GTX260 --> poor performance in EQ2

[Cohann]

This is ridiculous. I bought a new GFX Board recently. A MSI GTX260 OC Edition. My C2D E6300 is running at 3,15 GHz, 4GB Kingston Hyper-X Memory 800MHz @900MHz. I can play Crysis smooth @1920x1200 resolution with Ultra High Quality Mod under XP. In 3Dmark06 I score 15400. My System is configured correctly with newest drivers and everything runs fine...except EQ2. In raids i get unplayable 15FPS in High Quality.Before I had a 8800 GTS and had the exact same problem. Performance was crap. I thought this problem would go away with the new GFX but it's nearly the same. Will you ever fix this problem with some of the NV boards? I'm sick of playing eq2 in performance mode on high end hardware....

[Hordakk]

You might as well forget getting much help here. You will get those who say "The game runs great on my rig, so it must be YOUR fault"

or you will get "Thanks for the feedback" from an actual SOE type.

I have a 260, also, and the game runs fine except for a bunch of triangle crap with the environment. Oh, and the totally

random cras to desktops. 3 per day seems about normal. NO, it is not heat but it could be driver related. However, LOTRO, WoW,

AoC and even EQ1 run fine with ZERO lockups, artifacts or CTDs. So, EQ2 must have something in its code that is screwy.

[Smirk]

this game is highly cpu dependant, thats why your gtx 260 didnt make much difference, sadly

[Cohann]

So you want to tell me that a core 2 duo running at 3.15 GHz is not good enough for playing EQ2...There are people with much lower end hardware that can play eq2 fine on high quality. Please stop spamming my thread with such dumb answers if you don't know what you are talking about. This problem is already known from older nvidia cards but nobody cares about it. As long as not everybody has this problem it will be ignored...I just postet this because it's inbelievable how bad this games engine is. A masterpiece of crap. I don't know why eq2 is allowed to have the NVIDIA Logo. 'The way it's meant to be played' lol.EDIT: I have nice screenshots taken in different zones with lowest quality setting where you can see scenes from random eq2 zones displayed on objects (e.g. statues in some T7 epic zones) instead of their original textures. Thats the best example for what eq2 is doing with your hardware ressources...

[Cassea]

This may explain:Your engine (video card) is able to run at 300mph but your tires (CPU) are only rated at 120mphLet me explain.When the SWG/EQ2 game engine was being designed video cards worked only one way... they uses mutiple pipes to apply textures to triangles to make pictures appear on your screen. To make a faster video card they added more pipes (each pipe is like a lane on the freeway and means the card can do more things at the same time) and sped up the speed of the VRAM and GPU.This worked well for years because the video card companies kept shrinking the chips and making them run faster. When you add 4 pipes to 4 pipes you double the performance. When you add 4 pipes to 12 you do not have as much of a jump.Now keeping this in mine they reached a point in which adding more pipes resulted in diminishing returns because it became very hard to keep all those pipes busy at the same time and remmember that at the end of the road, so to speak, the CPU still has to reassemble all that data so you have somewhat of an issue When the game wanted to do a special effect the cpu broke down the special effect into graphics commands and then send the simplified commands to the video card but your CPU did half the work!Now the video card companies came up with an idea.... what if your video card could do all or most of the work! This way the CPU could be free to do other things and the more advanced (at graphics) video card could process graphics data faster than you CPU could anyway.Welcome to the world of programmable shaders. For years now games have been able to program special routines that ran right on your video card to do all sorts of special effects. 5 years ago, for example, in order to create detailed toon in a game the CPU would have to break down the commands into basic video card instructions and paint "layers" over and over (multipass) to get special effects.For example:1st pass would draw and paint the triangles that make your toon2nd pass would add armor and weapons on top3rd pass would add reflections and shadingand so on.... the more detailed the graphic and the more "passes" would have to be made which each pass involving your CPU.Today with special shaders your game can tell your video card what you want and "everything" is done within your video card. Very little calculations need to be done with your CPU. In fact these shaders are now so important that they often outnumber your pipes 2-1, 3-1 or even more!Let's look at your new GTX 260 now:Your video card has 64 texture units (pipes) and 128 shaders (special effects) but EQ2 does not know anything about shaders so 2/3 of your video card is not used!Now keep another thing in mind... the more pipes you add the less effect they have because its VERY hard to keep them all busy at once. 64 pipelines has very little real world impact vs 32 pipes. Yes the extra pipes will come in handy when needed but most of the time they are not fully used... In other words twice the pipes does NOT mean twice the performance.It does "on paper" because on paper you caculate theories and best case performance but in real games no.So I hope this explains some things. You have a great video card but until (if ever) EQ2 is reprogramed to use shaders your video card will be only 1/3 used.

