**FIXES** For Post DX11 Lag, Black shaders, too dark gameplay

This was tested changing one setting at a time in the eqclient.ini file until a result was achieved on an Intel I5 + Nvidia 2060 Laptop, and a AMD Ryzen + Nvidia 1070 desktop. Results may vary, but this has worked to improve darkness problems, fps stutter, and the black banding on npcs/some textures since the DX11 patch.

By default, most/many people I think do not or have not run the "Game Configuration" where you setup things like sound, model selection (old vs luclin), etc. I think the EQ client treats all of these things as "On" if they are not otherwise explicitly called in the eqclient.ini file. As a result you may not have these -four- settings. if you do not, you can hand jam them before loading EQ.

Go to your EQ Folder and make a copy/backup of your EQClient.ini file (absolute must!)
Then, near the top of the file, there is a section for [Defaults], this is where the following sections live (or should, if they do not). Double check with a Ctrl+F(ind) to avoid duplicate entries.

TextureQuality=1
- Mine was set to 3 and was inducing black trim/bars in the Palatial guild hall, blacked out npcs, models and some armor graphics. Changing this to "3" or "2" caused the behaviour. Set this to "1" to remedy the problem.

MipMapping=FALSE
This setting being TRUE seems to be the cause of severe framerate decline / stutter when using the mouse wheel to camera in/out and while using mouse2 to move the camera/look around.
Change this to FALSE. Removed all camera/movement related stutter.

ShowDynamicLights=1
My Default was set to 1, and I had no issues with brightness. Changing this to 0 induced severe darkness everywhere (I do not use Adv lighting, because it is retina searing in all settings).
Keeping this to 1 (on) fixed a lot of darkness issues.

UseD3DTextureCompression=TRUE
By Default this should be TRUE most likely. I noticed 10-20FPS drops when i turned it to FALSE. Keep it on / TRUE.

Settings that made no difference for me:
TextureCache=TRUE (or False)
VertexShaders (not the 2.0 ones)=1 (or 0)
UseLitBatches=1 (or 0)
GraphicsMemoryModeSwitch=1 (or 0)

This may not work for everybody, but I suggest TextureQuality to 1 to fix the shaders, MipMapping off to reduce the severe lag, and ShowDynamicLights=1 (ON) to help fix some of the darkness issues.
When complete, the start of your eqclient.ini should look something like this:

Code:

[Defaults]
UseLuclinHumanMale=1
...
UseLuclinVahShirFemale=1
UseLuclinElementals=TRUE
UseD3DTextureCompression=TRUE
MipMapping=FALSE
ShowDynamicLights=1
TextureQuality=1
Sound=0  (I like my sound off)
TextureCache=TRUE
...
etc

[Edit]
Prior to these changes, on raids, we experienced severe FPS lag, plus server lag. One remedy was using Alt+O -> Set "Hide Players" to All, "hide Pets" to All. It helped immensely. The above changes / suggestions helped me and others but have been (as yet) untested against raid FPS performance.

[Edit2]
My suspicion is that these settings changes are part of the Original or Luclin era graphics engine, which was on DirectX 9 or older. DirectX 11+ may not have that backwards compatibility to some of the API calls that these older options use, and it's causing the problems we're experiencing, which is why turning most of them off is "fixing" it. But, I'm spitballing. When the DEVS fix it, I'd be tickled to know how off the mark that guess is.

none of these are even in my eqclient.ini file

They are controlled by your initial EQ video card setup. If you look at the Fanra guide below, and scroll down to the Engine Settings graphic, the settings i listed above all correlate directly to that screen.
https://everquest.fanra.info/wiki/Graphics_and_performance_settings_guide

Wow, thanks. I copied and renamed my eqclient.ini file for backup and deleted the original. I then ran a full file check. I went into the settings and changed the ones you mentioned.

Huge improvement so far. I still have to fix some things by getting stuff from my old eqclient.ini file.

I still need to do more testing and checking and stuff but so far it is like night and day.

I think Darkpaw needs to have the game upon startup look at your eqclient.ini file and clear up the old junk that is causing these types of issues.

Thank you.

Thank you for this - I messed with these a little and they did help some. Not back to where they were bu better. As a side note, some of these were pointed out in beta.

I think the big thing was deleting my eqclient.ini file. That probably did the trick. The other settings may not have made much difference but I haven't tested this.

Make sure to save a copy before you delete your eqclient.ini file. I had to go into it to copy over my Keybinds to the new eqclient.ini file. I also might use it to change the chat colors back to my old way, I'm used to those colors.

