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How do I get the best graphics possible?
Morgaur
Member UncommonPosts: 196
in Everquest II
I was wondering about starting EQ2 later today, but was wonder. I got a pretty nice rig so the question is.
Is there a guide somewere on how to get the best possible graphics in EQ2?
Comments
You can't.
I had a Q6600 w/ a GTX280; still lagged.
Then, ended up w/ an i7 5850 CrossFiredX, still lagged.
I scored stupidly high in 3dMark06 + Vantage on both systems, along with being able to play every other game flawlessly, so why?
Everquest 2 was designed for hardware that does not exist, ontop of that, the engine still produces memory leaks out of it's ass. SoE can't code for their life (like Square-Enix).
If your system is a beast, you can put everything onto max, then after around 2-3 hours of playing, you will crash or find that memory usage is up to 5GBs (I had it up to 6GB once, I have 12GBs).
Adjust for your processor.
Your graphics card has SO LITTLE to do with the engine for this game. Multicore is beyond their support, and most singluar processors on multicore boards aren't up to par to the 'then current' pent 4 HT processors.
Your RAM, and your processor heat up and get used way more than your GPU and it's odd.
Just turn it down.
Are there any optimalization guids I can check out then? I have seen some pretty amazing screenshots and should be able to get some nice visuals haha. Like this for instance:
Got some pretty nice Draw distance in the last one
QFT
I run a i7 920 @ 3.8ghz with 12gigs ram and a gtx 285 videocard and experienced the same stuff Lienhart said.
You can also browse their forums and see many posts about this problem and there is no fix all SoE tech will ask you to do is turn down the graphic settings and run a lower resolution.
Played: MCO - EQ/EQ2 - WoW - VG - WAR - AoC - LoTRO - DDO - GW/GW2 - Eve - Rift - FE - TSW - TSO - WS - ESO - AA - BD
Playing: Sims 3 & 4, Diablo3 and PoE
Waiting on: Lost Ark
Who's going to make a Cyberpunk MMO?
Dig up a couple hundred bucks and build a 4 gig Pent 4 ht machine with 4 gigs of DDR2 and throw in a 512 6800 on a 16x AGP?
Let me see if I can find a guide. (Me I figured out this crap with trial and error over the years bouncing in and out of the game. The newer areas you'll see improve over the pre 65 content btw.)
http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/news_article.vm?id=52048 IS all I'm seeing.
And that's not helpful other than having good explinations of the obvious settings.
My best suggestion with newer machines is expect to turn it down and run your processor hot. You can actually optimize one of your processors to handle more of load than the other and it's fun. Seemed to help with the extended. Over all I found Extended to be a lil' less stable no matter what than just subscribing.
hehe isnt that link to adjust Everquest? Not Everquest 2?
How old are those screenshots? The game didn't used to look as terrible as it does now. I'm not a picky guy, I mainly play Anarchy Online, but even with AA forced up all the way everything is blurry. I feel like I'm playing without my glasses on.
I remember EQ2 looking great when I played it a few years ago. I'm trying Extended now and it's just horrible to look at. What the hell happened?
einexile the meek
Vacuos, Winterlong, Vaciante, Eicosapenta
Atlantean, Tyranny, Malton
What about setting your core affinity to 1 if you have a high clock speed?
TSW - AoC - Aion - WOW - EVE - Fallen Earth - Co - Rift - || XNA C# Java Development
Exactly what I thought here the other day. The game looked better some years back. The starting area in Timorous Deep is horrible. I miss the old starting areas.
I have serious issues with AA on my hd 5970 card aswell. Cant get it to work and I have been trying everything. Even on Extreme Quality the game doesent look good
Im a sad panda. Help me get good graphics
I want to play EQ2 with good graphics!!!!
All I know is, no matter what I cannot get EQ2 to look nice and run smoothly. Certain settings were terribly coded so when you have them on it uses absurd amounts of resources and causes lag. Bleh.
This game should've been named Everlag II
Check this post on the forums for display settings: http://www.mpog.com/discussion2.cfm/post/3439409#3439409
Two steps are needed to enjoy graphics to the max: 1) tweaking the settings of your graphic card. 2) tweaking the in-game display options.
Also, if you play in windowed mode you'll loose a fair amount of FPS so I would recommend playing in full screen mode (if you're playing in windowed mode because you want to access the internet while gaming you can do it in-game by typing /browse).
Use the CPU shadows instead of GPU shadows.
Finally, this site explains EQ2 settings very well: http://www.nvnews.net/articles/everquest_2_graphics/index.shtml
Enjoy!