[Smirk]

Owden@Valor wrote:

So you want to tell me that a core 2 duo running at 3.15 GHz is not good enough for playing EQ2...There are people with much lower end hardware that can play eq2 fine on high quality. Please stop spamming my thread with such dumb answers if you don't know what you are talking about. This problem is already known from older nvidia cards but nobody cares about it. As long as not everybody has this problem it will be ignored...I just postet this because it's inbelievable how bad this games engine is. A masterpiece of crap. I don't know why eq2 is allowed to have the NVIDIA Logo. 'The way it's meant to be played' lol.EDIT: I have nice screenshots taken in different zones with lowest quality setting where you can see scenes from random eq2 zones displayed on objects (e.g. statues in some T7 epic zones) instead of their original textures. Thats the best example for what eq2 is doing with your hardware ressources...

no, im saying upgrading from a 8800 card to a gtx 260 wont make you run the game in much higher settings.. people should really do some research befor upgrading hardware

[Bekkr]

Owden@Valor wrote:

So you want to tell me that a core 2 duo running at 3.15 GHz is not good enough for playing EQ2...There are people with much lower end hardware that can play eq2 fine on high quality. Please stop spamming my thread with such dumb answers if you don't know what you are talking about. This problem is already known from older nvidia cards but nobody cares about it. As long as not everybody has this problem it will be ignored...I just postet this because it's inbelievable how bad this games engine is. A masterpiece of crap. I don't know why eq2 is allowed to have the NVIDIA Logo. 'The way it's meant to be played' lol.

Sounds like inadequate research and unreasonable expectations to me.  Of course your C2D is good enough for playing EQ2.  The problem is that it's not enough (combined with the rest of your system) to play it on extreme quality settings.  Due to the nature of how EQ2 is programmed (as per Cassea's post), your new video card hasn't made any difference, because your framerate was already limited by your CPU.  It's like upgrading your suspension (GPU) and expecting that to make your car go faster in a straight line (EQ2).  Sure, it'll corner better, which will give you better lap times (Crysis or whatever), but your top speed is still determined by the engine/transmission (CPU).Way to show gratitude to people trying to help you though.

[Cohann]

You don't understand the problem. I can only raid in lowest quality setting because of a bug that eq2 has with some nvidia cards. I had this problem with my 8800GTS and I still have it with the GTX260. I don't expect a big improve from this card. I just expected that this bug would be gone with a different gpu. But it seems I'm unlucky and grabbed another board with the exact same problem. There were people that could raid in high quality mode 1 or 2 years ago. I don't know what that has to do with cpu limitation...

[Laedarr]

Cassea wrote:

