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everquest extended performance
Torgozo
Member Posts: 25
in Everquest II
I'm playing on a Phenom II with an HD 5870 and was blown away that I couldn't play this game on max settings with 60fps. From what I've read the game is coded weird so you have to tweak stuff...still, is there a machine out there that can max the game and run it at a stable 60fps or is it still just a dream?
Comments
Max settings really don't look that great and make the video card work as hard as running crysis in a high res.
There's reviews/threads/articles on here even that say the game "Looks amazing on high settings" but that's just a flat out LIE..
The best thing you can say about them is that some of the areas backgrounds have lots of detail, that's about it..
Everything else reminds me of mmorpg's from 5+ years ago.
Well maybe thats due to the fact it's almost 6 years old :P
It's not a "bloody mess". When EQII launched they made a technical decision that "assumed" CPU would be the primary source of graphics horsepower based on lessons learned from EQI and some SWG development. This is all well documented by their own dev team and explained over time. In a nutshell their graphics rendering engine doesn't rely heavily on graphics hardware. hence why the past 3 or so generations of video cards have not noticeably improved EQII performance and all the effort they put into "Shader 3.0" in EQII to offload lighting and shaders to the GPU instead of the CPU. Even so, it was a marginal upgrade.
CPU speed (an not multicores as much as raw CPU speed) and RAM are your primary EQII improvements. Hence why the Phenom II isn't much of a boost. A new high speed (core clock) Core I5/I3 would be pretty good upgrades.
Either way, the short answer is, and this is acknowledged by Sony, the game wasn't built to scale well with Video card power and made certain technology guesses that just turned out as bad choices. Now you can fault them all you want for not seeing the "future of graphcis rendering" in the PC space, it was a bad choice. But the engine written is shockingly good for what it does and what it was designed for.
I get a kick out of "It looks like a 5 year old game!". No sh*t sherlock. It's over 6 years old! More if you count dev time (it was 4 some odd years in development).
Well...this is NOT the entirety of the problem (for sure), but the decision to have the download run as a streaming download in the background upon starting to play EQ2X....was ignorant on SoE's part. But then again..."ignorant on SoE's part" is a common phrase in the English language by now, so...no big surprises there.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
I have a 6 core 970, nvidia 480 and 6gb 2000mhz ddr3 and I can't max it out with a stable framerate lol.
All of SOE's coding is a mess, they can't make good games, engines or art. SWG's engine was such a mess they couldn't even fix it lol.
See notes above. Never mind how many cores you have, but how fast are they?
I kept EQ2 in mind during my last upgrade: 2 cores was enough for me, but I made sure they topped 3 gigahertz. (Which is still slow to some people, but I don't have a mint to drop on fancy cooling and I don't like a noisy machine.)
Sure it was a stupid decision to not utilize graphics cards anywhere close to their potential in a game that was so graphically demanding, but the engine suffers other problems too. It is more than just that one choice from over 6 years ago and the answer has always been that it would be to difficult to fix the engine to fully utilize graphics cards or multicore cpus.
The end result is a laggy game that has been limited by the game engine in one fashion or another since release. Even on scaled down settings that game plays clunky or struggles with server populations that get close to 2004 levels.
I was getting 1-2 second casting delay nonstop in the eq2x servers. That is even after the particle effects have been heavily scaled down and optimised.
weird, i play eq2 Live and eq2 ext on max settings except Complex shader, under performance options, set to "2" and max bumpy distance, under lighting options, set to "-1" or" 2", and shadows at med settings and run 60-100 fps, 40 surrounded by 20+ toons, still Smooth animations.
7600 OC'd cpu, 8 gig Ram, 5870 ati.
Cant get a decent fps with my setup... Its a wonder that I cant play a 6 year old game with the fps Ive paid for!
Freaking love soe and I do wonder how they still can be around
I7@4ghz, 5970@ 1 ghz/5ghz, water cooled||Former setups Byggblogg||Byggblogg 2|| Msi Wind u100
Because you were DLing the game as you were playing it, duh. You couldn't figure that out? Seriously?
above poster got it right in a nitshell.the game was released nov 2004 so making it over 5 yrs old and ofc course its slowly starting to show its age but hey it still looks better then most.
A) Did you know that you can copy your eq2 folder to cut down the download time?
Thanks for your constructive assumptions, but next time feel free to ask if you don't know the answers.
Yes, but I guess my "point" was more that people ALWAYS raved about how amazing the graphics where/still are in EQ 2 when they really aren't no matter what you do.
Forget "years ago" when it came out, there's articles here on the site that rave about how "great" the graphics in EQ2 are..
So yeah, please keep the troll stuff to yourselves..