Wucked

For me the term 'Night and Day' quite nicely sums up the performance difference in EQ2 between Vista and Windows 7.

A short while ago I purchased some new hardware.

Had this...

*- Akasa AK-965 CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775)
*- Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 "LGA775 Conroe" 3.00GHz (1333FSB)
*- EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 SILENT 768MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI
*- Asus P5K Deluxe WiFi Intel P35 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
*- OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel Series
- Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Midnight Grey
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit
- Enermax Infiniti 720W EIN720AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU
- Coolermaster Stacker 832 Case


Changed this... (*)

*- Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 CPU Cooler (Socket LGA1366)
*- Intel Core i7 920 D0 Stepping (SLBEJ) 3.80GHz Overclock
*- Asus GeForce GTX 275 896MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card
*- Gigabyte EX58-UD5 Intel X58 Motherboard
*- Patriot Viper 6GB DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz DDR3 Bundle
- Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor - Midnight Grey
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 64-Bit
- Enermax Infiniti 720W EIN720AWT ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU
- Coolermaster Stacker 832 Case

Not a bad upgrade, every game I had installed loved the new hardware and flew. Every game that is, apart from EQ2...

I got a very minor performance increase but it still basically ran like a bag of shit. So bad in fact that allot of the time I couldn't run high gfx settings at all, even for group instances. In the end for the sake of smoothness I decided to run the game in raid gfx settings all the time. A ridiculous situation considering the hardware.

When other people told me about the performance increase they had seen with Windows 7, well I was sceptical. How can this be? Windows 7 is just Vista Service Pack 3, I thought. But no, I was wrong. In this post I take it all back, the performance increase from upgrading (not even a fresh install) from Vista to Windows 7 for me has been phenomenal.

Where once I would zone in and have to wait a minute for the frame rate to stabilize, now I zone in and 'blink' its just instant smoothness.. Even in our guild hall when its full of ppl and on max settings, as soon as I zone in I'm getting an instant and completely smooth 60fps. And it doesn't drop when I start to move around either.

So yep.. the point to the post is if you're still using Vista for EQ2, stop it and install Windows 7. Not only does it run EQ2 better but its also in general a far nicer place to live.

Kendayar

I've not tried Windows 7 yet, but it'll be in the mail any day now!

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Morara

I got a minor framerate boost with Windows 7, but nothing to write home about.

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Wucked

Yeah thats what I got with my other games, a minor boost at best, sometimes a drop in performance (far cry 2 being an example). But for some reason EQ2 loves it..

Niber

Wait till you realize all the annoying shit it breaks like preventing Ventrilo from getting enough of the CPU.

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Wucked

I used to have the same problem with Ventrilo under Vista, I used the higher process priority workaround. Not ideal but it worked.

When I moved to my latest guild I found them using an open source voice server called 'mumble'. Its actually pretty good, it works fine without any workarounds on XP, Vista and Win 7. Low system footprint, low bandwidth / latency and when configured properly good voice quality too.

If you're interested you can download it here and there's install guide for various OS here.

Niber

Nice, I didn't realize there was an open-source alternative to Ventrilo, I despise their license agreement. Maybe I'll throw a Mumble up on Flames for anyone who's interested.

Is Mumble compatible with the Ventrilo client? I unfortunately participate in a lot of pugs where installing a different client would be a deal-breaker.

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Wucked

I haven't tried the vent client with mumble server (murmur), the only other place I used Vent was in EvE online and I had my corporation there switch over totally. If you try and manage to pull it off let me know please.

I've had some success running both clients at the same time though, provided your soundcard is up to the job all you need to do is configure different push-to-talk keys and you can talk on vent and mumble at the same time. Or run the clients one at a time, either way its not a big deal having multiple clients installed.

Kampfer

Never had any issues with vent on win7 laptop and desktop nor heard of anyone that I know using having issues till Niber mentioned it. Maybe it specific to certain sound/onboard sound configurations?

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Niber

Most people probably dont notice and attribute it to lag. Regardless, I do not believe it's hardware related because a lot of people have reported the issue with varying hardware configurations (HERE, HERE).

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