This may explain:Your engine (video card) is able to run at 300mph but your tires (CPU) are only rated at 120mphLet me explain.When the SWG/EQ2 game engine was being designed video cards worked only one way... they uses mutiple pipes to apply textures to triangles to make pictures appear on your screen. To make a faster video card they added more pipes (each pipe is like a lane on the freeway and means the card can do more things at the same time) and sped up the speed of the VRAM and GPU.This worked well for years because the video card companies kept shrinking the chips and making them run faster. When you add 4 pipes to 4 pipes you double the performance. When you add 4 pipes to 12 you do not have as much of a jump.Now keeping this in mine they reached a point in which adding more pipes resulted in diminishing returns because it became very hard to keep all those pipes busy at the same time and remmember that at the end of the road, so to speak, the CPU still has to reassemble all that data so you have somewhat of an issue When the game wanted to do a special effect the cpu broke down the special effect into graphics commands and then send the simplified commands to the video card but your CPU did half the work!Now the video card companies came up with an idea.... what if your video card could do all or most of the work! This way the CPU could be free to do other things and the more advanced (at graphics) video card could process graphics data faster than you CPU could anyway.Welcome to the world of programmable shaders. For years now games have been able to program special routines that ran right on your video card to do all sorts of special effects. 5 years ago, for example, in order to create detailed toon in a game the CPU would have to break down the commands into basic video card instructions and paint "layers" over and over (multipass) to get special effects.For example:1st pass would draw and paint the triangles that make your toon2nd pass would add armor and weapons on top3rd pass would add reflections and shadingand so on.... the more detailed the graphic and the more "passes" would have to be made which each pass involving your CPU.Today with special shaders your game can tell your video card what you want and "everything" is done within your video card. Very little calculations need to be done with your CPU. In fact these shaders are now so important that they often outnumber your pipes 2-1, 3-1 or even more!Let's look at your new GTX 260 now:Your video card has 64 texture units (pipes) and 128 shaders (special effects) but EQ2 does not know anything about shaders so 2/3 of your video card is not used!Now keep another thing in mind... the more pipes you add the less effect they have because its VERY hard to keep them all busy at once. 64 pipelines has very little real world impact vs 32 pipes. Yes the extra pipes will come in handy when needed but most of the time they are not fully used... In other words twice the pipes does NOT mean twice the performance.It does "on paper" because on paper you caculate theories and best case performance but in real games no.So I hope this explains some things. You have a great video card but until (if ever) EQ2 is reprogramed to use shaders your video card will be only 1/3 used.

Cassea, thank you for that great explanation on how vid cards works vs cpus and the coorelation between the two.   I may have interpreted your explanation wrong, but the way I take this is, if I go and purchase an older model video card prior to all this advancement that utilizes less pipes, then EQ2 would utilize this card better and pump out greater performance?

[Cassea]

Well it's hard to say. Usually no as the newer cards are so much faster that even at 1/3 utilization they are faster than the older cards. What can happen, for example, is that you may have a top of the line "last generation" card that runs more like what EQ2 is used to and then you upgrade to a low or mid-range modern card. In this case you actually can see EQ2 run worse.Modern games use shaders and this is the part of the newer video cards that EQ2 does not currently use. I am sure that eventually EQ2 will start to use shaders... I just cannot predict when.If all you play is EQ2 then you really do not need anything more than a 9600GT or 8800GS both which are in the $100-$130 range. No need for $200+ video cards as they just will not be used. Both of these card are great values.Prefer ATI? They make great cards also and I recommend their excellent 3850's which are a really great value for the $$$.(yes the 8800GT, 9800's, 4xxx's are even better but unless you play other games there is next to no difference between a 8800GS/9600GT/3850 and the more expensive cards... in EQ2)There is one thing you do want to keep in mind... 256meg vs 512meg VRAM - Ultra High textures requires 512meg but you are better off running on high because those large textures can cause some serious studdering when you first load the textures as they are 4x the size. Once loaded, however, and it's pretty smooth.

[Thmy]

the E8500 and E8600 Intel chips are out so for $200 + YOU CAN  get your cores to run over 3 Ghz.

For EQ2 this can help more than the new video cards.  I am still using the 8800GTX with no real problems.

Peope are getting almost 4.0 ghz using air cooling on the E8500 .  I have not tried over 3.5 Ghz

I really want to try out the new video cards too- Nvidia 260 or 280 -- There should be a upgraded Nvidia by Sept1, if we can trust all the leak news.

There have been more nvidia drivers posted this year so moremay help your problems.

