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EQ2

Started by rhorse, November 16, 2004, 10:12:36 PM

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rhorse

I don't know if this is the right spot. But I would like to say watch what video card you have for EQ2. The GeForce 4 MX440 will not run it. Its about the only GeForce card that  won't. Which the kind of luck I have.

Georey

Zaryzel

I wouldn't personally have expected any of the MX cards to run it. The game uses tons of shaders that the MX cards just can't do.

Koullyn

Well, a Geforce FX 5700 with 256mb of ram doesn't run well either. The graphics engine in EQ2 sucks. My AMD 64 box will not run at all without locking up and there are tons of threads on the EQ boards about this. The performance of EQ2 is just the pits and yet again Sony released a heap of crap before it was ready.
-- Retired Level 70 Beastlord --
http://www.wowgamers.com
http://www.wwm.net

Khayden

My Ti 4800 SE with 128 mgb RAM runs it perfectly in performance mode.  The only time I ever get anything like lag is when there's over 100 players in a zone.  That's with an AMD 2800 xp and 1 Gig ram.

The issues sound isolated to me.  I'd check:

Dx9 drivers are up to date
You're running the recommended video drivers
Try the game in different modes  (Performance, Balanced etc)

Note that SOE have said the highly detailed modes are aimed at cards not yet on the market so that as people upgrade the graphics improve without needing to overhaul the engine.

I've been playing EQ2 when I only have an hour or two to spare (which is all too often at the moment :( ) since it seems to be much easier to pick, play a little and put down.  So far I quite like it and I think they've addressed a number of the major gripes people have with EQ1.

Khayden
Khayden
75 Barbarian Wildcaller of Mithaniel Marr
Bertoxxulous

Koullyn

That is running 1024x760 in high performance mode that mine craps out. There is no logic to it as EQ1, WoW and Doom3 run flawlessly on my machine with zero lag.
-- Retired Level 70 Beastlord --
http://www.wowgamers.com
http://www.wwm.net

Dummkopf

It depends a lot on the server you play on, if the server has a high load you will get a lot more lag then on a medium or light load server. I play one character on runnyeye, one of the most congested servers (the offer free movelogs to other servers there) and another on toxxulia, i have a lot less lag issues on toxx. And i dont mean only general game lag, i mean graphic lag.

But in general the EQ2 graphic engine is very hardware dependent, so you need to have a very good graphic adapter, lots of memory and a fast processor (just no athlon64 it seems).

Koullyn

Lag and locking up are two different things. I have a 3.0/784 connection here so that is rarely the issue. After about 10 minutes of gameplay AMD64 users are locking up completely.
-- Retired Level 70 Beastlord --
http://www.wowgamers.com
http://www.wwm.net

Khayden

It's very strange because I'm running it in 1280 by 1024 in performance with the setup I described on AB which is busy enough to be having a server split.  

The only time I get lag is when there's 30+ Players in sight, and that's not video related it's purely latency/processing of so many different co-ord changes and the like.

I've had one graphical glitch which was where polygons started to overspill but restarting and shutting some background apps fixed it.

I've actually been impressed by how well EQ2 runs personally, one of the few graphically rich games which allows me to resize it's window to non standard sizes, and allows the mouse and focus to change seemlessly so I can check things on the web or use messenger while playing.

Sounds like AMD 64 might not be very well supported though :(

Khayden
Khayden
75 Barbarian Wildcaller of Mithaniel Marr
Bertoxxulous

Jkal_Shihar

Well running on the basic requirements for EQ2 and its running quite nicely. Now mind you, I had to upgrade my OS cause for some reason winME would let patch and stuff work but not take me to character select.

Once I got winXP on it. It loaded right too character select and I was playing for bout an hour for I logged for the night.

Like I said I am running at basic requirements:
AMD athlon xxxx(cant remember atm) only 1.0 gig though
ATI radeon 9xxx with 64mb
512mb SDRam
Cable internet through router

Also, not sure if it makes a difference but went with playing on Neriak server since it had lowest population.
Animist Jkal Shi`har and tigger
Arch Animist of the Tribunal Server
My Magelo
*still my main since dec. 2001*

Dummkopf

Yes, population makes a big difference. Played tonight on my notebook on runnyeye just do finish some run quest and i got framerates down to 10 seconds a frame. Switched to Toxxulia which showed only medium instead of full and the game ran flawless. Notebook has a 1.7 Pentium M, 64mb 9700 graphics and only 512 megs ram. Memory seems the biggest problem, the harddisk was used nearly 100% of my time on runnyeye.

Khayden

Server load does not affect how well the graphics engine runs.  A graphics engine's job is to render graphics objects as quickly as possible, wherever the game tells it to.  Bad drivers, unsupported cards etc will slow this down, as will lower GFX card memory because it will swap out textures etc to the HDD.

The game client's job is to tell the graphics engine what to put where.  A high server load typically means many more pieces of information for the client to process, and slower server responses.  This slows down the client.  Low memory, HDD space and slower CPUs, or other processes running in the background will make this slower as well; as will poorly implemented support of the processor architecture/threading your system uses.

If you have 2 players around you your client needs to process 2 pieces of information, and the server processes 3 position changes sends 6 messages (each player needs to know where the other is).

If you have 20 around you your client processes 20 messages and the server processes 21 position changes and sends 400 messages.  This is what causes lag due to high volumes of players, both the client and the server have more work to do to keep in synch.

This particular problem isn't related at all to your graphics card or the games graphics engine, but it can indirectly affect framerate since the engine is waiting to be told what to do.  

In this case Kaspi's GFX card should run the engine with no problem at all... given that my lower spec does even on a very busy server.  I think therefore that the client or graphics engine is not very supportive of AMD64 since this seems to be the main difference.  That or goddam Norton Antivirus was playing it's usual tricks ;)

Khayden
Khayden
75 Barbarian Wildcaller of Mithaniel Marr
Bertoxxulous

rhorse

Wishing Khayden would buy me a gaming PC.

zaab

EQ2 is a beautiful looking game.  Runs without a single problem at 1280x1024 letterboxed in the balanced mode.  HL2 stutters and crashes.  EQ1 crashes to desktop now and then.  Doom3 runs ok.

Of all the games sony has had their hand in, eq2 is the most polished and fun.  However, it DOES requre a modern set of hardware.  If you dont have a beefy system, as the advertisement has hinted at, probably best to stay with eq1.