Test Update 9/26/2023 - Patch Notes and Discussions

I'm going to guess that those fixes were for people who were unable to run EQ under DX11.

Because the issue I reported earlier is still there. That is that the performance is worse than under DX9.

I logged into Test recently in hopes this patch had fixed it. Nope, moving around the Plane of Knowledge finds the game just stuttering. On Live with the exact same setup, everything is smooth as butter. On Test with DX11, the game stutter makes it unplayable.

This is the exact opposite of what is expected. The same level of graphics (same pixel count, etc.) and yet a more advanced API (DX11 vs DX9) actually makes graphics performance worse. It should make it better, or at the very least, the same.

Despite my PC running DX12 and being fully DX12 functional, EQ makes things worse under DX11 than DX9.

Now it appears that, without any optimization on Test server, Darkpaw is pushing this live October 18. I can only hope that in the time between now and then, there will be some massive optimization going to happen. I say it "appears" there will not be optimization, because the time left to test it is only 14 days or so and that's not even counting the "design lock" that happens several days before the patch is pushed live.

Highly disappointed at this point.

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Are they pushing a lot more fixes soon ???
This does not feel like it is ready for live at all.

As someone who tests things on test server regularly, I can agree that this is worse than before. However while performance overall is worse, the worst issues have been ironed out. However there are still glaring graphical issues such as textures exploding and discoloration of textures.

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Interesting. I am seeing pretty much the same baseline FPS, but peak performance is much higher. I am running Ryzen 5500, 16GB RAM, AMD 6600XT. 1440P resolution.

What's your hardware setup? I have noticed that the game tends to default to people's iGPU instead of their discrete. I am not sure why this is. You can override it in drivers I believe but you really shouldn't have to. This should definitely be looked at.

If you have bottom of the line iGPU graphics that barely support the DX11 feature set then yeah, you're probably in for a bad time. If you have anything even remotely modern it should run at least the same or better. My guess is something is askew but you give almost no information so hard to help.

Two biggest issues I see now are:

1. Defaulting to the iGPU instead of discrete.
2. People have old .ini files with things like texture caching enabled that seemingly cause things to break. These shouldn't be used unless you're on a PC from 99-2001 (and a crappy one at that) anyhow but something should be done to ensure that these flags set in the ini file don't cause people to just crash to desktop. From what I've seen the client could just ignore them and not use them and everyone would be better off.

Would be awesome if a Dev could be bothered to write up a guide to recommended graphics options for DX11.

I think instead of requiring people to do that an update should either change the offending values (although some people leave their .ini as read-only for whatever reason) or the client should be updated to ignore them. mip mapping, texture caching, and texture compression should all just be disabled for everyone. If at this point you have a videocard that somehow only has 32MB of vram or something you need to upgrade. In the modern era these options don't provide value and they seem to be the biggest offenders. Plus, if you have them on they make your EQ experience worse. Mip mapping and texture compression make the game look awful but a lot of people still have them enabled.

That would help me.

One thing I don't fully understand is why the video seems chunkier with EQ on DX11 than DX9. Others have mentioned it as well. It seems like there are fewer intermediate frames with DX11 and the video looks grittier than with DX9. With DX9, doing something like turning from side-to-side is really smooth, but with DX11 it's like it's skipping frames or something and the video doesn't look as good. It's harder to look at and gives me a bit of eye strain. I've tried deleting eqclient.ini, but there was no difference.

I have an old system and and old video card--I'm sure that's part of it--but it's still the same system either way. I would think that the performance of EQ on DX11 would at least be equal to DX9. Technically EQ still works, but the decrease in video quality will likely have an effect on how much I'll end up playing if this is how the DX11 performance is.

The choice of GPU adapter is fixed internally.

Is this going to the Test server soon? Because the deadline that Darkpaw has set of Wednesday, October 18 leaves very little time for testing this.

I'm a big fan of DX11 in theory but there seems to not be enough time for testing and tuning. At least I'm hoping that there will be tuning (and testing) done before this goes live.

You probably have mip mapping enabled on live, on test you probably have it disabled (especially if you deleted eqclient).

Yes after some more internal testing.

There's some complexity of GPU adapter selection based on eqdevice.txt (the user's legacy choice from EQ Launcher's Game Configuration) and having multiple adapters available. We want to honor the user's choice unless it poses a problem and try to fallback in that case. Some user's are running multiple instances of EQ and assigning them to different GPU adapters. So it can be intentional that it's not the best available GPU or even DX11 capable.

Is there a mechanism to regenerate eqdevice.txt outside of the Game Configuration (is it necessary to regenerate the file)?

Or am I interpreting the wrong way, and eqdevice.txt is not necessary and only a legacy artifact of the game configuration tool? If its a "GPU selector" file from before drivers really handled switching on their own, seems like it would be unnecessary to respect now that GPU switching should be handled on the driver side?

No (and no, you can even delete the eqdevice.txt file if you have only one GPU, but see below ... ).

Let's call eqdevice.txt the user's preferred device that we want to honor. The ways it can fail is that it's not a DX11 capable device or it's restricted from use by Windows 10 or driver settings. In that case we want to fallback to a capable device and not exit (or crash).

I have to imagine devs feel the same way, but this seems like a really good reason to prioritize modernization of the unsupported/not recommended game configuration tool now. If this is the only way to prefer a device from the game settings (and all the other settings that you would have to have intimate knowledge of eqclient.ini otherwise), and because running the tool is going to reset your resolution because of the limited options, we really need a new method. It's also non-obvious that "select your video card" is whats happening on the first screen of the tool, and likely most people with old installations may not be aware of their GPU selection.