I am sticking to 169.44 for now for my 8800gtx

do have and keep your card fan running at 100 percent if noise is not a problem

[damicatz]

Cassea wrote:

This may explain:Your engine (video card) is able to run at 300mph but your tires (CPU) are only rated at 120mphLet me explain.When the SWG/EQ2 game engine was being designed video cards worked only one way... they uses mutiple pipes to apply textures to triangles to make pictures appear on your screen. To make a faster video card they added more pipes (each pipe is like a lane on the freeway and means the card can do more things at the same time) and sped up the speed of the VRAM and GPU.This worked well for years because the video card companies kept shrinking the chips and making them run faster. When you add 4 pipes to 4 pipes you double the performance. When you add 4 pipes to 12 you do not have as much of a jump.Now keeping this in mine they reached a point in which adding more pipes resulted in diminishing returns because it became very hard to keep all those pipes busy at the same time and remmember that at the end of the road, so to speak, the CPU still has to reassemble all that data so you have somewhat of an issue When the game wanted to do a special effect the cpu broke down the special effect into graphics commands and then send the simplified commands to the video card but your CPU did half the work!Now the video card companies came up with an idea.... what if your video card could do all or most of the work! This way the CPU could be free to do other things and the more advanced (at graphics) video card could process graphics data faster than you CPU could anyway.Welcome to the world of programmable shaders. For years now games have been able to program special routines that ran right on your video card to do all sorts of special effects. 5 years ago, for example, in order to create detailed toon in a game the CPU would have to break down the commands into basic video card instructions and paint "layers" over and over (multipass) to get special effects.For example:1st pass would draw and paint the triangles that make your toon2nd pass would add armor and weapons on top3rd pass would add reflections and shadingand so on.... the more detailed the graphic and the more "passes" would have to be made which each pass involving your CPU.Today with special shaders your game can tell your video card what you want and "everything" is done within your video card. Very little calculations need to be done with your CPU. In fact these shaders are now so important that they often outnumber your pipes 2-1, 3-1 or even more!Let's look at your new GTX 260 now:Your video card has 64 texture units (pipes) and 128 shaders (special effects) but EQ2 does not know anything about shaders so 2/3 of your video card is not used!Now keep another thing in mind... the more pipes you add the less effect they have because its VERY hard to keep them all busy at once. 64 pipelines has very little real world impact vs 32 pipes. Yes the extra pipes will come in handy when needed but most of the time they are not fully used... In other words twice the pipes does NOT mean twice the performance.It does "on paper" because on paper you caculate theories and best case performance but in real games no.So I hope this explains some things. You have a great video card but until (if ever) EQ2 is reprogramed to use shaders your video card will be only 1/3 used.

This isn't true at all.  EQ2 came out in late 2004, over three and a half years after the first consumer video cards with shaders came out.  EQ2 itself uses numerous shader-based effects.Also, it was possible back in 2004 to offload much of what is done in the CPU today by EQ2 to the GPU.  Things such as occlusion culling and shadows (by the way, who's foolish idea was it to use shadow volumes for outdoor environments when shadow maps are better for that setup and have less of a performance hit).Also texture units don't correspond to pipes.  When most people talk about pipes these days, they are referring to ROPs or Raster Operations Pipelines.  Modern high-end video cards have anywhere from 16-32 of these.

[Cassea]

damicatz wrote:

Cassea wrote:

