>I'd love to see Shader 3.0 finally get here...</p><p>Currently my system is running at about 60fps in Sundered and Stonebrunt... 100+ in any old world zones and the same for [Removed for Content] near all the other expansions. RoK and TSO run about 80. In groups I tend to sit somewhere around 50. That's running on Extreme Quality with Flora off (it annoys me cos it's hard to see shinies and nodes) and shadows off. Now I've upgraded to a Radeon 5870, I've found I can run GPU shadows very nicely... and i'm using a 9120x1080 res.</p><p>REALLY want to see Shader 3.0 on this setup.</p>

[feldon30]

<p><cite>Bruknok@Nagafen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So if I understand the comments in this thread correctly, Shader 3.0 is going to do little to nothing to improve gameplay for about 90% of the player base.</p><p>At least the devs are consistent.</p></blockquote><p>It's amazing that you can read this thread and draw that conclusion.</p>

[Detor]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite></cite>Because the 5850 in the eyes of a CPU oriented framework means dog food. But you're not going to crash and burn.</p></blockquote><p>I have a 5870, and sometimes GPU load will be at 100% while the processor is sitting around.  GPU Shadows around Paineel places an enormous load on the GPU for some reason, much more so than most places, but still there's an example of an area of the game where more GPU horsepower would help.</p>

[zimmer]

<p>Reply to Albright! (did not want to start quoting as that takes a lot of the page up)</p><p>I also know you will not crash and burn because I run on less than what you have by orders of magnitude.</p><p>Though I understand why you said that and your sentiment.</p><p>My feelings (as I have mentioned) is the same on the flora.  Even if I could run it I do not care for the implementation. </p><p>Just my opinion on that not harping on who is behind it but rather my preference for what it adds.  I would be curious to see the game in motion though as you mention that the jaggie's are not as noticeable when in motion.  Not that I do not beleive you, on the contrary, I am just curious what the result would be.  When you are already running at 1680x1050 or higher they become a little less noticeable.</p><p>I personally agree that it is about balance and preference like what Albright has said.</p><p>I might try a few different things but to just crank it just because without looking closely and examining the difference it makes just does not make sense.</p><p>I am upgrading to an i7 in the next few weeks (yay for tax return) and hope to play around with different settings.  I do not plan on just cranking it but I am looking forward to tweaking it to my liking while keeping a balance in performance.</p><p>just my thoughts.</p>

[Gaige]

<p><cite>Detor wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: 10.8px;">Actually, that's wrong. See: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/budget-p55-motherboard,2436-15.html" target="_blank">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...rd,2436-15.html</a></span></p></blockquote><p>Sure, if you get a motherboard with a factory defect.  Almost all of those boards have since been updated, which is why people shouldn't link 5 month old articles.</p>

[Gaige]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: 10.8px;">Screenshots without AA always look... not great.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 10.8px;"><span style="font-size: 10.8px;">You on the other hand would probably crash and burn.</span></span></p></blockquote><p>I can't play the jaggy hot mess that is EQ2 without AA.  I can notice the difference immediately upon logging in.</p><p>As for "crashing and burning" - I raid with these settings.  I killed Ox in Highlands yesterday with them, then raided all of Labs in Vasty.</p>

[Jaale]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I must be missing something, I got onto test last night and I can't find an option anywhere to turn on shader 3.0</p><p>I went to  display/performace but nothing there. I also pasted that command Imago mentioned into my .ini file but i don't think it worked. Any tips on getting Shader 3.0 working on my computer?</p></blockquote><p><strong><span style="color: #008000;">I believe it got disabled again due to some full game updates coming out (aftermath of the GU/expansion).  I'm out of the office for a few days (which my wife is very happy about) to make up 3 months of 10-14 hour overtime days.  It should be back up in the next week or so.  Really really sorry about the on off on off on of shader 3.  Hopefully this is the last time until it goes Live.</span></strong></p></blockquote><p>Imago, go take a holiday! Now!</p><p>Good, return fresh tailed and bushy eye'd!</p>

[Child]

<p>if you don't want to have to worry about AA again, run all games in 2048x1152 (yes, higher than 1080p) on this monitor: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank"></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343B...r/dp/B001N0H8YW</a> it's what i use in eq2, bioshock 2, and many other games. because it's such a high resolution in only 23 inches, it literally makes AA unecisary in most games.</p><p>also, yes imago, go break :p that's just too much overtime.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Child@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>if you don't want to have to worry about AA again, run all games in 2048x1152 (yes, higher than 1080p) on this monitor: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank"></a><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343B...r/dp/B001N0H8YW</a> it's what i use in eq2, bioshock 2, and many other games. because it's such a high resolution in only 23 inches, it literally makes AA unecisary in most games.</p></blockquote><p>That resolution would have the same problem.</p><p>The problem I'm talking about is 'resolution shear' - I think a few years back I mentioned this in a post.</p><p>The problem of jagged polygons is the difference between the horizontal and the vertical resolution.</p><p>So if you have a 4:3 1280x1024 resolution, you would barely be able to see any jagged resolution shear occurring at all. Back in the 4:3 resolution day, when did anyone mention that polygons were jaggy? I don't remember it. Probably as an occurrence that the graphic card manufacturers incorporated AA. Then everyone noticed the problem on even minor jaggies when they were unseen. So when AA was not in effect, OMG, jaggies. I can't stand those.</p><p>The worse culprit for resolution shear is 16:9. You're not going to get worse than that standard. You would have to rely on AA because it's going to bother you like nothing else; especially if that resolution is 1280x720 or 1920x1080.</p><p>2048x1152, I haven't seen myself, but logic dictates that it would be pretty horrendous, and only offset by the fact that the human eye would have to discern smaller dot pitches - depending on how big the display was.</p><p>I'm not a fan of LCD displays over 27". It's ridiculously over-sized when you're sitting infront of it less than 2 feet away.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>^ This person obviously has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, or is phrasing his responses incorrectly. You're not going to crash and burn with that hardware setup. See an enormous frames dip here or there, possibly. Because the 5850 in the eyes of a CPU oriented framework means dog food. But you're not going to crash and burn.</p></blockquote><p>It's a metaphor.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p>Wow! Just read through this entire post (yes all 62 pages) and I've gotta say it was an excellent read. So many ideas flying all over the place. And all of them hopefully going into making EQ2 run and look better then ever before. It just makes me so happy. I'm especially pleased to see a Graphics Dev so vocal with the community. Thats a rare thing these days. /bow Imago-QuemOne thing I'd like to see is a screenshot of the new SM3.0 with AA turned on. I play at 720p windowed on a 40" 1080p screen that is less then 3 feet from me. (I like having a wall for a monitor damnit!) and to make things bearable at that distance/resolution AA is a MUST for me. All these screenshots I've seen look better from a diffuse/bump/lighting stand-point, but the added contrast/sharpness/glossiness adds unsettling amounts of white hot "jaggies" to the geometry/bumpmaps. I'm hoping a little AA will smooth out those shining pixels of intense jagginess.The suggestion list is rather long and dare-I-say-it, impossible (GI/AO? DOF? Caustics?! SSS!?!) But since we are talking about (unlikely) engine improvements I wanted put something different on the table. Why not add Motion Blur? I'm the lead VFX at a small studio and a lot of the 3D/motion graphics I do looks like crap without a great big spoonful of motion blur. It's precisely why 24fps is beautiful for movies, and why 60fps is only "ok" for gaming. Put simply, It's not how many frames per second you can achieve, its what you DO with those frames that matters most. With todays hardware it seems it's entirely possible to add realtime motion blur to games (see Mass Effect 1/2, Halo 3, KillZone 2, Crysis) but the games its typically added to (FPS specifically) its really a detrimental effect (it makes clear shooting much harder), but for EQ2 (or any game that does not rely on twitch skill) it stands only to make it more beautiful in motion. Imagine Monks and their crazy Kung Fu skillz pulling off a combo hit so fast you can only see a blur where their hands should be! Or a Tank swinging a giant 2hs broadsword so fast it creates an enormous blur as it cuts through the air. I'm certain it would reduce the framerate of the game, but I don't think it would be a "bad" trade. Plus from what I understand, its a post effect (i.e. its done after the current frame is rendered) so it should be much easier to implement/tack on versus some of the other ideas for improvement like GI, DOF and SSS. (of course I have very little experience with realtime engines, so I could be completely wrong about all of this)</p><p>And to prove my point, I'm gonna make a test video using a post motion blur tool I use alot for the 3D work I do. I'll post a link to it once its done.</p><p>Another thing, that is only partially related to this post, you guys should make more use of the camera wiggle. I think I've only seen it in a few instances with giants in Thundering Steppes and on the elephants in The Commonlands. It's a really neat effect that pulls you into the game, and it adds realism, weight and scale to the game world. Plus if you add motion blur, a 5 pixel wiggle will make every sword contact seem like an epic hit.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p>Here is the video test: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg</a></p>

[bluefish]

<p><cite>Child@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>if you don't want to have to worry about AA again, run all games in 2048x1152 (yes, higher than 1080p) on this monitor: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank"></a><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343B...r/dp/B001N0H8YW</a> it's what i use in eq2, bioshock 2, and many other games. because it's such a high resolution in only 23 inches, it literally makes AA unecisary in most games.</p><p>also, yes imago, go break :p that's just too much overtime.</p></blockquote><p>that resolution is no where near high enough to offset the jaggies wihtout AA enabled .. IMO anyway</p><p>I run 1920x1080 with 4x AA and still see jaggies.  Dont get me wrong .. it's much much better with 4x aa than without, but 2048 x 1152 with no aa, would drive me absolutely bonkers!</p>

[zimmer]

<p><cite>Teeboy@Butcherblock wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Child@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>if you don't want to have to worry about AA again, run all games in 2048x1152 (yes, higher than 1080p) on this monitor: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank"></a><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343BWX-23-Inch-LCD-Monitor/dp/B001N0H8YW" target="_blank">http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2343B...r/dp/B001N0H8YW</a> it's what i use in eq2, bioshock 2, and many other games. because it's such a high resolution in only 23 inches, it literally makes AA unecisary in most games.</p><p>also, yes imago, go break :p that's just too much overtime.</p></blockquote><p>that resolution is no where near high enough to offset the jaggies wihtout AA enabled .. IMO anyway</p><p>I run 1920x1080 with 4x AA and still see jaggies.  Dont get me wrong .. it's much much better with 4x aa than without, but 2048 x 1152 with no aa, would drive me absolutely bonkers!</p></blockquote><p>Kids these days!  jk</p><p>you ever seen doom or duke nukem orignals.  so much pixelation.</p><p>I have played 3d  for 15 years with jaggies.  My next upgrade I might finally be able to do turn AA on.</p><p>though I have not gone bonkers yet I think you would be ok teeboy  ;p</p>

