Everquest 2 Suggestions?

[jahutch]

Hey all, first, here's my system specs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (Overclocked to 2.5GHz)
Geforce 6800 128MB AGP
1gig RAM (DDR400, dual channel)

I recently picked up EQ2 because some friends are playing, and the game is very pretty, but performance is not quite where I'd like it. I basically begin with the "Balanced" performance profile, then tweak a few things down a bit. I am using 2xQ (Quincunx or whatever) AA, that oddly does not seem to effect performance much! I get around 40fps in some situations, but that bottoms to 21-22 in situations with more characters or buildings on screen. While that is certainly playable for an MMORPG its a bit too stuttery for my liking - personally I want FPS 35+ in all situations. The one thing that gives me a BIG boost in FPS is to turn off "Complex Shaders," which puts me up into the 40-55 range. Unfortunately, this kills all lighting effects in the game leading to a pretty unsatisfactory visual experience. I am currently playing at my LCDs native, 1280x1024.

As to goals, I'd like to be able to run EQ2 on "High Quality" or "Very High Quality," 2xQ or 4x AA enabled, with framerates steady at 35-40+ FPS. Res will be 1280x1024 for now, and ideally 1680x1050 late this fall when I upgrade to a 20" widescreen LCD.

So, with all that said.. I am looking for ways to improve performance:

(1) First issue, is I happen to be using Windows 2000. I had to reinstall when my XP disc was not around, so I used my Win2k instead. This seems to have had zero impact on performance in games, so I've just left it on there until my next reinstall cycle, but if people think XP will improve my performance for some reason I'll certainly put it on there.

(2) The next thing I am looking at is RAM. I know all games, and EQ2 in particular, are RAM hogs these days. It seems 1gig isn't quite sufficient. Do people think upping to 2gb will yield significant performance improvement?

(3) Video Card. I assume this is the likely bottleneck other than RAM, as my CPU, while not bleeding edge, is pretty top notch with the OC applied. It seems with my AGP system the best choice would be the NVidia 7800GS 256MB. Would this be a big step up from my 6800?

The RAM I can afford to do now. The Video card would have to wait at least a few months. I'm reluctant to do it because I just bought the 6800 like last July, but if the 7800GS will be way better, I'm willing to look into it - even moreso in September when I get the bigger monitor.

Thoughts?

 

[Yreka]

You are going to be really limited by your card. Keep in mind, this game was built to last a while, and its brutal even on high end systems.

What you can do now, that will probibly add the most performance bang for the buck is get another gb of ram

I have 2gb, and my useage hovers around 70-80% normally. I have seen it peg 100% at Quenos Harbor. I would do that ASAP.

As far as video settings go, the ones I have noticed that make a signifigant difference are:

Shadows, turn as many off as you can bear. Turning the "enviromental" and "from offscrean" off helps quite a bit.

Texture Res : 128mb card = no higher than medium. On a 256mb card, you shouldnt set it over high. I could not use Maximum without a signifigant performance hit on my 7800GT or 7800GT SLI. Now that I have a 512 MB card, it seems to be ok.

By default, anything above balanced will turn on your "atmospherec effects". Make sure these are unchecked on your card, especially if you want to use AA.

You can also try fiddling with your draw distance too.

Lastly

Check out THor's UI. its a downloadable interface for EQ2 that allows you to make presets for the video settings and adjust on the fly. Its nice to be able to select perfomance for raid, then click back to HQ right from your HUD.

What server are you guys on ?

 

[Yreka]

There is this too if you havent seen it.

 

[jahutch]

We are currently on Guk.

Neskun, 12 Ratonga Brigand and Telethyn, 7 Wood Elf Wizard so far .

I actually have the textures set to high on my 128 MB card, so the fact its playable suggests I'm already doing well I guess! I definitely found out turning off the bloom helped a great deal. Shadows are already on character only.

Regarding the draw distnace, oddly, it seemed to have very little impact on performance, so I left it fairly high.

I think I've found settings that will work fairly well for now - but I'll definitely upgrade the RAM and see if it helps things out. When I get the higher res monitor, i may look into a new video card, but for now, I think I'll make do.