This may explain:Your engine (video card) is able to run at 300mph but your tires (CPU) are only rated at 120mphLet me explain.When the SWG/EQ2 game engine was being designed video cards worked only one way... they uses mutiple pipes to apply textures to triangles to make pictures appear on your screen. To make a faster video card they added more pipes (each pipe is like a lane on the freeway and means the card can do more things at the same time) and sped up the speed of the VRAM and GPU.This worked well for years because the video card companies kept shrinking the chips and making them run faster. When you add 4 pipes to 4 pipes you double the performance. When you add 4 pipes to 12 you do not have as much of a jump.Now keeping this in mine they reached a point in which adding more pipes resulted in diminishing returns because it became very hard to keep all those pipes busy at the same time and remmember that at the end of the road, so to speak, the CPU still has to reassemble all that data so you have somewhat of an issue When the game wanted to do a special effect the cpu broke down the special effect into graphics commands and then send the simplified commands to the video card but your CPU did half the work!Now the video card companies came up with an idea.... what if your video card could do all or most of the work! This way the CPU could be free to do other things and the more advanced (at graphics) video card could process graphics data faster than you CPU could anyway.Welcome to the world of programmable shaders. For years now games have been able to program special routines that ran right on your video card to do all sorts of special effects. 5 years ago, for example, in order to create detailed toon in a game the CPU would have to break down the commands into basic video card instructions and paint "layers" over and over (multipass) to get special effects.For example:1st pass would draw and paint the triangles that make your toon2nd pass would add armor and weapons on top3rd pass would add reflections and shadingand so on.... the more detailed the graphic and the more "passes" would have to be made which each pass involving your CPU.Today with special shaders your game can tell your video card what you want and "everything" is done within your video card. Very little calculations need to be done with your CPU. In fact these shaders are now so important that they often outnumber your pipes 2-1, 3-1 or even more!Let's look at your new GTX 260 now:Your video card has 64 texture units (pipes) and 128 shaders (special effects) but EQ2 does not know anything about shaders so 2/3 of your video card is not used!Now keep another thing in mind... the more pipes you add the less effect they have because its VERY hard to keep them all busy at once. 64 pipelines has very little real world impact vs 32 pipes. Yes the extra pipes will come in handy when needed but most of the time they are not fully used... In other words twice the pipes does NOT mean twice the performance.It does "on paper" because on paper you caculate theories and best case performance but in real games no.So I hope this explains some things. You have a great video card but until (if ever) EQ2 is reprogramed to use shaders your video card will be only 1/3 used.

This isn't true at all.  EQ2 came out in late 2004, over three and a half years after the first consumer video cards with shaders came out.  EQ2 itself uses numerous shader-based effects.Also, it was possible back in 2004 to offload much of what is done in the CPU today by EQ2 to the GPU.  Things such as occlusion culling and shadows (by the way, who's foolish idea was it to use shadow volumes for outdoor environments when shadow maps are better for that setup and have less of a performance hit).Also texture units don't correspond to pipes.  When most people talk about pipes these days, they are referring to ROPs or Raster Operations Pipelines.  Modern high-end video cards have anywhere from 16-32 of these.

Let me just state that when I try and explain things I simplify things a ton so people can understand better.When EQ2 was being designed using the SWG graphics engine (this was in 2003) we need to look at what the "average" gamer was using to play games with. Yes video cards had limited shaders but they were by no means the powerful programmable shaders that we often take for granted today.EQ2 does use a ton of shader effects... they are just not done using the hardware shaders that modern video cards have.You see we know that EQ2 came out in 2004 but you have to remember that EQ2 uses the Star Wars Galaxies game engine. SWG came out in 2003 which means that the programing was done mostly in 2001/2002 so you have to look at video cards in 2001/2002 to see what abilites video cards had at that time.In 2001 the video cards of the day were the DX8 Geforce 3 with the very first programmable shadersIn 2002 the video cards of the day were the DX8 Geforce 4 that were about 30% faster for shaders.So SOE looked at this and determined that they could do shaders and other special effects easier/faster with your CPU.By the time EQ2 came out the cards were up to the DX9 GF 5xxx and these all had the DX9 defect that caused DX9 code to run "very" slow so most games still used DX8.ATI was a bit farther ahead in shaders and were the first to unlink shaders from the texture units.My point is that when the SWG game engine was being designed back in 2001/02 the video cards were primitive by todays standards. SOE programed the engine to use the cards of that day and shame on them for not upgrading these old routines after years and years of play.I'm guessing they were banking on the "guess" that CPU cores would keep getting faster forever and when this did not happen they were stuck with an old old graphics engine.Just because EQ2 looks good does not mean that the engine is efficient.If you go back and look at the GF3/4 you will see why SOE did what they did. Now you seem pretty up on graphics tech. Now assuming that SOE only had the GF4 to use as a base for the graphics engine does this change what they could have done? I'm asking because I would be interested to know this they just did sloppy programming or this is the best the GF4 could do when they were designing the engine?The GF2, which was still in use at the time by a large number of gamers, only had hardware shaders that could not be programmed. So if 50% of the population were still using GF2 cards as they started to upgrade to GF3 and GF4 cards then how could SOE have used those very limited shaders?BTW I use Nvidia for example... ATI is just as good and in many cases were actually better back then.