It helps to get out of the mindset that "max settings is the only good-looking setting". There are a number of settings that can suck down your cycles, yet have only minimal real effect of the image.
Like shadows? This game runs like crap, and it looks like crap without the high settings, sure it runs ok without shadows, but wtf...
Why SOE chose to carry this turd as their flagship POS instead of a new game or even Vanguard is astouding. I mean at some point in mid 2006 they had to have realized this engine was total crap and would never work with any modern computers.
Thanks for the tips. Im going to try this later this evening
Nods, EQ2 and performance just don't go together. Setting shaders to -1 is about the only thing that affects FPS in any meaningful way. If you do use shadows, use GPU though, they are free. Still always going to get low to high popping and sub 20fps in raid though, beast or not. Its not EQ1 raid stare into a corner bad, but its up there. The focus should be on VG which performs well but needs more content.
Now if only I could turn off SOGA human models without crashing to the desktop, that would be great
EQ2 do have multi core support, they added it 2 years ago.
It ran very fine for me until they patched in Halas (after they fixed up Neriak), but now I have some problems in many places. And I have 3,2 Ghx hexa core, 8 Gig ram and a 480 GTX.
You have to experiment to get it run good for you, try turning down shadows and anti aliasing first.
I'm afraid this is very true
I don't have a top-of-the-line PC, but it's a decent one:
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) II X3 425 Processor (3 CPUs) ~2.7GHz
Memory: Corsair 2x2Gb 800Mhz
Hard Drive: 890Gb :: SeaGate ST3250820AS :: SAMSUNG HD642JJ
Video Card: EVGA geForce GTX460 SuperClocked 768Mb
Monitor: iiyama ProLite E2208HDS
Sound Card: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio)
Speakers/Headphones: JBL Creature II
Keyboard: Logitech G11
Mouse: Logitech Cordless Optical TrackMan :: Wacom Bamboo Pen
Mouse Surface: Glass plate :: Does it realy matter with a trackball..?
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Motherboard: Asus M4N72-E
Computer Case: CoolerMaster Centurion V :: CoolerMaster Real Power M620
And even with this PC I can't set my settings to the maximum (I can set LotRo to the max with my system and have around 60FPS on 1920x1080). I've set it somewhere between high & very high, and graphics are good enough, but I have an avarage of only 35FPS, and it sometimes even drops back to 15FPS
ive tried eq2x with my setup and it runs like crap. ive tried to shut down 2 of my cores so i can run the two others at 4.5 ghz. it didnt help
the games engine is built, as someone said, for pc´s that has never been built.
I7@4ghz, 5970@ 1 ghz/5ghz, water cooled||Former setups Byggblogg||Byggblogg 2|| Msi Wind u100
As far as I know, EQ doesn't use any of the extra cores (at least, that's what I've been told). And yeah, if you want to play EQ2 to the max, you need a 2015 PC for sure
Also, there are a lot of options in the config that you should look at. The view distance for example, set to max, you can almost look from one end of the map to the other one (who ever though this was a handy option should be fired). Also, the shader options are an odd thing as well. A lot of shaders are set by default to use the CPU instead of the GPU (beats me why this is done), and thus the game uses more CPU than really needed.
Best thing is to look at each of the options in the graphical config and use common sense. I'll post my config settings here in a little bit to give an impression.
There we go... My complete graphical settings. Keep a close eye to the Shadows part (screeny #5). The Point Light Shaders (CPU) and Off-Screen GPU Shadows are 2 that eat a lot of performance. Enabling them (and the 1st one especially) dropped my FPS to somewhere around 7 o_O
this actually helped alot on my performance and everything. I even got AA to work. The only change from this setup was i activated AA via drivers under advanced settings, on the bottom.
On my Catalyst drivers i did the following:
- AA set to 8
- AF set to 16
Also use the last drivers from ATI.
In the eq2.ini file i added the r_aa_blit 1
Works like a charm. Thank you Reizla, I worship thee
Glad I could be of help ;-)
...perhaps I should look into the AA settings at the bottom as well for my own configuration ;-)
The game is made for CPU. Only high-end processors will give you nice frame rates w/all the nice visuals. Otherwise you'd have to shut off shadows, reduce your rendering distance, and turn down complex shader to 2. Well, that's what I do since I only have a Pentium 4. My water reflections are also turned off or turned down low because I have an ATI and they tend to have issues w/water or reflections anyway. My fps is still shitty tho in some dungeons, and i'm fighting with the settings.