 

[akugami]

Get a nice 2GB kit of RAM and sell your old RAM. It'll help a lot. I'm assuming you're using a Socket 754 motherboard. If so, don't bother upgrading the AGP video card. If you're going to upgrade, either do the full upgrade now to Socket 939 or just do the RAM upgrade for now, then move up to Socket 939 when you're ready for a new video card. Though that would mean you'd have to replace the CPU and motherboard as well. But I'd say that's a better solution than moving to another AGP video card. There's really no reason to wait for AM2 because from all indications, it won't be much faster than Socket 939.

 

[jahutch]

Actually my mobo is Socket 939.. Its nforce3. CPU is Venice core. I just upgraded the system recently (last summer). No reason to toss the 1GB I have that I can think of... As for the AGP, I'm not a $500 vid card man, so I think what's available for AGP is more than sufficient for me, for now. Something like a 7800GS would certainly hold me until I did another full upgrade in another 2 years or so.

 

[akugami]

Actually for many newer video cards, the equivalent powered AGP cards are more expensive than PCIe. At least for the newer cards. Sucks but it's true. Since you have a Socket 939 system, I'd recommend going with a Socket 939 motherboard that supports PCIe if you're going to upgrade the video card. Considering the 7800GS costs close to $300, you're better off waiting a couple of months until the ininitial demand for the 7900GT wears off and prices drop a bit. It'll then be prices similarly to the 7800GS but of course it's PCIe only. Get a decent motherboard which should run you about $70'ish or a tad more. This will give you a MUCH more powerful video card than the 7800GS. A new AGP video card is just not as good of a bang for the buck.

The motherboard you upgrade to would of course be Socket 939 as well and support dual core processors so you have that front covered. Assuming you get the RAM upgrade now, then get a PCIe motherboard and a 7900GT, you'd have PCIe covered for any future video card upgrade. It's likely the only upgrade you'd need is a dual core cpu and another video card upgrade after about 2 years after that.

There's some really good deals on 2GB RAM kits going on right now. About $200'ish with a $50 rebate bringing it down to $150'ish. I'd jump on it if I were you (and I have jumped on one of those deals last month). If you were to switch to PCIe and get a 7900GT, you could buy a heatsink ($30'ish) later on, do a volt mod and overclock it. People are getting about 550-650mhz core on it which is really awesome since the stock core speed is 450mhz.

 

[Washoe]

With that video card you are *not* going to be able to get to high quality in EQ2. Not gonna happen, forget about it, don't even try getting there cause you'll only frustrate yourself.

 

[jahutch]

Hey all, an update on this. I'm no longer terribly concerned about running on high quality - I've found a set of settings that works well for me and looks very nice. Basically, I started with "Balanced," dropped all texture res to medium (except character texture which i left on High, the armor looks too blobbish on anything less). I got rid of atmospheric effects, and killed shadows, and the result is a generally playable framerate. In places like the commonlands, I can get upwards of 40fps with these settings.

This is, by the way, with 2xQ anti-aliasing enabled -- oddly, turning it off helps fps very little, and the jaggies are quite the eyesore to me.

The only thing that bothers me is the framerate really tanks when there are multiple chars on the screen. In a group, mid 20s is more likely than the upper 30s I get otherwise. And if I'm in a zone with lots of people (*cough* Qeynos *cough*), I get even less - usually in the teens. While this is playable, it isn't pleasant. So my main goals now are to pull up my lower end framerate rather than max out the upper end.

My HOPE is that the extra gig of RAM I ordered (I will now have 2 gig DDR 400 - 4x512 in dual channel mode) will help pull this up some, as I assume part of the problem with lots of characters is all the textures, etc.

Only time will tell. As for other upgrades, I'm just going to hold off for now. A geforce 6800 should be more than sufficient for the time being - when I do another full upgrade in a year and a half or so I'll just upgrade the video card then.

One question that remains - will switching to Windows XP help any? I've found XP and 2000 indistinguishable fps wise in benchmarks and other games.. but I figured its worth asking.

 

[Washoe]

jahutch, I am running that same 6800nu card right now on a Dell 2405. I can't even get EQ2 to Balanced. What I do is set it to High Performance, maybe even 'Very High' then I adjust the specific settings higher where possible. The result isn't all that pleasing for me but until I get my x1900xtx card that's the way it's going to have to be! (just ordered a sapphire x1900xtx today, woot!) BTW, for EQ2, I don't run the monitor on native 1900x1200, I scale it back to 1680x1050.