[Runelaron]

The problem is definitely in the Everquest 2 Engine.

Im using a HD4870 ATI card. I get no anomolies or pixel problems. I can crank everything to MAX and still run at 70 frames a second expept for 2 options. When applying them both my perfomance drops about 40 - 50 frames. I did some research and its basically based on how everquest renders old Shaders.

the two options are.

1. Complex Shaders (this option turns on when you put complex shader distance above -1)

2. Advanced water (witch is a thin complex shader above the ocean floor)

The reason.

Like C said. The old way to give complext shader commands was pushed through the CPU to the graphix card.

Though what adds to this is those commands are only pushed though a single core of the processor because EQ2 was never designed for muti threading across other computers.

------

To answer your other question the BUG you may be experiancing might be with the Nvidia drivers, It may or may not be known and it probly still isnt fixed.. This is due to every card using the same general NVidia calculations for every GPU, you could get the same error across every card.

-----

On another note, I whent to the fan fair and I played EQ2 on their Machines. The lag still accures, The machines where the latest Dell XPS systems. I never did ask them about the preformance issues. It slipped my mind but here is some usefull and promising information.

SOE recently hired a Programmer for the sole purpose of overhauling the game engine. Thats all I can say. I hope he will fix the performance.

 Untill then Enjoy EQ2 I will try to contact the developers for a official comment but I cant promise anything. 

[Cassea]

As I have said before... there is nothing stopping SOE from pulling out the graphics subroutines one at a time and replacing them with modern code. The game tells the shadows subroutine, for example, to draw a shadow. The game cares not how it gets done... just tells it to do it. Now SOE can (and from what I've heard is already working on this) pull out that code and instead of using CPU calls to do the shadows, use modern video card shaders.Now this issue can be how the zones were designed. I'll not pretend to know much about this so perhaps others can chime in but from what I have read, the way zones are designed can impact many aspects of graphics performance in ways that are not readily apparent. Things like lightsources, shadows and other graphics can often depend on the actual zone structure.Anyone care to jump in on this?

[J0nnyR0ck]

Ok this may explain why my ATI HD4870x2 seem to suck when i push the quality higher.The strange thing about this game is that it does not even kick the GPUs into full speed. on the x2 when you are not in a 3d application the card drops the core GPU speed from 750 to 500 odd. Now using GPUz ( 2 instances of it, 1 per core) i can see what the GPU's are doing.  they don't kick in from 500 to 750 like in other games. this also means that i do not know if EQ2 is using both GPU's. From reading this thread it don't look like it is.Considering how many people still play this game this just sux SOE. The engine needs to be tweaked or fixed d@mn it.

[Taimes]

Multiple core support is coming soon. I don't know if if it will use more then 2 cores but I did see an improvement in framerates on the test server, and for the first time actually saw my 2nd core constantly running, though at low utilization. SOE said they will look into the game engine and make it take advantage of todays video cards but these things take a very long time to do unfortunatelly. The game uses about 70-90% (1 core) at 1600x1200 in windowed mode for my core2duo@3400. That is at fairly high settings... Regarding shadows..

 Running on an 8800GT shadows (environment) can take my framerates from say 50fps to 22fps.. That is more then 50% decrease in FPS.

However when running in SLI my framerates only drop only 3-5 FPS when enabling environment shadows.. So the game does benefit from extra GPU power in certain cases.. Having said that SLI makes this game unplayable for other reasons. Just using it as an example here.

[jagermonsta]

They still haven't fixed this problem yet? Why am I not surprised...