Recently I decided I wanted to have a better Everquest experience and after I looked into what other people suggested I settled on upgrading from a smallish 23” 1080p monitor to a larger monitor capible of 1440 WQHD. Whether or not this will give me what I want in the end (it’s already ordered; I’m not looking on feedback on this decision), this simple upgrade (and an event that followed shortly afterwards) opened a whole can of worms. Specifically, when you are researching WQHD resolution, you will come across people recommending various GPUs. You will also be forced to make a choice between standard response/refresh specs (5 ms 60-75hz) and higher end gaming stats like 1ms and 144hz. But what aspects of these conversations/debates matter to an EverQuest player? It is widely known that EQ spends most of it’s time working things out through your CPU, so how much of an impact does the GPU make even if you choose to play at a higher resolution. Discussions on this topic vary widely. Most discussions on this topic are positive and constructive, but few return anything concrete. They occure all over the Internet in various EQ communities and it can be difficult to aggregate them and evaluate their efficacy. Additionally, many guides focus on what to turn off to increase performance rather than what hardware/software can increase performance. In addition, a large percentage of the posts focus on how to increase performance while boxing rather than increasing the single player experience. As a result, anecdotes can vary widely, which further obscures any real conclusions that can help someone make an informed decision to better increase their experience as a player without being wasteful on fixes that might be common sense for today’s games and computing, but functionally anachronistic and futile for us. Some of the posts in this topic are recent, some are old. I’m hoping that this post might help to collect enough information (whether it be qualitative or quantitative) for players to make an informed decision on where to focus their efforts when improving their EverQuest experience. I only ask that players be as detailed a possible when they offer their feedback so other players can catch where the issue is. Also, it is likely best to indicate whether your experience is as a player with one instance of EQ running or multiple. Lastly, there are quite a few people that utilize 3rd party programs while playing Everquest. I don’t know what the policy is on discussing how these impact performance. If someone has a good idea of how much easier Gina is on your processor than audio triggers, or how much Gameparse stresses a SSD, I don’t really know how acceptable those conversations are here on the forums, so I leave that to those that are more knowledgeable and those that moderate the forums. I’m going to start off with a few basic questions that are often discussed but I feel never thoroughly answered, but the conversation can go in any direction that focuses on EQ performance and how it impacts the players’ experience. 1: How much does a GPU matter and for what things does it impact? a) Will a player notice an difference playing EverQuest on a modern-day GPU versus contemporary integrated video cards? b) Will A GPU greatly impact the resolution EQ plays at (assume the GPU is capivle of the resolution in general) 2) How much impact does the location of the EQ install impact performances a) Will USB 3.0 or HDDs bottleneck EQ in comparison with a SSD, or is EQ bottlenecked at the server level? b) Will EQ perform differently depending on where it is stored on your computer? c) if you are using a dedicated drive, what NEEDS to be saved there along with the EverQuest folder? 3) How can players obtain high frame rates to in Everquest? a) are they obtainable with setting maxed or near max? b) Will GPUs and gaming monitors have an actual impact on Everquest’s frame rate?
I recently upgraded from a GTX970 to a GTX1080ti and got exactly zero fps improvement (while six boxing). It's all CPU-bound for the reasons you've stated. You may be interested in: http://forums.eqfreelance.net/index.php?topic=3247.0 http://www.daguild.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=8823
I play on a 32" 4k monitor with top and bottom half being different characters. Works for me. I'm not one for multiple monitors. But then, I also don't raid much these days.
GPU will make a difference in your PC performance, but for EQ most graphics processing still happens on the CPU, so if you are going for EQ performance, CPU is what you want to look at. Installing EQ on an SSD is a fairly decent performance upgrade, lots of hard drive reads. Zone times/loads seem to be mainly hard drive speed. I would put Windows and EQ on the same drive.
For EQ CPU, CPU, CPU But not a 12 core CPU with low ghz, no you want as high of GHz as you can get. 4 cores at 4.5gHz will serve you better than 12 at 2gHZ. Solid State Hardrive, just get one. This is the easiest thing you can do that will see gains in the overall speed of your computer. No one should wait more than 30 seconds for a computer to boot these days. GPU, you should have one. But your playing a 20 year old game, you don’t need much of one. RAM, EQ doesn’t use much but how many clients are you going to run? Chrome is usually eating 1-2GB of ram on my machine, personally 8GB+ is what I would want. Monitor, once again your playing EQ, not a fast twitch based FPS. 60hz-120hz you will never notice the difference. The interface doesn’t scale well so setting up the WQHD will be annoying, but honestly color accuracy and black levels are all that will matter.
GPU matters very little. This is a DX9 game with low polygon counts, low resolution textures, and relatively primitive lighting effects. Any relatively modern graphics card, even entry level ones, should be more than sufficient to handle anything EQ can throw at it, except maybe with shadows on and tons of characters on screen. Being on an SSD dramatically improves zone loading time relative to HDD, otherwise doesn't affect much I believe. As others have said EQ is very CPU bound. Setting multicore affinity helps a lot (in eqclient.ini set CPUAffinity0, CPUAffinity1, etc. all to -1), although it appears that EQ is primarily executed on two threads: one core has very high utilization, a second core has moderate utilization, and the rest are close to idle. One thing I don't think people have investigated much is that EQ also appears to be quite memory speed sensitive. While running through the lag pile on Xegony (buff spot where dozens of people are always AFK) at my motherboard's default RAM speed of 2133MHz, there was severe stuttering, but after enabling XMP in the BIOS which set my RAM to 3200MHz, much of the stuttering went away. I have 64GB of RAM installed so it's not a matter of insufficient capacity either.
Framerates above ~60 aren't going to matter much, so a 144hz monitor is mostly wasted. Same for 1ms refresh rates, it just doesn't matter for EQ. FWIW I actually set a framerate *limit* of 60 so that a single instance of EQ doesn't run the CPU core 100% unless it really needs to. If I'm boxing a ton of characters on a single computer (not so much these days) I set the limit to 30. It's still playable ~15 if you really have to, but I generally wouldn't go below 30 unless you need to. (I used to do that for a laptop that would overheat after playing too long). Note that framerates can affect your falling speed, so be careful setting it too low if you are directionally challenged.
A good CPU with the eqgame.exe set to High priority gets you pretty far. I've also noticed a difference setting NVIDIA's power management option to max instead of the default or optimal or whatever. I think EQ is so not GPU intensive that it tricks the software into putting the GPU to sleep lol.
I have a 27" monitor 2560x1440 that Ive been using for a while. I dont think Id be comfortable on anything smaller now. Going to my 17 inch laptop I have to make alot of ui compromises.
Also note that FPS higher than 60 increases /follow performance even when your monitor can't render faster than 60hz. I found that at around 80fps it was difficult for my boxes to ever get desynchronized even with selos on.