I recently upgraded from 1 Gig RAM to 2G RAM so I thought I could offer some input. I have no noticeable difference whatsoever in the way the game plays for me. The issue with RAM is this - When EQ2 first loads up, it is going to fill up around 700-800MB space. The remaining RAM is going to get filled up while playing the game over time, and after awhile with memory leaks, the 2nd Gig RAM begins to be used. For me, the game doesn't go over 1GB RAM until I've been playing for a few hours, and even then sometimes doesn't seem to get into the 2nd Gig. *Especially* due to the fact that I'm playing with High/Very High performance, this means less textures used, thus less memory used.

Without the 2nd Gig of RAM though, the hard drive has to be used to swap the memory out if needed, and that will seriously decrease performance, not to mention wear down the hard drive. This is of course where the 2nd Gig RAM is helpful. So, while it's going to help, I don't think you're going to see much overall performance increase.

What I would recommend is looking into unlocking the pipes on your video card. I use RivaTuner and was able to unlock the 4 extra pipelines. That has definitely helped. From 12 pipelines to 16. Here is a great thread describing how this can be done.

 

[jahutch]

Ok, I turned on the extra vertex unit on my vid card, but couldn't do the pixel pipelines, as they caused artifacting, even on the Windows desktop. I also turned on Fast Writes again in my BIOS.

These two changes netted me like 10 FPS! I couldn't even believe it. I've got to believe thats mostly the vertex unit and not the Fast Writes, as I've never seen that have much diff in the past. All I can say is EQ2 must like Vertex units, lol! I hit 60fps in the commonlands sometimes now!

Throw in the extra gig of RAM.. and I think I'll be okay for a while at least.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: Washoe
jahutch, I am running that same 6800nu card right now on a Dell 2405. I can't even get EQ2 to Balanced. What I do is set it to High Performance, maybe even 'Very High' then I adjust the specific settings higher where possible. The result isn't all that pleasing for me but until I get my x1900xtx card that's the way it's going to have to be! (just ordered a sapphire x1900xtx today, woot!) BTW, for EQ2, I don't run the monitor on native 1900x1200, I scale it back to 1680x1050.

My notebook has a 17in 1920x1200 resolution and a 7800GTX GPU, it can rum EQ2 at that res on High Quality ver smoothly. Once you get your 1900XTX, you should be able to play at your panel's native res as well.

EQ2 is one of the most beautiful games out there, if you have system for it.

 

[jahutch]

How significant of a performance drop should I expect when I go from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050? I'm hoping not much, as this isn't a huge shift, and most modern cards seem to handle higher reses fairly well. If it doesn't, that may be what pushes me to buy a new vid card.. I'm not a fan of playing at non-native res on LCD panels.

 

[Ronin]

Without reading this whole thread, I'm going to tell you the two things that will improve your performance:

RAM
CPU

I realize you have your CPU oced, but it's not even close to where it would need to be to handle what's going on in EQ2.

2GB of RAM will lower your zone times dramatically, and reduce stutter in the city zones, and allow you to turn up your options a bit.

Video card factors in, but not nearly as much as the other two.

 

[Soccerman06]

Originally posted by: jahutch
How significant of a performance drop should I expect when I go from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050? I'm hoping not much, as this isn't a huge shift, and most modern cards seem to handle higher reses fairly well. If it doesn't, that may be what pushes me to buy a new vid card.. I'm not a fan of playing at non-native res on LCD panels.

Enough to warrent a new card, or maybe a major OC

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: jahutch
How significant of a performance drop should I expect when I go from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050? I'm hoping not much, as this isn't a huge shift, and most modern cards seem to handle higher reses fairly well. If it doesn't, that may be what pushes me to buy a new vid card.. I'm not a fan of playing at non-native res on LCD panels.

Unfortunately, I was not actively playing EQ2 when I upgraded to my 2005FPW from a 17in LCD, but I can say that there was a noticeable drop.

I'm running the game on a P4 3.4, a 6800GT, and 2GB of RAM.