New Shader Model 3.0 for eq2 :) - Page 6

Morara · 06-26-2009, 08:13 AM

"Pretty good" is subjective. You're not getting 60fps maxed out at 1920x1200, when modern hardware is more than capable of it.

firamas · 06-26-2009, 08:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Petgroup

And I would bet you that $10k that it would still take you 10 seconds to see those lizard things over near Hurricanis in Tenaberous Tangle.

I was just PL'ing in that spot last month. No graphics load delay noticed. I didn't even know there was supposed to be a problem there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Morara

"Pretty good" is subjective. You're not getting 60fps maxed out at 1920x1200, when modern hardware is more than capable of it.

Who's not? =p Like I said a few posts up, I'm running at double that resolution, with everything maxed (both in game and through the nvidia panel), and I get 90-150 FPS when standing around in town or the guildhall, 80-90 FPS when soloing, 60-80 FPS when grouping, and 40-60 FPS in raids. I turn player particles off for raids though, not for performance, but because it's too cluttered for me. The bottom line though is that the game is playable in any situation at that resolution.

So if I can get that with a $170 CPU (E8400) and $240 GPU (GTX 280), what FPS would I be showing at half that resolution like you suggested?

I don't fucking understand why people are STILL complaining about performance in this game. Two-year-old hardware was able to max it out at most resolutions. Current hardware will smoke it even on a 30" monitor.

Diknak · 06-26-2009, 09:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gungo

Cry all you want but its completely true. Just because your still running on a dell you bought 3 years ago doesnt mean it doesnt happen. Although I do not raid with partical effects on because they annoy me. And you do not need a 10k system because frankly you wont gain much out of that and a good 3k system. So you can call bullshit all you want and claim outragious price tags but its obvious you have no fucking idea what your talking about. Get a good I7 chipset, a decent motherboard, a high end graphics card, and some quality memory. Slightly overclock the core speed with a good aftermarket heatsink. And you can put your computer on extreme quality without ever needing to touch the settings.

The fact is you are probably running on a doucore or quad core chipset that was released in 2007. With an 8000 or 9000 series geforce card released in late 2006 to early 2008. I am sorry but a 2-3 year old machine is not modern.

I love how you think you can even guess what kind of system I use. And particle effects are the thing that cause slow down the most in raids. I run with them off for the same reason that you do, but I also recognize that my system takes a hit if I turned them on. I didn't buy my computer; I built it. And I can run Crysis and Far Cry 2 on full quality and get perfect a frame rate, so I obviously am not running a 3 year old dell.

Here are my specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
ABIT IX38 Quad GT LGA 775 Intel X38 ATX Intel Motherboard
GECUBE HD3870X2-F3 Radeon HD 3870 X2 1GB 512-bit (256-bit x 2) GDDR3
Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10000 RPM
4 Gigs of RAM. Can't seem to find the order record for it.

This is obviously not the best system in the world, but I should be able to run a 4 year old game perfectly with this setup. I run on extreme quality when not in raids just fine, but I do turn some stuff down for raids. If you guys can think of a simple improvement for my system, please let me know.

Operation · 06-26-2009, 09:54 AM

Your E8400 will clock to 3.6ghz without even blinking.

Diknak · 06-26-2009, 10:33 AM

I haven't really pushed my CPU that much. So you think I should crank it up a bit?

firamas · 06-26-2009, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diknak

This is obviously not the best system in the world, but I should be able to run a 4 year old game perfectly with this setup.

You can stop classing it as a "4 year old game" as if it was supposed to compete with other 2004 era products. That was never the stated intention of the devs when it was released, and you know that. MMO's have much longer product lifecycles than other games, and building in a lot of room for your playerbase to expand into that in the future is good policy.

It's a lot easier to develop a processing intensive graphics engine up front and let your players grow into it than to retrofit one every few years to stay up with "current" expectations of graphics quality.

Oh, and I concur with the guy above me. Overclock your CPU. My E8400 hit 4.0 out of the box, on air cooling, and has been stable for 18 months. Clock speed is, uh, kind of important for CPU-bound games.

Diknak · 06-26-2009, 10:49 AM

Yeah, I know that it is a bit unfair to compare it to static engines released in other games at the time, but I still feel that the game is way too CPU heavy and could benefit heavily from more development to utilize the GPU.

I OCed my CPU a bit, but I didn't push it quite up to 3.6, as I am always paranoid that I am going to destroy my CPU. Maybe I will give it a good crank tonight up to 3.6 and see how that works out. If I get comfortable, I might push it closer to 4.

Morara · 06-26-2009, 12:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by firamas

Who's not? =p Like I said a few posts up, I'm running at double that resolution, with everything maxed (both in game and through the nvidia panel), and I get 90-150 FPS when standing around in town or the guildhall, 80-90 FPS when soloing, 60-80 FPS when grouping, and 40-60 FPS in raids. I turn player particles off for raids though, not for performance, but because it's too cluttered for me. The bottom line though is that the game is playable in any situation at that resolution.

So if I can get that with a $170 CPU (E8400) and $240 GPU (GTX 280), what FPS would I be showing at half that resolution like you suggested?

I don't fucking understand why people are STILL complaining about performance in this game. Two-year-old hardware was able to max it out at most resolutions. Current hardware will smoke it even on a 30" monitor.

Can I have some of the magic that you used to make the engine scale?

firamas · 06-26-2009, 01:24 PM

There isn't a linear correlation between resolution and performance, but in most cases it's still significant. My point was that I'm running at 25x16 with no problems and I don't have a ridiculously expensive CPU/GPU setup. You don't need a $3k PC to run EQ2 well.

Buy a GPU that isn't horrible (spend the $250-300 and stop dicking around with low end cards).
Buy a proven C2D (E8xxx) or an i7 920 and leverage their massive overclocking potential.
Spend the $90 to buy the 8GB of RAM so your system is page-proof for the foreseeable future.

That's $500 for the core components, and your system will smoke EQ2 (and almost everything else out there). This is a gaming forum. It's not unreasonable to expect someone to spend that much on core components for their box.

If you have contemporary hardware and can't run EQ2 on max settings, you're doing something wrong. I don't know what it is specifically, but you done fucked sumthin up, sonny!

Operation · 06-26-2009, 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diknak

I OCed my CPU a bit, but I didn't push it quite up to 3.6, as I am always paranoid that I am going to destroy my CPU. Maybe I will give it a good crank tonight up to 3.6 and see how that works out. If I get comfortable, I might push it closer to 4.

Those processors perform like they were factory underclocked. Manually setting the FSB from default 333 up to 400 will put the E8400 at 3.6ghz with no need to increase core voltage (1.2v) and very little increase in core temp. Be careful if your motherboard has an "auto" setting for the core voltage. In my case (ASUS P5E) setting FSB to 400 resulted in the "auto" core voltage getting bumped to 1.26v...which *will* cause more heat and reduce processor life. Use CPUz (it's a free tool) to monitor the settings and manually set vcore to 1.20 or 1.22 if necessary.

3.6ghz is considered the maximum "safe", "air cooled" overclock for the E8400. At the 400 FSB and stock core, that processor should run darn near forever.

PS. All of this assumes that since you built your computer, the first step you took was to throw out the stock Intel CPU cooler. It's junk and barely rates as a coffee table curio...