Old Hardware - My Experience With EverQuest DX11

My main gaming system is a 7950X3D + 64GB RAM + 4090. It's a workhorse and I can push the latest games at or near max quality settings running 4k resolution and get 100+ FPS most of the time. Running EQ on this system is fine. I had some massive stuttering but the many .ini fixes have pretty much ensure a smooth experience. Lag pile is still laggy. And stuttery. It was frustrating but I chalked it up to the fact this game is old and so am I. So I just accepted it.

I have an older PC which was decent for the time: i7-870 + 8GB RAM + GTX 560. I pulled it out of mothballs to test EQ and see just how bad it was under DX11. I upgraded the old 5400RPM 40GB drive to a 128GB SATA SSD and installed fresh Win10.

For drivers I took the default WHQL chipset, audio, network, and USB drivers pulled down by Windows 10. But I downloaded the latest NVIDIA drivers - which in the case of the GTX 560 1GB GPU meant they were last updated 3/23/2018. Nearly six years old. This isn't looking so good. Adjusted the screen resolution to match the 1920x1080 60Hz monitor.

I migrated the game files over via network, leaving all the .ini files behind. Downloaded the launcher and pointed it at my new EverQuest folder. Install complete. I clicked Advanced Settings and opened Game Configuration. Enabled everything except Mip Mapping and Texture Caching. Chose 1280x1024 since 1080P wasn't an option. Then ran a file validation. Validation Complete. Here we go.......

Got to server select. Windowed mode. Ugh. Switch to full screen. Ahh, better. Chose my server. A scant 8 seconds later I am vaulted to the Character Select screen. Windowed mode. Again. Ugh. Switch to full screen. Grr, please stay! Select my character who happens to be in the lobby - in the middle of the lag pile.

12 or so seconds later I'm looking at a default UI layout and many, many bodies floating around me. What's that? What? How can that be? They're floating, yes. But they're floating so smoothly. How? What is going on??

Prepared to experience stutterhitchpocalypse I brace myself as my hand slides over the mouse, holding right-click. I move. I move again. I spin around. I look up. I look down. I do the thing you NEVER do in Lobby. I looked directly at the lag pile. And it's..... smooth. So smooth I can NOT believe it. I am in utter shock.

This isn't a dream. It's real. This old system that's probably worth around $15 runs EQ better than my $5000 top-shelf gaming system. And not just by a little bit. It's a HUGE difference. Smooth. Stutter-less. Enjoyable.

I am a reasonably intelligent human being. I love technology and tinkering. But I cannot explain this. Since this event occurred I attempted to repeat all the same steps on my main gaming PC in an effort to duplicate the very desirable results on my old system. Nope. Didn't happen. Same results. Maybe I gained a little bit, but not enough to make it the butter-smooth experience on that old GTX 560. High FPS on the GTX 560 system? No. I get 14 FPS when looking at the lag pile. But it's a stutter-free 14 FPS!

If the kind of gameplay experience I am having on that old system is possible - SURELY it's possible on new hardware. Or am I just dreaming?

30fps in the lagpile for me 11700 w/ 3070

My rarely used FX8350 + GTX1030 @1440p runs DX11 just about the same as DX9. I don't use it much (just to check my trader or move characters about before the evening session maybe) as it's my 'work'ish machine, but it's fine. I haven't touched any ini files on any of my machines, all three have updated themselves from dx 9 to 11

I have an old system, and the recent hotfix improved the situation to the point it runs like it did on DX9. Everything is pretty smooth other than doing things like being in the lagpile.



'WTS 10-year-old graphics card. 5Kr'

Using a Radeon HD5450 2GB here in a 16GB Dell system with a core I3. The Inspiron 620 that had more cores doesn't fire up the HD5450 even with what I think is a 500 watt power supply. I have my doubts about the 500 watts but I have no tester to plug into the main power connector and no desire to move the power supply in my working system to test it. I may be getting close to EoL myself.

Why do so many people play in fool's screen?

Had a similar, though I guess opposite, experience to Zilendar. On my old graphics card, an RX 580, I ran into almost no issues after the DX11 patch. I could run through the lag pile (PoK on my server) with nothing except the usual lag. Nothing terrible.

