If you have the storage and time, try installing a brand new directory, don't change anything, like don't modify the ui and what not. Are your frames fine then? I had a similar problem on my high end PC where everyone told me ridiculous troubleshooting steps assuming that it was a computer/resource problem. Even though I had high FPS before. I eventually figured out my issue after reinstalling 6 times. Because every time I reinstalled, everything was fine, I would run at 100fps and even 60fps in guild lobby on a high pop server (FV). The issue started every time I would copy my ui layout to another character. As soon as I did that, 20 frames... like clockwork. I now have to set up my ui manually on every character but I haven't had any frame issues since.... *sigh* Would be neat to find someone else this specific issue cuz there is no way they will ever fix my single user issue.
ran into this issue with a different nVidia card (GTX 770 2gb) under win 10 x64. my second install (I uninstalled when EQ ran at 12-18fps) of EQ was a custom to just C;\Everquest and ran as admin windows 7 compatibility settings and installed the MS direct x 9c redistributable. I also set CPU affinity so I could box a second account. solved my problems.I was not using any custom UI, the game would run fine, and i would log out. log back and my system crawled. with a i7 3770k 16gb DDR and GTX 770 2gb using latest nVidia drivers at that time. I have since upgraded to 390.77 today for fixes for other games I play. EQ still works fine.
The first step in dealing with framerates and performance issues is to generate a baseline. You need to specify the exact zone, population count, etc., and all of your settings and testing has to remain consistent. I emphasize this because I don't know if they make a computer that will always maintain a high frame rate with maxed settings and in a highly populated zone (like PoK). Some of this is just the nature of EQ - throwing more hardware doesn't always fix code issues Edit: I see your settings image now and based on your hardware and settings I wouldn't expect any problems. I would be looking at other programs running on your machine (for instance, what app is reporting your framerate?). Maybe post an image of your Task Manager. Also, definitely update your drivers pretty much any time Windows updates itself. I recently read that if you are using IS Boxer, you may need to update your Window Layout any time you update your graphics driver.
Continue reading, but only do this as a final consideration. if the eqclient.ini was copied from another installation from another computer, delete it and have EQ recreate it then make necessary changes.. but only if the following does not immediately resolve the issue... OP, part of the problem is with at least ONE of the game settings, which most have been unchecked, and/or the eqclient.in was copied from a previous machine/build, and that is the Allow hw Vertex Shaders, being unchecked. This needs to be CHECKED. This is a VERY VERY old workaround back in the dark ages when some video cards had issues running EQ's Vertex Shaders on its hardware. hw = hardware. By having that unchecked you have moved the rendering of Vertex Shaders from being done by the GPU, etc to being calculated and drawn via CPU and software rendering... Second. Computer Setup. Change Power Options to Best Performance, otherwise when your OVERALL CPU usage drops below a specific threshold the system will throttle down the CPU speed.... And with Nvidia, setup a profile for Everquest and set 3D, Power Management mode to Max performance to ensure EQ stays running on the Nvidia GPU and not being switched over to the CPU built-in Intel GPU... 3rd. By default EQ is set to run only on ONE CORE. With notepad edit eqclient.ini in the EQ folder, locate line(s) similar to this one CPUAffinity0 = -1 / CPUAffinity1 = -1 and change the number AFTER the equal key to a -1 (neg 1). This changes the behavior to spread the work across all cores instead of pegging just one core. As for the other poster's UI issues not seen that particular issue for many years, nor do I remember the final remedy to it then. Edit, with your system, on the options with the Allow hw Vertex Shaders, your system is more than capable to utilizing 99% of the other options except Shadows. Shadows has been a pita since the day it was implemented Shadows of Luclin and not worth the headaches it may cause.