I will try that later. I hope you will accept a compliment in that your posts are often very helpful. Thank you.

What were your original issues? I probably should remember from reading the threads here, but I don't.

• Much longer zoning (and entering from character select) times (the game was "Pre-loading character textures" for a long time)
• Stuttering/framerate/lagging (mostly around other players)

It was very bad and almost unplayable.

I didn't delete the client. That's a last resort for anything. I did mess with some of the other options and put my windows gamma back to what works for the rest of my rl world. Something or some combination of what I have now is "better" but not perfect yet like it was before the patch. I know I have mipmapping off currently on one comp, I haven't done anything to the other comp. That's tomorrow's challenge.

It's crazy. Even my Overseer is faster now (back to before DirectX 11).

I just tried these changes out and they seem to help. I did them all at once so I can't tell which specific change is good or bad. I had a lot of the items showing up jet black. Now that's mostly fixed.

Need to buy Frank a cookie.

Was most interested in the comments on MipMapping and UseD3DTextureCompression. Tested both of these on an OC'd RTX 4090 3.1ghz. No discernable difference in on vs. off: FPS was identical with only +/- 2 variance at >120 FPS. Hitching was not improved or worsened.

However, I definitely could imagine UseD3DTextureCompression helping people on lower performance systems, given the known issues with DB's current iteration of DX11's texture loading/handling. It appears that for many computers this line was stripped out of the INI file (used to be in many of mine, and is in none now), so it would need to be added back by others testing.

MipMapping is an interesting one in that the technology itself was introduced back in the 80s, and became quite perfected by the time of 3dfx and earlier Nvidia GPUs and next to zero level of invasiveness even in the 90s. Not sure why this one would have an impact on slower systems, but definitely worth others testing as well.

These changes definitely helped my system. They did not completely fix it. I only have to worry about a character on follow running into oblivion 2 out of 10 times i start moving... instead of the 9 out of 10 times. I haven't had any gamma issues, so can't comment there. Made a fresh ini and added my keymaps, chat filters and these settings above.

Win 11, i7, 1080ti, 64gig

I made a post about the changes I made and eqclient.ini here: From Crawl to Tall: eqclient.ini Changes and DX11

If someone just wants to make the LaunchPad changes, I've created a blog post with just the LaunchPad changes (no eqclient.ini editing needed) here: January 17, 2024 Game Update Possible DirectX 11 Fix for those that just want to try the safest fix.

The blog post is a walkthough to help you do it without special knowledge or extra reading needed.

This may or may not help you but is easy to revert back.

Thanks again to FrankTheNotTank.

This worked for me. After doing a backup of my eqclient.ini, I deleted it. Everything looks back to normal now. Prior to this change, I could barely see 20 feet in front of me. I'm still having a problem with changing to other members in my 3 box setup. I'm using the default UI, but when I click on another member, most of the time it doesn't change to that member & often I have to click on the member twice before it will change. That makes it very hard to 3 box because you can't be certain that you have the right member selected.

This did nothing for me, sadly. Thanks for the write up, however.

Still stuttering at raids. Still stuttering when someone zones in near me in almost all zones. Occasional 4/5 second pure stoppage at raids. Everything is updated.

Thanks for the tips, they did help a smidge. Guild hall, for example went from 60% pitch black to 40%, but now the lighted areas are very bright. Better than it was, but still hoping we get some dev support with more adjustments to get it back to a more enjoyable view. Right now out of 6 pc's, one is black, one is amber (fixed), 1 is bright, 3 are normal (these 3 are on basic intel hd graphics.) Also I should note that the enhance vision slider doesn't do anything past 50%

The bright one [fx6100 cpu] and black one [athlon 64x2 5000] are the same GPU's (hd6900).. Stop laughing, they worked fine before this and shouldn't be working less than a celeron n2840 on default intel graphics with 4gb ram~..

This didn't do anything for me but thanks for the diligence. I did some research this morning and here's the mugly I've uncovered. DX12 has issues with lighting and has for quite some time. Those of us current "may" be the ones caught between a rock and a hard place and may not be able to do much except reset the gamma in windows which isn't ideal. Most games have figured out how to adapt rather than use the windows workaround.

So ... tossing this out there ... back when I started playing somebody refresh my memory ... did we have to have DX9 in the EQ folder? Would a DX11 clone work for EQ in the folder to work off of or ... improve the slider to accommodate the difference? I'm not keen on the idea to having everybody back-lvl their comps to 11 to play 1 game.

Thanks spending time looking into this, changing just the TextureQuality from 2 -> 1 fixed the main issue that was bugging me. Some heros forge sets and some other textures appearing black.