So. Getting stuff set up to be ready when Mischief opens up. Notice that I for some reason have poor performance. Running a 5600x and a 6800xt on windows 10. Game is on a m.2 drive with 4k+ read/write speeds. In game in say like crescent reach just standing around I get 150fps(Even though I set the max FPS to 144?). I enter PoK and the FPS tanks to 30-60. Checking the performance tab in AMD Adrenaline and the GPU utilization never goes above 3%. Checking the task manager and eqgame CPU utilization is just hovering around 12%? Is this normal?
You can have a monster video card and cpu and your performance will still take a hit because the game rendering engine sucks for certain things. Turn off shadows and turn down clip plane and actor clip plane and /part off. Then zone. After you do all that your frame rate should be better.
Thanks. I figured the answer was probably "old game" but wanted to make sure after seeing the low utilization numbers on CPU/GPU. While lowering the clip plane doesn't seem to have improved my FPS it does seem to have made it less spike/made moving around feel less sluggish. Thanks for the tips.
Fanra has a comprehensive guide it is well worth your time reading through https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Graphics_and_performance_settings_guide Some of these may help performance too (my general help guide) Add launchpad.exe & eqgame.exe to the exceptions or white-list for your anti-virus & firewall - especially if you are using Windows Defender as this is known to often block connections to EQ. Run a file check from the EQ Launcher (HOW? - https://help.daybreakgames.com/hc/e...73-How-do-I-validate-game-files-in-EverQuest-) Right Mouse button Click the EQ Icon, select Properties then compatibility then put a check in the box for "disable full screen optimizations" hit apply then run as administrator the first time you log in Download & install a fresh copy of Direct X 9c (LINK - https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/microsoft_directx.html) Download & install the latest C++ runtimes (LINK - https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads) Check what Graphics hardware you are using & uninstall the old drivers & re-install the latest WHQL drivers for it or a new copy of the current drivers if you already have the latest ones.
A few things that might matter. Since EQ can only utilize one thread per instance of the program, and you have 6 cores and 12 threads (going from memory, assuming Ryzen 5 here), one thing you can do is download Ryzen Master software and turn on Game Mode. This disables threading, so you don't want to leave it on all the time, just when playing EQ. This will ensure that EQ gets one full core instead of 1 of 2 threads on a core. May not matter much, but consider it min/maxing for your environment. Next, your GPU is super overkill for EQ, but thanks to being a DX9 client, you can still utilize a lot of the card, albeit inefficiently. This is handy if it's winter where you live and you like extra heat. But seriously, it will ramp up in the right conditions. Particle effects in particular will hit the card hard. For example, I had a GTX 980 and could hit 100% while looking at a frost giant in Velious with a Bard behind it popping particle effects into the air (@ 1440p 144fps). After I upgraded to an RX5700, that same situation only spiked to about 70%. Given the RX6800XT is about double the speed of an RX5700XT, you will probably not see over 50% for the most part. It's hard to say what the cap is. Unfortunately the the AMD drivers have some slowdown issues with DX9 that they aren't going to go back and deal with, so an RTX3080 or RTX3090 might outperform your card, but not by much, and not anything you would notice. The trick will be turning on enough things to make it look pretty and challenge the card, but not so much that walking around PoK or the Guild Lobby is completely jarring.
Oh yeah, I didn't build this computer with EverQuest in mind hah. Just saw the new TLP server coming and decided to hop back in and try it out again. I think so far I have tried everything. Seems to have smoothed out the FPS dips so that it doesn't feel sluggish/jerky in PoK. Haven't tried disabling the Velious models. Not sure how much impact that has. So far mainly limiting the clip has been the most help. Though I haven't lowered it too much since I still wanna be able to see mobs at a good distance. I have ryzen master installed though I haven't used it much at all. Just let the auto boost do it's thing. I'll try turning on game mode when I play EQ. Thanks for all the info guys.
It just occurred to me that I might be wrong about Game Mode. I forget if that disables threading, or if it turns off a CCX/CCD. In either case it should make single core performance better, but that chip is fast enough where it may not matter. Either way it can't hurt, just might not help.
Resolution scaling is tough on EverQuest's graphics engine. If you are running 1440p or higher, it literally doesn't matter how good your hardware is - graphics performance will suffer. Adjust your graphics settings until you find a suitable sweet spot. Or run 1080p and you can max everything out.
In the link Skuz listed, one of the important items will be setting Windows power settings to High Performance. And dependent on how old the account is, Alt J and disable Journal, as it records every single word and emote that NPCs say. Recently had a bard complaining about FPS drops/system stuttering while pulling a mob, and it was still enabled. It is a write/save process for each line, and if antivirus program is not setup to exclude EQ folder, there is even a heavier impact.