[Child]

<p>lol, it's 23 inches, at such a high res, you'd have to be REALLY far zoomed out to see bad pixels.</p><p>@zimmer - yea :p i remember the first starcraft, loved it, but it had no AA period when i played it.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p>What is "Resolution Sheer"? are you talking about Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR)? If so, that is a problem only videos deal with. 4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1 and any other aspect ratio you can come up with will ALWAYS have a 1:1 PAR on a computer. More importantly even if the PAR was say .9, or 1.21 or even 1.333 it would be equally "jaggy" with only more or less pixels.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>The suggestion list is rather long and dare-I-say-it, impossible (GI/AO? DOF? Caustics?! SSS!?!) But since we are talking about (unlikely) engine improvements I wanted put something different on the table. Why not add Motion Blur?</p></blockquote><p>Everquest 2's game engine could be tweaked to be capped to 30fps. Then motion blur would be a better candidate. with Shader 3, I think this would be ideal. I doubt there is a PC out there even at the medium-performance level that couldn't handle Shader 3 and the type of game engine Everquest 2 is. 30fps would also negate Shader 3's heavy handedness on the GPU.</p><p>Then the GPU driver would be set for 2 pre-rendered frames (minus the v-sync). But in the v-sync ideal, I am not sure whether you would need it or not. I know consoles employ it for a capped 30fps. They do it on consoles for that very reason.</p><p>The v-sync issue is largely just a multi-buffer translation, although there are a variety of ways that coders employ them with the particular graphic engine. The best I've ever heard, by a long, long way, is what Liverpool Studios did with WipeoutHD on the PS3. I still get goosebumps reading their tech-paper on that.</p><p>60fps is really only a motion-blur coherent rate in which there are frames the human eye cannot perceive as drawn. Motion blur etches in those gaps at 30fps (for this concept at least).</p><p>I'm just speaking as an analogy here.</p>

[Albrig]

<p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>What is "Resolution Sheer"? are you talking about Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR)? If so, that is a problem only videos deal with. 4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1 and any other aspect ratio you can come up with will ALWAYS have a 1:1 PAR on a computer. More importantly even if the PAR was say .9, or 1.21 or even 1.333 it would be equally "jaggy" with only more or less pixels.</p></blockquote><p>It's a made-up term.</p><p>I made it up.</p><p>I used it to describe the level of acute horizontal to vertical pixel displacement inherent in types of display resolutions that have have almost double the horizontal over vertical.</p><p>I also hadn't made up mind whether to use Shear or Sheer. But now you've used it because you understand it, I'll stick to Sheer. Which is probably what I used on these forums a year back or so.</p><p>On a further note, speaking in LCD terms just for pixel pitch accuracy, a resolution of 1680x1680 and 24" would have no jagged edges that you could discern from a normal viewing distance in the context of what you're using it for.</p><p>But no one - and I mean no one - would like looking at a SqUaRe display. The human eye, the brain, hates that kind of thing.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p>Albright, could you post a picture/video showing what you are talking about? I still can't get my head around this. I just don't get how display aspect ratio can translate into more or less "jagginess".</p><p>For the sake of clarity, here is an Aliased and Anti-Aliased image of the letter "A" in Times New Roman zoomed in quite a bit. The "A" on the left represents what I'm calling "jaggies" but more properly is called Aliased. The "A" on the right is Anti-Aliased and appears much smoother, especially if scaled back to the original size.</p><p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Aliasing_a.png" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped.../Aliasing_a.png</a></p><p>How can changing the display aspect ratio of the display/game window make the Aliased "A" appear smooth like the Anti-Aliased "A"? No matter if a screen is square and was 2048x2048 (1:1 DAR) or if it was an extremely wide display showing 256x2048 (1:8 DAR) I can't see the Aliased "A" looking smooth.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p><cite>Albright wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>The suggestion list is rather long and dare-I-say-it, impossible (GI/AO? DOF? Caustics?! SSS!?!) But since we are talking about (unlikely) engine improvements I wanted put something different on the table. Why not add Motion Blur?</p></blockquote><p>Everquest 2's game engine could be tweaked to be capped to 30fps. Then motion blur would be a better candidate. with Shader 3, I think this would be ideal. I doubt there is a PC out there even at the medium-performance level that couldn't handle Shader 3 and the type of game engine Everquest 2 is. 30fps would also negate Shader 3's heavy handedness on the GPU.</p><p>Then the GPU driver would be set for 2 pre-rendered frames (minus the v-sync). But in the v-sync ideal, I am not sure whether you would need it or not. I know consoles employ it for a capped 30fps. They do it on consoles for that very reason.</p><p>The v-sync issue is largely just a multi-buffer translation, although there are a variety of ways that coders employ them with the particular graphic engine. The best I've ever heard, by a long, long way, is what Liverpool Studios did with WipeoutHD on the PS3. I still get goosebumps reading their tech-paper on that.</p><p>60fps is really only a motion-blur coherent rate in which there are frames the human eye cannot perceive as drawn. Motion blur etches in those gaps at 30fps (for this concept at least).</p><p>I'm just speaking as an analogy here.</p></blockquote><p>Yeah obviously the game engine would have to be capped to a framerate, but I think it would be a little better at 24FPS. 24p would give the game that "movie feel" and would also allow a triple buffer system to work quite well. Also triple buffering allows for an easy vsync. I'm not sure how motion blur is done in real time, but in a rendered workflow there are two main ways to achieve it. First is subframe sampling. In realtime applications I can't see this working well because it would mean that the computer would still have to rely on rendering at least 8 samples per frame. Meaning 192FPS. The second option is motion tracking based and is what I did to produce that motion blur test. I believe that with 3 samples per second and some serious coding, a realtime version of that could be possible. Infact I'm certain that is what these other games are doing. Perhaps they are just calculating camera position change and using a depth map to determine direction and amount of blur per frame rendered.</p><p>While most people have PoV at around 16FPS and are most comfortable at 50-60FPS, I actually believe that 180FPS is the bleeding edge of human perception. A few years ago I did an informal test using one of my old CRT production monitors that has a 240Hz refresh rate. 4 out of 6 people I showed could notice a difference between 140FPS and 180FPS, but not above 180FPS.</p>

[Jaale]

<p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Here is the video test: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg</a></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: "><p>Hiyaku, what system spec do you run EQ2 on? I have to say that does look beautiful, pausing the video does show the blurring effect and it's eloquently done. Was that 30FPS on the video?</p><p>Also have you tried it with battle?</p></span></p><p> Edit: ok read the post box on youtube where you say it's done in 30FPS!</p>

[Aszuth]

<p><cite>Gaige wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Detor wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-size: 10.8px;">Actually, that's wrong. See: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/budget-p55-motherboard,2436-15.html" target="_blank">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...rd,2436-15.html</a></span></p></blockquote><p>Sure, if you get a motherboard with a factory defect.  Almost all of those boards have since been updated, which is why people shouldn't link 5 month old articles.</p></blockquote><p>Interesting data you provided earlier Gaige - been looking at upgrading my CPU finally due to EQ2 (P4 has taken me a long, long ways - but getting hooked on EQ2 is finally pushing the upgrade - was even hearty enough of a CPU to handle my 4770 without the CPU bottlenecking substantially - but EQ2 has forced my hand on planning the upgrade).</p><p>Are you aware of any other CPU's that have the throttling that works with overclocking? I was aware of the function for a number of years, but I was unaware that it included overclocking protections - I may do i7, I've got the budget for it - but of course the difference between an i7 and something lower end could easily fit in my planned upgrade to TiVo Premiere without having to set aside more of my limited (SSDI, due to my wonderful neurology and congenital condition) cash supply.</p>

[Gaige]

<p>The i5 750 is a good budget cpu for all around use, if you're talking EQ2 only the i3 540 is probably your best bet.</p>

[Hiyaku]

<p><cite>Graal@Blackburrow wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Here is the video test: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg</a></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: "><p>Hiyaku, what system spec do you run EQ2 on? I have to say that does look beautiful, pausing the video does show the blurring effect and it's eloquently done. Was that 30FPS on the video?</p><p>Also have you tried it with battle?</p></span></p><p> Edit: ok read the post box on youtube where you say it's done in 30FPS!</p></blockquote><p>Thanks for your opinion on the motion blur. It's always great to find out that you're not crazy. I could have pushed even more blur into it, but I think its best when not overly done.</p><p>Yes it is 30FPS (well actually 29.97). After I had done all the work I realized that 24FPS would have looked even better... oh well.</p><p>My Specs:</p><p>CPU: Intel i7 920 OC'd to ~3.7 Ghz</p><p>MoBo: EVGA Intel X58 Micro ATX</p><p>RAM: 12GB G.SKILL Ripjaws Series DDR3 2000</p><p>GFX: SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5870</p><p>HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB</p><p>PSU: SeaSonic X750 Gold 750W</p><p>HSF: Noctua NH-C12P SE14</p><p>Case: LIAN LI PC-V351B Black Aluminum MicroATX</p><p>EQ2 generally rides it's FPS cap (60FPS) for me. From time to time I dip into the 50s though.</p><p>I have not tried battlegrounds yet... I keep hearing its fun though.</p>

[TemberWolf]

<p>wow the motion blur looks awesome XD</p><p>the 60 fps cap you are talking about would be from use vsync with a 60hz refresh.....but you probably already knew that <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>I've been impressed with game performance with my Phenom II 965 BE. Pricing is reasonable for the CPU, as well as motherboard and memory components. </p>

[Aszuth]

