Wasn't sure if this belonged here or in support but.. What does this truly mean, technically? What did they do to the client and servers? Can client now utilize multiple cores? Is there some sort of new SSD support? Better W10 support? No more CPU bottlenecking? Better FPS while in densely populated areas? IS THE UI FINALLY GETTING UPGRADED AFTER 16 YEARS??? Just wishing they had expanded more on what this means now and for future releases. There isn't even a blog post somewhere explaining the significance of this, aside from briefly mentioning dropping some legacy OS support. The vagueness is frustrating.
Unlikely the ui is getting upgraded this patch or else there would be a lot more ui files noted in the patch post.
They changed how the client is compiled, I know that so we might see some performance increases from that.
I'm also speaking about future patches, not just this exact and only patch. This patch going forward.
This will be interesting to see. I know my 770 card never moves past 50% processor utilization even when I start dropping frames, like in the Guild Lobby. If the changes can better utilize modern graphics cards then that would be awesome. But really any performance increases are welcome.
This was one of the more interesting patch notes to me, and I also wonder what this means. Does this mean multi-core support? Does this mean updating older DX 7 and DX 9 calls? I don't know if it's still in place, but years ago a dev had made a post that EQ was written with many DX 7 calls, and they had to use DX 9 wrappers around those calls rather than natively making graphics calls to the GPU with DX 9. With DX 10, 11, and 12 support on video cards being pretty common today, I'd love to see if those old calls were upgraded to improve performance (maybe they already have been). Somewhere in that old thread was a comment that the old DX 7 code meant the GPU had to draw everything on the screen, even if it wasn't in your actual view (trees, caves, and characters behind mountains, even if all you saw was the face of the mountain, etc). I'm just going off of memory here, so I could be remembering this inaccurately, but at any rate, for a game that's been around since 1999, any improvements in performance are appreciated. I just want to know exactly what those performance improvements mean!
I'm pretty worried my I S boxer based usage of EQ is going to run like trash after this update, but I'm hopeful it'll be better!!
Well, they are no longer limiting themselves, in order to stay backwards compatible. They are very vague about this, but it seems like there will be more "upgrades" coming in the future. My first thought was updating to a newer directX, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part. EQ could really use an updated 3d-render, for example. or better multi-core support. This good be really good news!
Seems to be faster at cashing textures after entering a new zone, or maybe its just because zones aren't crowded yet...
Last night some guild mates where saying the sound is a lot louder, also I have noticed a couple people saying that zone geometry is wonky in some places (ARX). So it looks like they did indeed make changes to DirectX calls and or something in the way the game interacts with the system. Good news that they are making changes in this department.
Devs, please drop us some clues or breadcrumbs or something. I didn't get a chance to play at home last night so I will run some tests tonight. I want to say things looked prettier when I logged into the Test server last week, but I can't say for sure. I have a client installed where I am at the moment, going to see how that performs as it has much lower specs than my home PC.
Here are my initial observations from the low spec PC I'm using at the moment. Specs: AMD A8-5500 Quad Core 3.2ghz 4GB RAM Shared with Video Card, 3.2GB available, 800MB for Video ATI Radeon 5580 integrated video Windows 10 I've played quite a bit on this PC recently and it always felt a little sluggish. The cooling fan for the processor runs on high constantly when the game is active. This cooling system is different and you can hear when the fan kicks into high gear, very clearly. That is with max FPS capped at 49 and background FPS capped at 21. Clip planes are just below half and all other settings are low and group + npc only. Shadows off, etc. Playing today, I haven't heard the fan kick on to high even once. That is running around Shadeweaver's where it definitely did before. Processor utilization is improved, specifically the video portion. Normally the video card eats about 15-20% of my CPU on top of whatever the game uses (integrated video). Now it's bouncing between 5-12%. There is no graphical lag at all, whereas it was common before. This is really impressive for far. I played for years at home on a Radeon 5570 so I'm used to the card's performance. I'll run some FPS tests on my GTX 770 at home tonight and check the performance there. I'm expecting to see a serious improvement, hopefully the Guild Lobby is packed so I can give it a real good test.
I noticed things running somewhat smoother last night as well. Faster loads, no clipping, etc. with 4 clients running. I had also done a fresh reboot that I hadn't done in some time...which begs the question. @Roshen what'd you guys do?
They changed the toolset to vs 2013 (or even 2015?) from vs 2010 Haven't had much time to look at it closer but a major patch for sure.
Issues with the lobby are likely due to the huge amount of graphics that have to be loaded in order to cover all of the illusions/pets/mounts people have running there. I wish they would just disable the buff timer suspension in those zones, that would remove the incentive for hordes of parasites to sit in front of the guild hall entrance all day. Alternatively, give us a clicky that takes us directly to the guild hall so we can avoid that stupid lag fest in the lobby.