But maybe three days after the patch, for unrelated reasons I upgraded my gaming PC to an RX 7600, and suddenly it was terrible. Being anywhere in PoK meant stuttering frames unless I looked at the ground and used the map to navigate. Looking in the direction of the lag pile, even from the other side of the Library hill, meant it got worse. And actually being in the pile meant stutters that could take up to 3 seconds to update. Even some odds zones like The Deep would start stuttering too if I looked in certain directions.

After the posts about modifying ini files and a few hours testing settings, I could be in PoK again without getting sick. And the update yesterday seemed to help some, but the lag pile still stutters uncontrollably.

Throughout all of this, I also play on a laptop when I'm away from my desk. It has an RTX 2050 in it, and has never had any of these problems. The lag pile has never stuttered on it. I've never had an experience before where the better your hardware, the worse something runs. Unless I guess if you count Windows 98 crashing if you had too much memory installed.

I prefer to play in fool's screen.

I don't know anything about DX programming, but can the programs query the DX layer to see which functions are enabled in the card? Perhaps older cards have fewer functions and EQ takes a simpler path when rendering the graphics. If you have a newer card with more features, maybe EQ takes a more complex path with more conditional checks about how to render things. Just a wild guess. But if that's the case, maybe there would be a way to force EQ to take the simple path no matter how advanced your graphics card is.

I think it has something do with performance.

Only reason for me is that i like to see the UI on a high resolution monitor.

You don't need a specific function for that, you just know when you call the D3D11CreateDevice function on the client's device and it fails. You should throw up a nice pop-up box at that point instead of a crash.

You can check if the client is running Windows 10 or better by calling IsWindows10OrGreater.

If you want to know which verion and support your own sytem has, click start and run "dxdiag".

Is D3D11CreateDevice just to get the DX11 driver? Are all cards expected to have all the DX11 functions? Or can some cards have a more limited set of DX11 functions? That is, can a card say it supports DX11, but it only supports functions A, B and C of DX11? Or do all cards need to support 100% of the DX11 functions if they say they support DX11?

Hardware specs are deceptive for EQ. Modern games are built to run off of gpus far more than EQ is. The program wasn't written to use hardware in the same way as current games are.

Game programmers don't directly interact with GPU or drivers (they used to, back when Matrox and 3Dfx were making GPU). A programmer interacts with the API layer DirectX, which is a good thing, because it offers a level of abstraction where GPU manufacturers can change drivers without breaking every game.

Drivers are in the kernel graphics subsystem of Windows, highly restricted due to the damage a program could do to the stability of the system. Even regular desktop programs don't have access to this space, they interact through GDI+ and Direct2D libraries.

Those DX11 "extended feature sets" like 11.1, 11.2, 11,3 and 11.4 are rarely used. And you will be notified if the client doesn't support these functions because you will get an invalid argument if you call these functions, which you properly error handle.

I run a windows 7, nvidia 1050, the dx11 update has slowed down loading times. But I don't get stutter, I run new models everything turned up except shadows and advanced lighting. The only time I experience lag is raiding. What is this lag pile you speak of?

Something about EQ seems to be giving new hardware fits. Yes I'm sure there are old systems that have been phased out by this update. But the majority of the issues I've seen posted about seem to be newer systems, the ones that should have gained the most benefit from upgrading the game...

Every server has a zone and a specific spot in that zone where everyone stands around waiting for people to throw out buffs. For some, it's in PoK...for others (like on Drinal), it's the lobby in the general area in front the magus. That's the lag pile...sometimes people refer to it as the buff pile.

I prefer to call it the fleshpile, it sounds dirtier. And yes I know what the lag pile is. The point being made was it doesn't cause lag on every system, and mine is a literal potato. So something else is going on.

could also be the OS. Windows 7 development stopped 9 years ago

I wonder why you never upgraded to Windows 10, an upgrade which was (is?) completely free for Windows 7 users. They even allow users to use the Windows 7 activation key to activate Windows 10.

A GTX1050 is still a nice card, great for some indie gaming in 1080p. Why not move to Windows 10 for better support.