<p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I've been impressed with game performance with my Phenom II 965 BE. Pricing is reasonable for the CPU, as well as motherboard and memory components. </p></blockquote><p>Good to see the reinforcement from someone, that's actually the precise CPU I had my eye on for my rebuild previous to Gaige's comments.</p><p>Any idea if it Cool n' Quiet or whatever they call the CPU stepping these days for the Phenom II is active when overclocking? From what I recall back in the day when CnQ first started it had to be disabled to OC. (In fact previous to Gaige's comment, I didn't think ANY of the CPU stepping was available when overclocking)</p>

[NrthnStar5]

<p>Vaclav,</p><p>I do not know if the Cool n' Quiet is active when oc'd. I turned it off from the get go. I was also able to OC with stock cooling to 3.68. I plan on getting aftermarket cooling to get up close to 4ghz. </p>

[Aszuth]

<p><cite>NrthnStar5 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Vaclav,</p><p>I do not know if the Cool n' Quiet is active when oc'd. I turned it off from the get go. I was also able to OC with stock cooling to 3.68. I plan on getting aftermarket cooling to get up close to 4ghz. </p></blockquote><p>Nod - after reading the temp info on o/c'ed Phenom II's it seems rather unneccesary - they run darn low temp these days. (In fact, since the last time I researched it looks like the tables have flipped - I thought I remembered Athlons being the hot CPU's and Intel's running cool...)</p><p>Of course also have slid back about $100 on my plan now as well - Numbers on the new bottom-end Phenom II seem insane, without aftermarket cooling frequently O/C's to at least 3.6, many get over 4 even. And what looks to be 50% or so have 4 usable cores if you've got a BIOS to activate them. (or in other words, a good portion of them are 955's in a 555's clothing)</p><p>Since the concensus seems to be that EQ2 doesn't care about more than 2 cores, I'm not concerned if my luck ends up having no extra cores though - for the absolutes it seems right in line with the 955 as long as you've got an OC friendly motherboard.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>wintermute wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p>I'm hoping for a performance increase on my setup with ps 3.0 too. My experience is pretty similar to yours, but I attributed the poor eq2 performance at higher settings to be due both to both CPU bottlenecking AND not running on my card's native pixel shader. Also: it would be impossible to implement, but I still have a pipe dream of one day seeing eq2 having SMP haha (symmetric multiprocessing, i.e. running more than 55% total use of your multicore cpu).</p><p>I get pretty underwhelming performance at 1080p with 4gb ddr3, 1 gtx 285, and q9550 quad clocked at 3.7ghz. Usually 20-40fps in most places. SF overland zones really lag my box. I had to slide down the LOD and max poly for environment quite a bit to stay over 20fps in some places. Maybe the addition of physx support and ps 3.0 will help free up my cpu for these scenes with lots of depth.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Shader 3.0 might not actually run faster since there's more "punch" running in the new 3.0 shaders.  The current 1.0 shaders are so tiny that current generation graphics cards have no problem with them.  The problem really looks like the mass single core CPU usage at this point.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>VerdicAysen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So the potential effect here for us is that if we want to see any difference without losing alot of performance we have to upgrade to a next generation GPU? I might be understanding it wrong, but it sounds like in the end visual quality was preferred to improved performance. I run an ASUS laptop on Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit  -  Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.0 GHZ w/ 4 GB of DDR2 & an Nvidia GTX 260. Even with things toned down, the performance in PS 1.0 is abysmal. So reasoning leads me to believe that since the math is being directed toward quality, not speed, PS 3.0 is going to be even MORE abysmal. Is this correct? Or am I not getting the full story?</p><p>Of course, my opinion of abysmal is anything below 40 FPS. Though with a GTX 260 i've seen other MMO's running SM 3.0 churn out upwards of 90 FPS with maximum settings. I was led to believe the reason for sub-par performance in EQ2 (For years with many different systems, one even including a 3.2 GHZ Phenom II x4 running two GTX 260's in SLI) that the game is CPU bound and doesn't take full advantage of cards in the ATI 4xxx & Nvidia GTX lines.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes and no.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Under certain settings Shader 3 outperforms Shader 1 by over 100 FPS.  But old (around 2004) graphics cards just don't process 3.0 shaders very well, so they won't likely see much of this gain.  On current default settings Shader 1 slightly outperforms Shader 3.0 (in respect to FPS, not workload).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>If you choose to run point lights + shader 3.0 then you will likely see a performance drop at the cost of the quality upgrade.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I hate to be such a negative ninny, but reading all your posts is starting to get my ire up. I've got an e8400 w/8800GT and there is *no excuse* for a five year old game to run as poorly as it does on hardware exponentially more powerful than existed on the day of release in 2005. The NUMBER ONE PRIORITY on improving EQ2's engine should be on the speed and performance of the game.</p><p>If all Shader 3.0 is going to do is make the game look prettier (I think it already looks good on quality settings) without offering me a significant speed boost then I really see no point to all of your work.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm sorry about that.  I hope you enjoy at least everyone else's work in creating new levels, spells, zones, quests, etc. to add more fun to your game.  You can always play the game in Shader 1.0.</strong></span></p>

[Armawk]

<p>I would expect that e8400 with an 8800GT card to perform pretty well under shader 3 actually. The 8400 is a sweet spot chip for EQ2 anyway (fast core duo) and the 8800GT will run the shaders very well indeed. That is good solid hardware for this purpose.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Guy De Alsace wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I just bought a new computer and I'm still baffled as to why it chugs so much in places. Playing Oblivion and Half Life 2 with ultra-high resolution textures and I get three times the fps than I do with EQ2...its also STILL the only game in the known universe of space and time that I know of that doesnt support AA within the game.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Non-MMO games will be able to run more graphics faster since they do not have to manage servers and un-predictable numbers of objects and characters on the screen.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU performance optimizations have been a hot topic of discussion around the office, specifically for the rendering engine.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>From a selfish point of view I'd really really like to see more multiprocessor support (although at times I wonder just how much real improvement can be had from the current multi-cpu architecture when all the overhead of splitting tasks up is done?).</p><p>It also seems to be the one area that would benefit both owners of high end and low end gear very well, at least according to the steam survey last year showing 70% of users now had dual core or more (and it must have grown a lot since then), especially when a lot of cheaper systems have a great sounding CPU and a mediocre graphics card, plus its the simple solution when EQ2 is so heavily CPU reliant currently.</p><p>As for graphics I did notice on test that with or without Shader 3.0 (shader 3.0 inside one cave ran more then 2x as fast as 1.0, but outside in Faydwer was about 10% slower on average back in December) the flora was the biggest hog, spinning fast around with it off was extremely smooth, with it on it I had slight juddering/50% slower frame rates.  I think after a while it smoothed out on the juddering which I guess was the flora being in cache instead of ram perhaps?  If so moving it to the graphics and the massive memory bandwidth it has there sounds like it could take a big load off the CPU/main memory.</p><p>All in all though the shader 3.0 is looking great, thanks for all the hard work your putting in there, its appreciated!</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Multithreading will be very difficult if we start down that road.  But if it can be done it could really improve performance.  Optimizing the framerates is something we'd like to look at ASAP.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You will see a lot of this "shader 3 runs faster here, shader 1 runs faster there".  It is because of the lighting model shader 1 runs under vs shader 3.  Since the art work is not tailored to shader 3 you will only see benefits where the art just so happens to bend in favor of shader 3, in other cases shader 1.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Awesome Work Imago, This game already looked awesome but this Shader update adds allot more depth to the textures and makes the game look allot less dated, cant wait for it to come live <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />.</p><p>At the moment on test server it doesent allow you to activate cpu shadows which in my opinion, with antialiasing enabled, look allot better than the gpu ones as they take into account lightsources other than the sun, have a longer draw distance and look sharper and less pixilated. Also, at the moment the gpu shadows have a slider that makes you choose bettween distance and quality, will that be changed in the future? And are there any plans to make the Gpu shadows be effected by lightsources other than the sun cause at the moment, even though they have a horrible impact on preformance in most cases, Cpu shadows look allot better.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm not sure when/if we'll be upgrading the GPU shadows some more (eg. adding more quality with distance, point light shadows, and more crisp shadow options).  The CPU options should be back now though.  Also, you can now choose to run GPU sunlight shadows in combination with CPU point light shadows, but it will likely run as slow as all CPU shadows.  For you this option probably isn't any better since you like the CPU shadows more.  But for others it might.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Glad you're enjoying the new shader 3 option.</strong></span></p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>Thanks for the reply. Everquest 2 is easily the best looking mmo out there 5 years on and considering that it was tailored to run in the future on faster single cores in the future its pretty amasing it runs as well as it does to be honest. It anoys me that people are given the option to have insanely high graphics and then that gives the game a bad reputation for running slow and being graphics heavy with no room for gameplay. This was also the Case with Crysis which became my all time Faivorite game playing it on medium settings with a 7300gt and a pentium 4 and it still looked and ran better than any game on the market at that time.</p><p>Personaly Everquest 2 is easily the best mmo I've ever played; infact the only one that doesent feel like a chore <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> the only problem is performance but people shouldent be suprised that it runs like it does.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Guy De Alsace wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Zulaika@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>You should probably stop mentioning the launch date, as the technology Imago is working on *now* is not early 2000 tech benchmark. To be crude, a stale cake with fresh icing is probably going to taste like a stale cake with fresh icing on it. Nothing he can do about the inherent graphics engine of the game itself. You have the option of staying with what your card can handle, or attempting to have it run newer technology which both makes the game look prettier and run smoother on cards that can handle it. That's it. If you want the benefit of the newer tech, you need a newer card.</p><p>This is the world of computing, tech can go obsolete in six months. It's expensive and there a sharp curve =(</p></blockquote><p>I think thats the nail on the head. EQ2's engine stinks so badly and getting it to do what its currently doing is actually quite a feat in and of itself. Getting it doing even more is quite obviously extremely difficult.</p><p>I think at some point though there will be a point reached where the engine cannot be made to go any further. Shader 3 might be it.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's like a house.  You can keep ripping parts out and replacing them with new stuff.  Some stuff is expensive to do because they're integrated into the infrastructure, like a house's wiring, and a game's shader engine.  It it's even more difficult when all your house outlets and power has to be able to hook up to both the old and new wiring.  Kind of like EQ2 hooked up to both shader 1 and shader 3.</strong></span></p>

