Graphics performance on newer PC's

I'm curious, is Daybreak ever going to update EQ2's graphics engine or some of its other internal coding to make it more multi-thread friendly? Eq2 has only ever ran on 2 threads essentially and it does a very poor job of offloading graphics processes to the GPU vs. rendering things directly on the CPU.

I've got a 32-core threadripper system, 128gb ram, Titan X GPU's and the game doesn't perform any better compared to any of my PC's from the past 10 years or so (been playing eq2 since launch).

I realize that this game suffered from this same issue long before Daybreak purchased the asset from SoE but I think the time has long come for some strong under the hood changes if the game is expected to last much longer.

Adding content is great but when the game looks and performs from something back in 2008, its sad.

I like the way it looks and, if they make any updates, I hope it doesn't change the way it looks.

They can't update the graphics without rewriting the whole game engine, is the problem. They had graphics people in years back, which is where we got GPU shadows, but graphic improvements will belong to whatever "EQNext" actually turns out to be.

I've got a 3-core system, 8gb ram, gt240 GPU (I have video card three times weaker than yours. You have 384-bit, and I have 128-bit) and the game is perform. Your system is clearly over-productive - like overweight. and not everyone wants to ride Ferrari, you know

I fully share your point of view in this matter. And I think that very many also have the same opinion

Everything is much simpler. DB knows who plays on which machine. Why do you think they should make new graphics if they know that the overwhelming majority play (and will play) on machines that are much less productive than that of the author of this topic?

They will never update the game engine...ever.

Play with your post processing settings on your gfx card and it can do wonders on how EQ2 looks

I agree. I have a high end system, spared no expense and I play on full ultimate setting and average about 100 fps with much faster load times. EQ2 never looked better. I was playing on a puny Sony Vaio at launch lol

Maybe they will have VR support when they update the game engine.... It will never happen.

They can do a lot to update graphics without changing the way the game looks. Its all about the fine details and in game constant animations. I agree that the original design concepts and base render models look and feel fantastic, but there can be significant improvements to a lot of aspects of graphics. Similar to what Dark Souls did when they remastered Dark Souls 1. It is outdated and could use a facelift. But realistically, their art team of 3 people will never actually find the budget or time to do that.

I run a 8 Core Ryzen 7 2700x 32gb 3200 mhz RAM with a 11gb Radeon VII GPU, and noticed no difference in graphics from 8 years ago to now.

As far as I am aware, the game engine is ALSO the graphics engine. Graphics is not a separate module that's easy to tinker with.

You can get your graphics to improve by adjusting your settings, to some extent. There are a lot of CPU intensive graphics settings that don't actually do all that much to improve the look of the game. There's a guide that explains what the various graphics settings are doing, and it tells you which ones are hogs.

shadows are the killer.

Re-writing the game code to take full advantage of GPUs and multi-core CPUs would be an expensive and lengthy project, and would be unlikely recoup the costs. Yes, it would take re-writing nearly the entire game to do it. Maybe if you won the powerball and donated the necessary funds...

This thread makes me reminisce. Old age has not been kind to my memory, so I am probably completely wrong about 5+ things mentioned below.

The year was 2010. A beautiful year, and EQ2 was in the SF expansion. SF wasn't the best at launch, but came to include a good run of content and progression. Life was so much simpler back then. We were all younger, bright eyed and full of hope.

A Game Update (GU56) heralded an update that held so much promise. Talk of a feature that could offload a lot of CPU intensive graphical processing to the graphics card, thus freeing up the CPU to process other things, made many a player giddy at the thought. It was Shader 3.0 support.

A cautionary tale of aspiration versus reality ensued.

Before Shader 3.0 was put on live servers, the proposed benefits were dialed back again, and again, and again. The announced performance benefits fizzled to very minor. Shader 3.0 had issues with making some things look like plastic, and not all textures successfully translated into the new system (fluro green is a great look!). Additionally, various system configurations would have lag and crash issues, especially if water reflections were involved on some Nvidia GPUs, which was amusing given the Nvidia logo placement on game startup.

Support and development for Shader 3.0 was cut back before it even went live. And after it went live, it was quickly cut back to little more than one guy trying his best, but the task was impossible.

After lingering for a little while, Shader 3.0 was inevitably pulled. And with such, even the most remote chance that EQ2 would ever see any graphical or engine improvement, died.

And here we are the present. Someone is hoping a game engine created (and abandoned) in the early 2000's can be upgraded to run EQ2 better on their 2019 rig. I can't blame a guy or gal for having a dream, but this one seems unlikely to eventuate. But heck, if I am wrong, what a wonderful thing it would be to see!

OP’s system makes my “gaming” rig look like a toaster but it runs eq2 maxed out at 1080p well above 60fps sometimes in the hundreds. Do you really need eq2 in 4k? My 2018 MacBook Pro can run eq2 in 4k on Windows 10 maxed out but it’s not necessary, I wasn’t impressed.

My gaming pc-
16 gigs of ram
i7 8700k (forget how many physical cores and threads but it’s more than I need)
RTX 2060 6gig (even before this I had an amd (ati) RX460 w/ 4 gigs and it still ran fine.
Eq2 runs from an SSD only

How can we help OP run the game better?

Gee, I have no graphics card. Mine uses the chip on the motherboard, and I have a total of 4 gigs of ram. The video chip has 128 megs. I do lag a bit when there are lots of characters on my screen, or just as the rain starts up, but otherwise fine. Oh, and I don't have a SSD hard drive. Do have a new 40" screen though.

My CPU has, I think, 2 cores.

And I agree, software has to be written to address extra cores which can be expensive.

My opinion is that good CPUs, and home computers, don't need extra cores. Its more a marketing thing than anything else. Like how hard drives are still mentioned in adverts. In large print '1 terabyte !'. In very small print '900 megs after install and setup'.

nice mother

Please explain this a bit more please. I do not see "post processing" settings in Nvidia control panel.

My previous Win 7 computer had a 1 gig video card. I don't remember such settings either.

I think that in EQii we are limited by capabilities of dx9. And post-processing becomes visible on newer version of dx (specifically, newer api direct3d is needed).Post-processing principally uses 3D rendering. Go to OpenGL Rendering GPU, and you can see it set as auto-select, choose your nVidia graphics card from here as well. Also make sure your video driver is signed, that he is -whql (nothing else comes to mind. Wait until end of W7 support, and as result, forced transition of DBG to W10 support and new dx).

Easiest way is to use Nvidia Freestyle and play around with the settings until you are satisfied with the looks.