Everquest 1 and imroving performance

[BoboKatt]

Hey all, I know EQ 1 is old and never really considered when all these new fancy video cards and CPUs come out but I wanted to get some of your input.

To start, does anyone here play EQ and run say an SLI/Crossfire system and if so does it do ANYTHING at all?

I've noted that using my current ATIX1900XT, I get absolutely no difference in performance whether I clock my card at its standard normal 2D mode (500/590) and use that speed in 3D more or run the real 3D speed of say 625/700 or something like that. With my ATi tool box, it actually shows the frame rates while I play EQ and I never ever note any difference in performance either way. Thus this leads me to conclude that it's all CPU limited and RAM. Even with 2 GIGs of RAM on my AMD x24800+, running two instances is not bad but some zones are still horrible.

Does a faster or even RAID hardrive setup help? Does anyone have something like that set up? Would 4 GIGS actually help RAM wise?

I refuse to play that game stripped down with no models, in low quality with no ligthing effects and in in low rez. That just sucks! So I tend to run at 1680X1050 with everything turned on.

 

[Schadenfroh]

Dear god man, your system is already far more powerful than what probably 90% + of the people that play EQ2 use.

Would 4 GIGS actually help RAM wise?

Does it ever use the 2gb currently? There is a program IIRC, that tracks RAM usage.

it actually shows the frame rates while I play EQ and I never ever note any difference in performance either way.

You are not going to see frame rates higher than your refresh rate on your monitor.

running two instances is not bad but some zones are still horrible.

This leads me to believe that those certain zones are underoptimized in the game itself or you are having another program in the background sucking system resources.

 

[Bateluer]

You have an X1900XT and EQ1 runs too slowly?

What are the rest of your system specs?

 

[skace]

If it's slow loading zones, it is most likely your bandwidth or connection to said server.

If the game is running weird in general, it might be because it has issues with dual core if infact you have dual core (you sound like you have a good rig). If you have dual core, set affinity to the everquest.exe to a single processor before clicking "Play" on the patcher. Once you are ingame it will be too late, as you get access denied trying to change affinity at that point.

If you are getting slow down in the new zones, I believe there is an issue with Icefall and ATI video cards, possible memory leak or glitch, all I know is just lower your clip plane a bit in that zone for the time being. Despite EQ1 being old, the new TSS zones are absolutely huge.