[Ama]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Guy De Alsace wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Zulaika@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>You should probably stop mentioning the launch date, as the technology Imago is working on *now* is not early 2000 tech benchmark. To be crude, a stale cake with fresh icing is probably going to taste like a stale cake with fresh icing on it. Nothing he can do about the inherent graphics engine of the game itself. You have the option of staying with what your card can handle, or attempting to have it run newer technology which both makes the game look prettier and run smoother on cards that can handle it. That's it. If you want the benefit of the newer tech, you need a newer card.</p><p>This is the world of computing, tech can go obsolete in six months. It's expensive and there a sharp curve =(</p></blockquote><p>I think thats the nail on the head. EQ2's engine stinks so badly and getting it to do what its currently doing is actually quite a feat in and of itself. Getting it doing even more is quite obviously extremely difficult.</p><p>I think at some point though there will be a point reached where the engine cannot be made to go any further. Shader 3 might be it.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's like a house.  You can keep ripping parts out and replacing them with new stuff.  Some stuff is expensive to do because they're integrated into the infrastructure, like a house's wiring, and a game's shader engine.  It it's even more difficult when all your house outlets and power has to be able to hook up to both the old and new wiring.  Kind of like EQ2 hooked up to both shader 1 and shader 3.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Very Succinctly put Imago very good analogy.  Every time I heard about revamps, upgrades, and add-ons to a game's engine they talked about how difficult it was to do.  Even smallest detail such as making a game more compatable from 1 OS to the new OS was a feat in and of itself (Bet you all went through heck and back for W7 32bit and 64bit versions). </p><p>One thing i'm curious about though is if a game can actually have the entire engine itself ripped out like leveling a house and building a new one ontop of a foundation.  That is if the foundation itself is sound and doesn't to be destroyed as well.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>NViDiaFReaK wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>NViDiaFReaK wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>any word on when we can expect Shader 3.0 to be pushed to live?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You won't hear it from here unless it's already been said somewhere else.  Generally, if it's been on Test for over a month it will be on Live in the next Game Update.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's going back up on Test as soon as QA runs a quick pass over it again to make sure I re-enabled it correctly.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Well thanks for the quick response.. 3.0 is beautiful  and i cant wait to explore SF with it on..</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Awesome.  Thanks!  It's very motivating to hear when your work is appreciated.  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion, infact its one of the only games to consitantly make my jaw drop <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" />. This is allot to do with the art style of the world itself, I think that they have done an amazing job with their "realistic fantasy" aproach, this is what makes me feel this shader update is one of the most important updates to eq2 for a long time as it doesent only make the game look better but it starts shifting allot of the processing from CPU to GPU which for the majority of people will improve as the main problem with the game's preformance is that it is far too processor relliant and doesent support multicore as they were planning for single cores to get allot faster than they have rather than multicores, hopefully this will lay the foundation for future preformance improvements.Also imago was telling us earlier in this post that it will make it easier to implement some of the designs for new content and more elaborate design which will hopefully mean that future content will be able to be created quicker and the end result will be better. Another benefit of Shader 3.0 which I have noticed on the test server is that it realy does bring out defenition and depth in the textures. I never realised just how detailed they were before as they just looked very flat with the current shader model despite being very high resolution.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">One question, think I've asked twice on this post allready <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />, will the current CPU shadows be implemented in the final version of shader 3.0? Because at the moment theres no shadows attall indoors and in my opinion CPU shadows with antialiasing on and the lighting resolution turned down to about 630 in options look awesone despite not rendering on trees and being a bit of a processor hog <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">Looking forward to the release of this update, have been postponing my playthrough of sentinel's fate so I can play through it with shader 3.0 enabled <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some multi-core speep-ups here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p>

[Akevo]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion, infact its one of the only games to consitantly make my jaw drop <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" />. This is allot to do with the art style of the world itself, I think that they have done an amazing job with their "realistic fantasy" aproach, this is what makes me feel this shader update is one of the most important updates to eq2 for a long time as it doesent only make the game look better but it starts shifting allot of the processing from CPU to GPU which for the majority of people will improve as the main problem with the game's preformance is that it is far too processor relliant and doesent support multicore as they were planning for single cores to get allot faster than they have rather than multicores, hopefully this will lay the foundation for future preformance improvements.Also imago was telling us earlier in this post that it will make it easier to implement some of the designs for new content and more elaborate design which will hopefully mean that future content will be able to be created quicker and the end result will be better. Another benefit of Shader 3.0 which I have noticed on the test server is that it realy does bring out defenition and depth in the textures. I never realised just how detailed they were before as they just looked very flat with the current shader model despite being very high resolution.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">One question, think I've asked twice on this post allready <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />, will the current CPU shadows be implemented in the final version of shader 3.0? Because at the moment theres no shadows attall indoors and in my opinion CPU shadows with antialiasing on and the lighting resolution turned down to about 630 in options look awesone despite not rendering on trees and being a bit of a processor hog <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">Looking forward to the release of this update, have been postponing my playthrough of sentinel's fate so I can play through it with shader 3.0 enabled <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some <span style="color: #ff0000;">multi-core speep-ups </span>here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I don't know what a speep-up is, but I want one now!!!  Especially if it's multi-core!!!</p><p><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/0320a00cb4bb5629ab9fc2bc1fcc4e9e.gif" border="0" /></p>

[feldon30]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some multi-core speep-ups here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I'm glad to hear that the artists now have the tools necessary to design Shader 3-ready art. Otherwise, I had a very depressing vision of you in a pit of quicksand, trying to not only get Shaders 3 working great, but also endlessly converting ever-new textures. You'd never have gotten your head above water.</p><p>I know some people here are complaining about Shader 1 or Shader 3 or GPU Shadows. I'm sorry that what looked like a great little project turned into a 3 headed monster on you.</p><p>I'm just glad that someone is working on the rusty EQ2 engine to try to breathe some more life into it. What you are doing is appreciated, and as we get closer to the release of Shaders 3 on Live, I intend to create some comparison videos.</p>

[Ikke]

<p>Just wanted to add to the general concensus:</p><p>Thanks for the work AND the communications!</p><p>I can't wait to see the results in the Live game.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>MurFalad wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The Shader 3.0 pipeline does "run" faster than our Shader 1.0 pipeline, yet at the same time our direction was for better looking shader effects.  This in turn lead to slower rendering in some places since the shaders have been packed with new pretty algorithms and math to make things look better.  The Shader 1.0 pipeline also requires our assets, like 3D meshes and textures, to be constructed in a way specialized for our Shader 1.0 pipeline.  Unfortunately this pulls Shader 3.0 down a bit.  Kind of like that bad guy holding onto your ankle while you're hanging off a cliff, or the stupid brown sack your feet are stuck in in a potato sack race.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p><p>I'm wondering on meshes, textures etc, I assume this means that to make the game totally optimised for Shader 3.0 we would need to redo all the art assets?  Or is this the code that reads the art assets in?</p><p>I'm just wondering if its feasible to rewrite everything to work with Shader 3.0 perfectly, or would this be several years work to redo everything?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>You're right, for the game to work better for EQ2 Shader 3 it would require all geometry and textures to be redone, and yes it would take years.  There are other theories as well to improve shader 3 performance but it is near impossible to predict the true performance gain.  Since the current prototyped theory of improvement is complete it would only take months to develop.  But the risk is months of work with little or no performance gain in the end.  Other benefits would arise, though, such as CPU shadow support and infinite light support for shader 3.  Currently we have no plans to take this prototype any further (it's not my call).</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Akevo wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion, infact its one of the only games to consitantly make my jaw drop <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" />. This is allot to do with the art style of the world itself, I think that they have done an amazing job with their "realistic fantasy" aproach, this is what makes me feel this shader update is one of the most important updates to eq2 for a long time as it doesent only make the game look better but it starts shifting allot of the processing from CPU to GPU which for the majority of people will improve as the main problem with the game's preformance is that it is far too processor relliant and doesent support multicore as they were planning for single cores to get allot faster than they have rather than multicores, hopefully this will lay the foundation for future preformance improvements.Also imago was telling us earlier in this post that it will make it easier to implement some of the designs for new content and more elaborate design which will hopefully mean that future content will be able to be created quicker and the end result will be better. Another benefit of Shader 3.0 which I have noticed on the test server is that it realy does bring out defenition and depth in the textures. I never realised just how detailed they were before as they just looked very flat with the current shader model despite being very high resolution.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">One question, think I've asked twice on this post allready <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />, will the current CPU shadows be implemented in the final version of shader 3.0? Because at the moment theres no shadows attall indoors and in my opinion CPU shadows with antialiasing on and the lighting resolution turned down to about 630 in options look awesone despite not rendering on trees and being a bit of a processor hog <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Times;">Looking forward to the release of this update, have been postponing my playthrough of sentinel's fate so I can play through it with shader 3.0 enabled <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some <span style="color: #ff0000;">multi-core speep-ups </span>here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>I don't know what a speep-up is, but I want one now!!!  Especially if it's multi-core!!!</p><p><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/0320a00cb4bb5629ab9fc2bc1fcc4e9e.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Hehe, good catch.  "Speep"-ups is another word for super cool fastness. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>vexation wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: andale mono,times;">I agree that the game's preformance needs improving but Everquest 2's graphics are still amazing 5 years on in my opinion</span></p></blockquote><p>Just echoing this sentiment. The game looks great in higher settings, even in balanced settings - in fact I don't personally know anyone that has ever complained about how eq2 "looks" - it's the performance that everyone has a problem with. I've played on a variety of rigs and I nearly always end up playing the game in extreme performance mode because I'm tired of it dropping below 30fps in groups / raids.. sometimes going as low as 10-15.</p><p>I hoped (and still hope) that Shader 3.0 will bring performance benefits rather than incurring a further cost. I'll be really disappointed if after all this time we just see another 5fps lost for some shiny surfaces and spell effects.</p><p>On another note, I know a bunch of people have complained about the lag in Tox Forest - I'm sure it's already been considered but could it be something as simple as the skybox changes (I only say that because I noticed an FPS hit when the sky changes but I guess it could be anything in that area)? The same people tend to complain about Terens Grasp and Kunzar Jungle, can't remember whether the skybox changes there too. /shrug</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The lower FPS in those areas is likely not due to sky-boxes, but we do go through zones as we have time, from the art side, and clear up some things that cause FPS to drop.  I'm not sure if we'll make it through these zones soon or not, but I've mentioned them to the art director.  Zone FPS drops likely come from a few different causes.   Masses of memory usage for the zone like large textures used on small objects.  Lots of NPC's with varying armor sets, weapons, skins, and hair.  Objects placed into the zone that were taken from other zones.  Misplaced objects will cause more shader swapping and potentially use higher resolution textures when not needed.  Objects with transparency, like tree tops, plants, nets, etc..  The number of players currently near you or in view multiplied by the number of different objects they have on them like armor and weapons.  Spells being cast.  And shadows being cast if you have them on.  These are things we go back through and tweak for performance.  Sometimes we don't have the time to scrutinize a zone between designer object placement and release to Live.  But we're continually working to improve our processes, techniques, and</strong> global knowledge on the team to impact your gameplay for the better.</span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm sorry about the possible lower FPS for you with Shader 3.  I hope you "do" get a performance boost, but as you mentioned it is adding more "shiny" at a cost.  Shader 3 has been introduced as a new graphical effect, not a performance upgrade.  In general, changing from Shader 1 to Shader 3 is only changing the way you say the same thing.  Something like this, (Shader 1) "Bright this object is" VS (Shader 3) "This object is bright".  Since this does nothing to impact performance we also added in some extras for a better Shader 3 impact, "This object is bright AND SHINY".  </strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I hope you enjoy the graphical upgrade or at least the continual additions we're making to your game.  And hopefully some more performance updates in the future.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Hyst@Storms wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><img src="http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/3269/eq2000002.jpg" /><img src="http://img695.imageshack.us/img695/5422/eq2000003.jpg" width="800" height="500" /><img src="http://img109.imageshack.us/img109/3843/eq2000001.jpg" /><img src="http://img532.imageshack.us/img532/5254/eq2000000.jpg" />I have see some problems in east freeport :</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I've got this one fixed now.  Thanks.  Should be out soon or at least with Live.</strong></span></p>

[Child]

<p>sorry for the noob question, but i can't read through 64 pages....</p><p>how do you enable shader 3.0 on test? i don't see the checkbox under performance.</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Hiyaku@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Wow! Just read through this entire post (yes all 62 pages) and I've gotta say it was an excellent read. So many ideas flying all over the place. And all of them hopefully going into making EQ2 run and look better then ever before. It just makes me so happy. I'm especially pleased to see a Graphics Dev so vocal with the community. Thats a rare thing these days. /bow Imago-QuemOne thing I'd like to see is a screenshot of the new SM3.0 with AA turned on. I play at 720p windowed on a 40" 1080p screen that is less then 3 feet from me. (I like having a wall for a monitor damnit!) and to make things bearable at that distance/resolution AA is a MUST for me. All these screenshots I've seen look better from a diffuse/bump/lighting stand-point, but the added contrast/sharpness/glossiness adds unsettling amounts of white hot "jaggies" to the geometry/bumpmaps. I'm hoping a little AA will smooth out those shining pixels of intense jagginess.The suggestion list is rather long and dare-I-say-it, impossible (GI/AO? DOF? Caustics?! SSS!?!) But since we are talking about (unlikely) engine improvements I wanted put something different on the table. Why not add Motion Blur? I'm the lead VFX at a small studio and a lot of the 3D/motion graphics I do looks like crap without a great big spoonful of motion blur. It's precisely why 24fps is beautiful for movies, and why 60fps is only "ok" for gaming. Put simply, It's not how many frames per second you can achieve, its what you DO with those frames that matters most. With todays hardware it seems it's entirely possible to add realtime motion blur to games (see Mass Effect 1/2, Halo 3, KillZone 2, Crysis) but the games its typically added to (FPS specifically) its really a detrimental effect (it makes clear shooting much harder), but for EQ2 (or any game that does not rely on twitch skill) it stands only to make it more beautiful in motion. Imagine Monks and their crazy Kung Fu skillz pulling off a combo hit so fast you can only see a blur where their hands should be! Or a Tank swinging a giant 2hs broadsword so fast it creates an enormous blur as it cuts through the air. I'm certain it would reduce the framerate of the game, but I don't think it would be a "bad" trade. Plus from what I understand, its a post effect (i.e. its done after the current frame is rendered) so it should be much easier to implement/tack on versus some of the other ideas for improvement like GI, DOF and SSS. (of course I have very little experience with realtime engines, so I could be completely wrong about all of this)</p><p>And to prove my point, I'm gonna make a test video using a post motion blur tool I use alot for the 3D work I do. I'll post a link to it once its done.</p><p>Another thing, that is only partially related to this post, you guys should make more use of the camera wiggle. I think I've only seen it in a few instances with giants in Thundering Steppes and on the elephants in The Commonlands. It's a really neat effect that pulls you into the game, and it adds realism, weight and scale to the game world. Plus if you add motion blur, a 5 pixel wiggle will make every sword contact seem like an epic hit.</p><p><span >Here is the video test: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalC9u_Yjrg</a></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Great video.  Motion blur sounds really cool.  I'll add it to the list.  By the way, the list is really only to find out what should go into EQ2 next.  It might be used again each time I finish a project but at least we are getting your opinions into the mix and not just forcing changes on you.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>As far as the wiggles, I'll bring it up in our meetings.  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm not sure when/if we'll be upgrading the GPU shadows some more (eg. adding more quality with distance, point light shadows, and more crisp shadow options).  The CPU options should be back now though.  Also, you can now choose to run GPU sunlight shadows in combination with CPU point light shadows, but it will likely run as slow as all CPU shadows.  For you this option probably isn't any better since you like the CPU shadows more.  But for others it might.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Glad you're enjoying the new shader 3 option.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some multi-core speep-ups here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>so can you choose to run the gpu shadows in conjunction with cpu ones under shader 3.0? I'm confused <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Amana wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Guy De Alsace wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Zulaika@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Thundy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So I can either choose the same option right now, which runs like crap, or I can use the new option, which makes things uber pretty but probably runs worse. I am not seeing how this helps me. My CPU is perfectly capable and I'm not spending ~$300 on a new one any time soon.</p><p>Did I mention this game came out in 2005? <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>You should probably stop mentioning the launch date, as the technology Imago is working on *now* is not early 2000 tech benchmark. To be crude, a stale cake with fresh icing is probably going to taste like a stale cake with fresh icing on it. Nothing he can do about the inherent graphics engine of the game itself. You have the option of staying with what your card can handle, or attempting to have it run newer technology which both makes the game look prettier and run smoother on cards that can handle it. That's it. If you want the benefit of the newer tech, you need a newer card.</p><p>This is the world of computing, tech can go obsolete in six months. It's expensive and there a sharp curve =(</p></blockquote><p>I think thats the nail on the head. EQ2's engine stinks so badly and getting it to do what its currently doing is actually quite a feat in and of itself. Getting it doing even more is quite obviously extremely difficult.</p><p>I think at some point though there will be a point reached where the engine cannot be made to go any further. Shader 3 might be it.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's like a house.  You can keep ripping parts out and replacing them with new stuff.  Some stuff is expensive to do because they're integrated into the infrastructure, like a house's wiring, and a game's shader engine.  It it's even more difficult when all your house outlets and power has to be able to hook up to both the old and new wiring.  Kind of like EQ2 hooked up to both shader 1 and shader 3.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>Very Succinctly put Imago very good analogy.  Every time I heard about revamps, upgrades, and add-ons to a game's engine they talked about how difficult it was to do.  Even smallest detail such as making a game more compatable from 1 OS to the new OS was a feat in and of itself (Bet you all went through heck and back for W7 32bit and 64bit versions). </p><p>One thing i'm curious about though is if a game can actually have the entire engine itself ripped out like leveling a house and building a new one ontop of a foundation.  That is if the foundation itself is sound and doesn't to be destroyed as well.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The problem with ripping the engine out is that all the content is developed to fit like Legos into the engine.  You can rip out the engine but the new one will still have to work with the original content structure.  Almost better at that point to make a new game entirely.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Child@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>sorry for the noob question, but i can't read through 64 pages....</p><p>how do you enable shader 3.0 on test? i don't see the checkbox under performance.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It was disabled for a couple Live updates.  It should be enabled now or very soon.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm not sure when/if we'll be upgrading the GPU shadows some more (eg. adding more quality with distance, point light shadows, and more crisp shadow options).  The CPU options should be back now though.  Also, you can now choose to run GPU sunlight shadows in combination with CPU point light shadows, but it will likely run as slow as all CPU shadows.  For you this option probably isn't any better since you like the CPU shadows more.  But for others it might.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Glad you're enjoying the new shader 3 option.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Yes, the artists are now equipped with a functioning tool to develop 3.0 shaders along-side 1.0 shaders.  Faster development?  Probably not, since they now have to make sure things look correct with complex shaders turned to -1, with shader 1.0, and with shader 3.0.  Plus, since the textures and lighting data are developed for shader 1.0 as the default setting (min-spec), it will require the artist to keep a close eye on balancing the affects between shader 1 and 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Not sure yet at this point what kind of performance gains we'll be able to find when we look more into performance optimizations, but I hope we can get some multi-core speep-ups here and there too.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>CPU shadows won't be implemented for Shader 3 at this point.  The design to support it is there and a prototype made, but as to finishing it, alongside a performance equalizer for shader 3, it's a full time 2+ month project.  At the moment it is not budgeted into our current schedule.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>so can you choose to run the gpu shadows in conjunction with cpu ones under shader 3.0? I'm confused <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>No, when Shader 3.0 is turned on you cannot run CPU shadows.  This is not done on purpose.  The shader 3.0 framework for EQ2 cannot support CPU shadows at this time.  My first paragraph above was speaking only about when Shader 1.0 is enabled for the game.  Sorry for the confusion.  And thanks for asking for clarification! <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>Cool <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />. Put shader 3.0 on again yesterday and it seems to be progressing nicely, cant wait for it to come live <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> looks bloody amasing and on my gpu heavy xfx gtx 260 black sli system it performs very well indeed, seems to be a very smart move intergrating theese shaders seeing as most systems in the future look like they are going to be more gpu reliant aswell. My only problem now is that the gpu shadows look horrible imo if they are slided all the way down to quality then they look ok but they only draw for a couply of meters  and if you put them up to distance instead they look horribly pixilated and still dont draw as far as the cpu shadows. They do perform well however but I think they realy could benefit from a quality update it seems odd that you have to choose bettween quality or distance is there no way you could introduce two seperate sliders? One for quality and one for distance, also the cpu point light shadows in conjunction with gpu shadows dont seem to do anything other than produce allot of lag in shader 3.0 on test at present will that change? Also at present if you only have gpu shadows enabled in shader 3.0 you get no shadows attal indoors.</p><p>Again amasing work Imago I would say this is easily one of most important updates for EQ2. Imo its all good apart from the shadows. Cant wait for it to come live, been putting back my playthrough of Sentinals fate so I can play it in 3.0 shaders <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[vochore]

<p><cite></cite></p><blockquote><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>No, when Shader 3.0 is turned on you cannot run CPU shadows.  This is not done on purpose.  The shader 3.0 framework for EQ2 cannot support CPU shadows at this time.  My first paragraph above was speaking only about when Shader 1.0 is enabled for the game.  Sorry for the confusion.  And thanks for asking for clarification! <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></strong></span></p></blockquote><p>i have been keeping my eye on this from the begining and i might have missed it somewhere but from what you just said here it is my undersatanding then when shader 3.0 is used all shadows and shader will  be taken off of the cpu and done completely on the gpu.</p>

[VBGod]

<p>When the Runnyeye server went down last night for the second night running, I decided to hop over onto the test server and check out the shader 3.0 changes ... <strong>WOW good job Imago!</strong></p><p>I never can get decent frame rates in EQ2, mainly due to the Phenom X4 CPU I have (4 cores, but relatively low clock speed). However, I found that I could ramp up the quality without losing many more fps. I normally run a slightly customised High Performance profile, but was happily running around the Willow Wood with High Quality and GPU shadows on, without dropping below 12 fps on my GTS250 (yes, it's normally that poor!)</p><p>The image was a little 'over exposed' so I had a play around with the gamma/brightness, but in the end found out that the personal torch was causing it. Dropping the max brightness down to 50-60% seemed to do the trick, resulting in a much more natural look to the scene while still being able to find my way around. Also there were a couple of issues with sudden changes in brightness as I ran through the tunnel, but not too bad.</p><p>I'd link some images, but they all seem to be of young elven ladies <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/385970365b8ed7503b4294502a458efa.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Keep up the good work. I'll have another look around when I've had a chance to /testcopy my main character & can get around a bit more and try out the more laggy areas.</p>

[Clazz]

<p>I tried to log onto Test this morning at about 7:30 PST to check out the shader 3.0. When I turned on shader 3 and reloaded the game my armor completey changed colors. It was the purple plate armor for newbies in Darklight woods. You get it at around level 5 or 6. After turning on Shader 3.0 it was just grey. Also i couldn't log all the way in. It kept locking up at 50% loading zone resources.</p><p>Of course I didn't try to log in the game with Shader 3.0 off because i had to hurry off to work. Guess I failed as a tester hehe.</p><p>Also i could tell from the character select screen i was still getting those weird transparent shadow effects i posted on the Look and feel threads when i have GPU shadows turned on. Should i have CPU and GPU shadows turned off when i have shader 3.0 selected?</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>ElogostElundiel wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Cool <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />. Put shader 3.0 on again yesterday and it seems to be progressing nicely, cant wait for it to come live <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /> looks bloody amasing and on my gpu heavy xfx gtx 260 black sli system it performs very well indeed, seems to be a very smart move intergrating theese shaders seeing as most systems in the future look like they are going to be more gpu reliant aswell. My only problem now is that the gpu shadows look horrible imo if they are slided all the way down to quality then they look ok but they only draw for a couply of meters  and if you put them up to distance instead they look horribly pixilated and still dont draw as far as the cpu shadows. They do perform well however but I think they realy could benefit from a quality update it seems odd that you have to choose bettween quality or distance is there no way you could introduce two seperate sliders? One for quality and one for distance, also the cpu point light shadows in conjunction with gpu shadows dont seem to do anything other than produce allot of lag in shader 3.0 on test at present will that change? Also at present if you only have gpu shadows enabled in shader 3.0 you get no shadows attal indoors.</p><p>Again amasing work Imago I would say this is easily one of most important updates for EQ2. Imo its all good apart from the shadows. Cant wait for it to come live, been putting back my playthrough of Sentinals fate so I can play it in 3.0 shaders <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm glad you're enjoying it.  I'm still making my way through a wall of shaders to clean up for Live, but I'm getting my way through.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Ya, Shader 3.0 enables extensibility to more GPU intensive effects for future updates.  Hopefully we can budget some of those features in for added EQ2 coolness (probably after some performance updates).</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The GPU shadows (shadow maps) are currently maxed with a 3 layered system, but that doesn't mean we can't add more.  The reason why the slider is built that way (distance vs quality) is because the shadow precision actually gets stretched out across the terrain when you increase the distance.  The stretching causes pixelation to occur.  So to add distance without losing quality we would need to build more layers for the shadows.  It dramatically impacts framerates.  Maybe in the future, as time permits, we can add more.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Ya, GPU shadows don't work indoors right now.  It's a feature I'm dying to add in, but other things are taking priority at the moment.  Also, CPU shadows don't run when Shader 3.0 is enabled, so CPU + GPU shadows won't work.  This is a result of the shader 3 framework design.  I'll have to gray out the option before it hits Live.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The GPU Shadows in Shader 3.0 still need a cleanup pass, so you'll see a lot of anomalies right now with them on.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Again, I'm really glad to hear you're enjoying it. <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>vochore wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite></cite></p><blockquote><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>No, when Shader 3.0 is turned on you cannot run CPU shadows.  This is not done on purpose.  The shader 3.0 framework for EQ2 cannot support CPU shadows at this time.  My first paragraph above was speaking only about when Shader 1.0 is enabled for the game.  Sorry for the confusion.  And thanks for asking for clarification! <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" /></strong></span></p></blockquote><p>i have been keeping my eye on this from the begining and i might have missed it somewhere but from what you just said here it is my undersatanding then when shader 3.0 is used all shadows and shader will  be taken off of the cpu and done completely on the gpu.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Almost.  There are a very small number of shaders which still run in Shader 1.0 when 3.0 is enabled (the sky, water, some ice shaders, and spell effects).  And yes, CPU shadows will not be enabled when Shader 3.0 is on.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, shaders are always computed by your GPU, so there's no moving from CPU to GPU there.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Hubert@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>When the Runnyeye server went down last night for the second night running, I decided to hop over onto the test server and check out the shader 3.0 changes ... <strong>WOW good job Imago!</strong></p><p>I never can get decent frame rates in EQ2, mainly due to the Phenom X4 CPU I have (4 cores, but relatively low clock speed). However, I found that I could ramp up the quality without losing many more fps. I normally run a slightly customised High Performance profile, but was happily running around the Willow Wood with High Quality and GPU shadows on, without dropping below 12 fps on my GTS250 (yes, it's normally that poor!)</p><p>The image was a little 'over exposed' so I had a play around with the gamma/brightness, but in the end found out that the personal torch was causing it. Dropping the max brightness down to 50-60% seemed to do the trick, resulting in a much more natural look to the scene while still being able to find my way around. Also there were a couple of issues with sudden changes in brightness as I ran through the tunnel, but not too bad.</p><p>I'd link some images, but they all seem to be of young elven ladies <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/385970365b8ed7503b4294502a458efa.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Keep up the good work. I'll have another look around when I've had a chance to /testcopy my main character & can get around a bit more and try out the more laggy areas.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>LOL - "I'd link some images, but they all seem to be of young elven ladies".  That's awesome.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the compliments.  They always make me want to try harder and do better to make you guys happy.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Ya, I need to lower that torch intensity.  I always drop it the same way, about 50-60%.  I know it's there, just low priority right now compared to other bugs.  And the washed out effect, ya, dropping the brightness helps a lot for now.  It's a minor tweak from my side.  Always battling with the artists about what's too bright and what's too dark, hehe.  I plan to add some Shader 3 specific sliders for you that will help adjust lighting that will look better.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The sudden changes in brightness could be a number of issues.  Not sure which one you're seeing, but I'm working on some lighting issues right now.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>More and more fixes coming.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I tried to log onto Test this morning at about 7:30 PST to check out the shader 3.0. When I turned on shader 3 and reloaded the game my armor completey changed colors. It was the purple plate armor for newbies in Darklight woods. You get it at around level 5 or 6. After turning on Shader 3.0 it was just grey. Also i couldn't log all the way in. It kept locking up at 50% loading zone resources.</p><p>Of course I didn't try to log in the game with Shader 3.0 off because i had to hurry off to work. Guess I failed as a tester hehe.</p><p>Also i could tell from the character select screen i was still getting those weird transparent shadow effects i posted on the Look and feel threads when i have GPU shadows turned on. Should i have CPU and GPU shadows turned off when i have shader 3.0 selected?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Right now GPU shadows are a little buggy with Shader 3.0, soon to be fixed.  As far as color changes, send me the exact name of the armor (or /bug it) and I can fix it.  There were a few sets that slipped through my fingers for color values.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, some shaders lost their filename attachments recently so there are a couple zone crashes here and there. I'm not totally sure what you mean by logging in "all the way".  Do you mean specifically to the character select screen?</strong></span></p>

[Clazz]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I tried to log onto Test this morning at about 7:30 PST to check out the shader 3.0. When I turned on shader 3 and reloaded the game my armor completey changed colors. It was the purple plate armor for newbies in Darklight woods. You get it at around level 5 or 6. After turning on Shader 3.0 it was just grey. Also i couldn't log all the way in. It kept locking up at 50% loading zone resources.</p><p>Of course I didn't try to log in the game with Shader 3.0 off because i had to hurry off to work. Guess I failed as a tester hehe.</p><p>Also i could tell from the character select screen i was still getting those weird transparent shadow effects i posted on the Look and feel threads when i have GPU shadows turned on. Should i have CPU and GPU shadows turned off when i have shader 3.0 selected?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Right now GPU shadows are a little buggy with Shader 3.0, soon to be fixed.  As far as color changes, send me the exact name of the armor (or /bug it) and I can fix it.  There were a few sets that slipped through my fingers for color values.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, some shaders lost their filename attachments recently so there are a couple zone crashes here and there. I'm not totally sure what you mean by logging in "all the way".  Do you mean specifically to the character select screen?</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>i can long into the character select screen, that's how i was able to tell the armor looked messed up. but i can't log in with that character. i think Dark Light woods is having a problem. It freezes up on "loading zone resources" at 48%.  So At the moment I can't log on to give you the name of the armor.</p><p>I was able to long in with another character in Timourous Deep. Shader 3.0 looks nice <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />. Had to turn off the GPU graphis though, they were driving me crazy. Alll the lizards had tranlucent teeth.</p>

[NamaeZero]

<p>Shader 3.0 is really awesome. I had to remember to reset my Graphics to Very High Quality when I went to test. Love the nice little touches, like the tops of the wooden posts on the bridge suddenly have rings from the wood they were cut out of.</p><p>Did notice a few bugs, though. Though the first few falcons on Queen Colony were normal, the rest were suddenly solid neon green. It also looked like there was some sort of aura around the leaves of the bush running up the side of the Last Stand. All in all though, I can't wait for it to go live!</p>

[VBGod]

<p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Hubert@Runnyeye wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>When the Runnyeye server went down last night for the second night running, I decided to hop over onto the test server and check out the shader 3.0 changes ... <strong>WOW good job Imago!</strong></p><p>I never can get decent frame rates in EQ2, mainly due to the Phenom X4 CPU I have (4 cores, but relatively low clock speed). However, I found that I could ramp up the quality without losing many more fps. I normally run a slightly customised High Performance profile, but was happily running around the Willow Wood with High Quality and GPU shadows on, without dropping below 12 fps on my GTS250 (yes, it's normally that poor!)</p><p>The image was a little 'over exposed' so I had a play around with the gamma/brightness, but in the end found out that the personal torch was causing it. Dropping the max brightness down to 50-60% seemed to do the trick, resulting in a much more natural look to the scene while still being able to find my way around. Also there were a couple of issues with sudden changes in brightness as I ran through the tunnel, but not too bad.</p><p>I'd link some images, but they all seem to be of young elven ladies <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/385970365b8ed7503b4294502a458efa.gif" border="0" /></p><p>Keep up the good work. I'll have another look around when I've had a chance to /testcopy my main character & can get around a bit more and try out the more laggy areas.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>LOL - "I'd link some images, but they all seem to be of young elven ladies".  That's awesome.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the compliments.  They always make me want to try harder and do better to make you guys happy.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Ya, I need to lower that torch intensity.  I always drop it the same way, about 50-60%.  I know it's there, just low priority right now compared to other bugs.  And the washed out effect, ya, dropping the brightness helps a lot for now.  It's a minor tweak from my side.  Always battling with the artists about what's too bright and what's too dark, hehe.  I plan to add some Shader 3 specific sliders for you that will help adjust lighting that will look better.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>The sudden changes in brightness could be a number of issues.  Not sure which one you're seeing, but I'm working on some lighting issues right now.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>More and more fixes coming.</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>The changing brightness issue was noticeable when running through the docks tunnel in Willow Wood. I tried it at night, and as I got a couple of steps into the tunnel the brightness suddenly rose, then fell again a few steps later. Again, it's no biggie, but gives a second or two of brightness at the entrance to the tunnel. It happened at both ends of the tunnel, but I think only on the way in, not out. The effect is position-related not time i.e. I could stop and linger in the bright bit.</p><p>BTW, I did like watching the shadows creep across the ground as the sun rose - very nice effect.</p>

[Morghus]

<p>When I gave it a try things appeared to in some circumstances be way too dark. Indoor, and especially lava areas like jarsath wastes and Trakanon's lair were so dark that alot of colors appeared to be brown or blackish even Trakanon himself looked rather brownish despite being blue normally.</p><p>Some specially shaded items like a certain set of black pants appeared white which was the original texture color I suppose.</p><p>Also, fiddling around with the ambient light setting didn't seem to do anything at all. My performance was also dramatically dimished while playing with the new shaders and I ran into a lot of framerate stuttering which was rather off-putting. I was hoping for at least some small performance gains here and there but it actually seemed alot worse.</p><p>While some aspects of the game definitely look better, it still needs alot of work with performance and things being way too dark.</p>

[LiquidFusion17]

<p>It's nice to see you are continuing to work on the graphical side of this game. While its definitely no Aion, this game still looks pretty good considering the engine limitations and age.</p><p>My question is, are there any plans to revamp the engine to put less dependency on the CPU and more on the GPU or even take advantage of multi-threaded CPUs? I could run other, more recent MMO's at max quality with all the DX10 goodness turned on and still average 100+ FPS, however I sit about 50-60 in some areas with my graphics turned up. The 24-Man battleground I get like 20 FPS, even at the lowest possible setting. But again in other games I could handle 100 v 100 PVP sieges with no problems.</p><p>Obviously there has been a great advancement in technology since this game was launched, It would be cool to see some of it get used, but I can imagine that is a huge process and may not even be possible (or viable).</p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>Realy appriciate  all your replies Imago all my questions are answered <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />. I dont think your priority should be performance or graphics after shader 3.0 goes live, what it should be is sleep and beer <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Dreyco]

<p>Did some testing on my laptop.  Runs a Radeon HD 4650, so it's definitely shader 3.0 compatible.  Performance was great, but.. there were a few problems with world parts just not.. appearing, and skin tones on some races.</p><p>See screenshots.</p><p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v410/Dreyco/Game%20Screens/EQ2_000001.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v410/Dreyco/Game%20Screens/EQ2_000000.jpg" /></p><p><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v410/Dreyco/Game%20Screens/EQ2_000002.jpg" /></p>

[Cyliena]

<p>I played with it for a few minutes yesterday and the Carpet of Clover would not render, aside from the mushrooms on it. I didn't think to take a screenshot, sorry.</p>

[Satu]

<p>I figured I'd give it a shot, and I aboslutely LOVE it, other than one thing...</p><p>I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's my settings, or if it's the shader, but, my main seems to have a HUGE red glow...</p><p><a href="http://img26.imageshack.us/i/eq2000007d.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/4617/eq2000007d.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p><a href="http://img687.imageshack.us/i/eq2000006k.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/8890/eq2000006k.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p>Vs on live:</p><p><a href="http://img62.imageshack.us/i/eq2000097.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/6092/eq2000097.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p><p><a href="http://img715.imageshack.us/i/eq2000042.jpg/" target="_blank"><img src="http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/5445/eq2000042.th.jpg" border="0" /></a></p>

[vexation]

<p><cite>Taubin@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I figured I'd give it a shot, and I aboslutely LOVE it, other than one thing...</p><p>I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's my settings, or if it's the shader, but, my main seems to have a HUGE red glow...</p></blockquote><p>It's caused by having Jin'tus Gift in your charm slot - it's supposed to happen also (or at least I assume it is, the same red glow shows up on live)</p>

[Satu]

<p><cite>vexation wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Taubin@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I figured I'd give it a shot, and I aboslutely LOVE it, other than one thing...</p><p>I'm not sure if it's me, or if it's my settings, or if it's the shader, but, my main seems to have a HUGE red glow...</p></blockquote><p>It's caused by having Jin'tus Gift in your charm slot - it's supposed to happen also (or at least I assume it is, the same red glow shows up on live)</p></blockquote><p>That's a bit better, thank you so much. I guess I never noticed it on live lol</p><p>I stll have a massive white glow now though, even completely stripped, which makes her look quite dark, and her wings quite bright (I'd clip them all together if I could)... Probably one of my settings.</p><p>Other than that though, I LOVE the look of 3.0! Keep up the excellent work, it's highly appreciated!</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Imago-Quem wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Clazz wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I tried to log onto Test this morning at about 7:30 PST to check out the shader 3.0. When I turned on shader 3 and reloaded the game my armor completey changed colors. It was the purple plate armor for newbies in Darklight woods. You get it at around level 5 or 6. After turning on Shader 3.0 it was just grey. Also i couldn't log all the way in. It kept locking up at 50% loading zone resources.</p><p>Of course I didn't try to log in the game with Shader 3.0 off because i had to hurry off to work. Guess I failed as a tester hehe.</p><p>Also i could tell from the character select screen i was still getting those weird transparent shadow effects i posted on the Look and feel threads when i have GPU shadows turned on. Should i have CPU and GPU shadows turned off when i have shader 3.0 selected?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Right now GPU shadows are a little buggy with Shader 3.0, soon to be fixed.  As far as color changes, send me the exact name of the armor (or /bug it) and I can fix it.  There were a few sets that slipped through my fingers for color values.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, some shaders lost their filename attachments recently so there are a couple zone crashes here and there. I'm not totally sure what you mean by logging in "all the way".  Do you mean specifically to the character select screen?</strong></span></p></blockquote><p>i can long into the character select screen, that's how i was able to tell the armor looked messed up. but i can't log in with that character. i think Dark Light woods is having a problem. It freezes up on "loading zone resources" at 48%.  So At the moment I can't log on to give you the name of the armor.</p><p>I was able to long in with another character in Timourous Deep. Shader 3.0 looks nice <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" />. Had to turn off the GPU graphis though, they were driving me crazy. Alll the lizards had tranlucent teeth.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I tried zoning in and running around DarkLight Wood and there's no crash with the upcoming shaders (this includes a lot of bug fixes I've made recently).  But it could be your armor set too, like you said.  Try switching shader 3 off, restart, and zone in with that character.  Record your location by typing /loc and pressing enter in your command window.  Send me the location and try to get the name of each armor piece and weapons you have on your character.  Send me a PM (private message) with this info.  That way I can check your location, the NPC's around you, and the armor set you have on and have a fix out to you.  Thanks for checking it out!  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>NamaeZero wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Shader 3.0 is really awesome. I had to remember to reset my Graphics to Very High Quality when I went to test. Love the nice little touches, like the tops of the wooden posts on the bridge suddenly have rings from the wood they were cut out of.</p><p>Did notice a few bugs, though. Though the first few falcons on Queen Colony were normal, the rest were suddenly solid neon green. It also looked like there was some sort of aura around the leaves of the bush running up the side of the Last Stand. All in all though, I can't wait for it to go live!</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Awesome!  Thanks.  I've got a fix for the green falcons but you'll have to give me a /loc for the leaves.  There are a few tree types left I need to fix that have a white outline on them.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I'm really glad you like the visual change with shader 3.  It's always good to hear.  <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p>

[Anastasie]

<p><cite>Taubin@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>vexation wrote:</cite></p><p>That's a bit better, thank you so much. I guess I never noticed it on live lol</p><p>I stll have a massive white glow now though, even completely stripped, which makes her look quite dark, and her wings quite bright (I'd clip them all together if I could)... Probably one of my settings.</p><p>Other than that though, I LOVE the look of 3.0! Keep up the excellent work, it's highly appreciated!</p></blockquote><p>Try turning off your personal torch to get rid of the white light surrounding your character. I believe the command is Alt+L</p>

[Morrias]

<p>Found a couple issues while I was running around in Mystic Lake, havent really been keeping up with this thread so dunno if you know about them or not. (Shader 3 and GPU shadows were on, was running very high quality)</p><p>Dont have a picture, but the mountains in the distance were flashing between aqua and grey as I walked through the zone.</p><p><img src="http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/131726/EQ2_000000.jpg" width="1440" height="848" /><img src="http://files1.guildlaunch.net/guild/library/131726/EQ2_000002.jpg" width="1440" height="848" /></p>

[Kinvore]

<p>I can't seem to get shader 3.0 to work.  I am using an Nvidia GeForece 9500 GT, is it compliant w/ Shader 3.0?  I click on the Shader box under the performance settings and it says I have to restart the game to get it to work.  However when I restart the game the box is unchecked again.  I notice that if I check the box and bring up the options window again that the box gets unchecked.  Is there something I'm doing wrong?</p>

[VBGod]

<p><cite>Annelise@Guk wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Taubin@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>vexation wrote:</cite></p><p>That's a bit better, thank you so much. I guess I never noticed it on live lol</p><p>I stll have a massive white glow now though, even completely stripped, which makes her look quite dark, and her wings quite bright (I'd clip them all together if I could)... Probably one of my settings.</p><p>Other than that though, I LOVE the look of 3.0! Keep up the excellent work, it's highly appreciated!</p></blockquote><p>Try turning off your personal torch to get rid of the white light surrounding your character. I believe the command is Alt+L</p></blockquote><p>You can adjust the brightness of your personal torch in the Options. I found setting it to around 50-60% gave a nice effect without washing everything out.</p><p> <cite>Imago-Quem wrote (on page 65):</cite></p><blockquote><p>... Ya, I need to lower that torch intensity. I always drop it the same way, about 50-60%. I know it's there, just low priority right now compared to other bugs. And the washed out effect, ya, dropping the brightness helps a lot for now. It's a minor tweak from my side. Always battling with the artists about what's too bright and what's too dark, hehe. I plan to add some Shader 3 specific sliders for you that will help adjust lighting that will look better.</p></blockquote>

[paul_cha]

<p>I tried the Shader 3.0 and had some problems with it using my Ati Radeon 4650 some of the people didn't have legs etc. Went on my nvidia computer and it worked flawlessly only major problem i am seeing is the white glow on my toon, going to adjust the torch in a bit, but the major thing is trees and plants. They have a white outline and it looks as if they are sparkling. Sometimes around objects i see the same affect a white outline, this happens on both the Nvidia and Ati cards.</p><p>BTW the trees and stuff are located in Darklight Woods area.</p>

[Child]

<p>tried shader 3.0 on my geforce gts 250. MAJOR MAJOR hit on performance. i'm talking a over half total framerate loss. i usually get around 40 fps in qeynos with max graphics, shadows, everything. when i enabled shader 3.0 and restarted, i was down to averaging less than 10 fps! it also did not look too much better.</p><p>is there a known problem with the geforce 2xx series of graphics cards and shader 3.0? i know when they first came out, eq2 barely played at all, causing the developers to make the "reuse vertex buffers" checkbox</p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>I'm useing 2 xfx gtx 260 black edditions and it runs very well indeed, out performs in nearly all situations and looks allot better imo. Can you give us any more of your computor specs? PSU CPU ect?</p>

[Child]

<p>amd athlon 64x2 6000+</p><p>windows 7 64 bit</p><p>4gb ram</p><p>psu is antec at iirc a not-round number less than 400watts cap (like 388 or something) i know the video card "requires 450 watts", but i've had no computer crashes, even in games like assassin's creed 2 and bioshock 2 at max settings, and if my psu was underpowered, i'm pretty sure id run into crashes/shutdowns with those games (pretty sure. psu's are one area of computers i don't know a whole lot about)</p><p>i run the game at 2048x1152 res</p><p>motherboard is whatever the default that came with my comp was (only one pci-e slot, i can't sli-bridge)</p><p>i've got some extra money i cna spend. if you can tlel me which one is causing the horrible slowdown, i'll gladly buy a better one to make eq2 run better with shader 3.0</p>

[Laylle]

<p>Playing with the 3.0 shaders, and things just seem to be kinda messed up for me.</p><p>Specs:</p><ul><li>NVidia GeForce gtx 260 with the 196.21 drivers. </li><li>Windows 7 64-bit</li><li>Intel Core2 Duo E8400 (3ghz)</li><li>4GB Ram</li><li>Resolution: 1920x1080</li><li>Graphics set to maximum with 3.0 shaders enabled. (Also tried various other settings, including resetting everything to defaults)</li></ul><p>Problems:</p><p><strong>Character select screen: Parts of my toon seem overly dark. (her eyes / shoulders)</strong></p><p><img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/2135hr7.jpg" width="450" height="669" /></p><p><strong>Some characters / npcs are missing body parts.</strong></p><p><img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/2v9enu8.jpg" width="769" height="753" /></p><p><strong>Lighting seems over bright, with poor contrast. </strong></p><p><strong>May be a pre-existing problem with GPU shadows, but bits of swaying branches leave behind an unmoving unshadowed mask.</strong></p><p><img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/23l1lir.jpg" width="1280" height="720" /></p><p><strong>Some details just look... wrong / ugly / have white outlines.</strong></p><p><img src="http://i42.tinypic.com/11b18j8.jpg" width="505" height="483" /></p>

[Dreyco]

<p><cite>Child@Unrest wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>tried shader 3.0 on my geforce gts 250. MAJOR MAJOR hit on performance. i'm talking a over half total framerate loss. i usually get around 40 fps in qeynos with max graphics, shadows, everything. when i enabled shader 3.0 and restarted, i was down to averaging less than 10 fps! it also did not look too much better.</p><p>is there a known problem with the geforce 2xx series of graphics cards and shader 3.0? i know when they first came out, eq2 barely played at all, causing the developers to make the "reuse vertex buffers" checkbox</p></blockquote><p>DO you have the latest graphics drivers?  Shader 3.0 will be utilizing your hardware a bit more.  Others who are running GTS 260's for example are not seeing that big of a performance hit...</p>

[Child]

<p>sorry all, found the issue. i was apparently forcing 16x anti-aliasing via the nvidia control panel. disabling it entirely, and it's fully plyable again.</p>

[ElogostElundiel]

<p>Kewl, yeh that psu seems fine for that build</p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Ukae@Befallen wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Found a couple issues while I was running around in Mystic Lake, havent really been keeping up with this thread so dunno if you know about them or not. (Shader 3 and GPU shadows were on, was running very high quality)</p><p>Dont have a picture, but the mountains in the distance were flashing between aqua and grey as I walked through the zone.</p><p>[Pics deleted to prevent forum bloating]</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Ya, I'm working on the shadows hopefully today.  There are tags for certain objects the shadows need to operate correctly.  I'll be going through and making sure these tags are correct per object.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I've seen this color shift "thing" occurring along pathways as well.  I don't know what's causing it right now, but soon will.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the testing <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, when posting issues sending me the /loc of where you are with the zone name is very helpful.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>Pouncer@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I can't seem to get shader 3.0 to work.  I am using an Nvidia GeForece 9500 GT, is it compliant w/ Shader 3.0?  I click on the Shader box under the performance settings and it says I have to restart the game to get it to work.  However when I restart the game the box is unchecked again.  I notice that if I check the box and bring up the options window again that the box gets unchecked.  Is there something I'm doing wrong?</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>It's possible r_usethreepointoshaders is getting forced to off in one of you ini settings files.  Try looking in the directory you have EverQuest II installed and find the files eq2.ini and eq2_recent.ini.  Make a copy of these files in case you need to restore them.  Open them (not the copies) with notepad and search for r_usethreepointoshaders.  Erase every line you find with r_usethreepointoshaders.  Save the files and try turning shader 3 on again in the game.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Let me know if this doesn't work.</strong></span></p>

[Imago-Quem]

<p><cite>paul_chain wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I tried the Shader 3.0 and had some problems with it using my Ati Radeon 4650 some of the people didn't have legs etc. Went on my nvidia computer and it worked flawlessly only major problem i am seeing is the white glow on my toon, going to adjust the torch in a bit, but the major thing is trees and plants. They have a white outline and it looks as if they are sparkling. Sometimes around objects i see the same affect a white outline, this happens on both the Nvidia and Ati cards.</p><p>BTW the trees and stuff are located in Darklight Woods area.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>I've gone through and fixed as many "missing objects on ATI" as I could find (as well as QA could find).  There are possibly more, but the issue will likely be fixed for you on the next Test update of Shader 3.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Also, I'm making my way through and fixing white outlines on leafs, nets, and other things like them.</strong></span></p><p><span style="color: #008000;"><strong>Thanks for the testing!</strong></span></p>

[Sasquatt]

<p>I've been getting quite a bit of a performance hit lately too.. I can run the game mostly maxed except for the usual, cpu shadows off (gpu shadows on), complex shaders set to 30, the rest of the sliders mostly all the way to the right.. I play in 1920x1200 resolution as well and have been able to play everything so far with at least decent fps..</p><p>However on test with shader 3.0, my fps is pretty much half of what it is on live with shader 1.0</p><p>Currently running with Nvidia 9800GTX, core 2 duo 3.0 ghz, 4gb ram, newest drivers + system tweaked etc.. anyone else getting a big performance hit with shader 3.0?</p>