I have a 6600k and a NVidia GTX 970, yet this is unplayable. I don't get it, at all. I used to be able to play this game just fine on a Radeon HD 6870, but now that daybreak got a hold of it, a high-end gaming machine can't play freakin' everquest 2??? It's 2016 and we still can't play this game on a quad-core? I thought they moved most of the resources over to the GPU a few years back. This should not be happening! Plz help, as I already paid for a membership, would really like to actually be able to play this game.
The EverQuest II game engine is more than a decade old, and it was written at a time when it was believed that CPU capacity would be doubling yearly. High-end graphics cards with their own GPUs hadn't been invented, nor were multi-core architectures. The only adjustment to take advantage of the GPU is GPU shadows. There's no way to actually rebuild the game engine. At some point, DBG needs to either build a new engine, or better yet, adopt one of the existing game engines and rebuild EverQuest over that new engine. Meanwhile, you can vastly improve your play experience using the Guide to Optimizing Display Performance, Rebooted. Just ignore most of the first post there until you get to Performance. Then follow the instructions. There are a LOT of graphics settings in EQ2 that don't do diddly for your visual experience, but do hurt your framerate. Adjusting these as the Guide suggests will help your framerates and overall play performance.
I did have some issues with the NVIDIA drivers on my PC-two-before-this-one, and like Feldon, I had to go through the rigmarole of uninstalling video drivers, then installing an older version of the driver for that card. Or you might just have an OLD driver and need to update. HOWEVER, under the "cause least harm" doctrine, at least try the Graphic Optimization steps first before you go to the drivers. Before you start making driver changes, let's find out what you have now. (1) Click the Windows Start button, Run, then in the box type dxdiag and hit Enter. That opens the DirectX diagnostic tool, which gathers a lot of useful info about your machine. (2) When it's done assembling data, click the Save All Information button, and tell it to put the file somewhere you can find it. I usually save mine as C:\dxdiag_yyyymmdd.txt (3) Once that's done, you can close the dxdiag window. (4) Now, open that file you just saved. Notepad.exe works just fine for this. We want to see just a little bit of that data, mainly the card name, manufacturer, driver file version, and the driver date/size, so grab the chunk describing your display driver and edit out the lines we don't need. On my current machine, it looks like this: ---------------Display Devices---------------Card name: AMD Radeon HD 5670Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.Driver File Version: 8.17.0010.1404 (English)Driver Date/Size: 11/4/2015 12:00:00 AM, 1479808 bytes This will give you enough information to be able to intelligently select a possible new display driver. First, let's note where the possible replacement drivers are to be found. NVIDIA GE Force Drivers for Win10 NVIDIA GE Force Drivers for WinXP, Vista Win7, Win8 If you have an old driver, I'd first try updating to the most current driver to see if that helps. If you have the most current, I'd try backing up one version at a time to see if that's better. Generally, the advice is to completely uninstall current drivers before installing new. NVIDIA has an article on how to uninstall your current display drivers.
if your current monitor only has a refresh of 60 - 75 MHz or lower then you will experience a lot of MONITOR lag. Cant run a high end video card on a low end monitor. Monitors with a refresh as mentioned above cant handle what the card is pushing so it " BottleNecks" and you see it as video lag. Asus Gaming Monitors have a 144 MHz refresh and a 1 millisecond response time. Cost is $200 - $250 US dollars and can be purchased " special ordered" at bestbuy or online. With a 144 MHz refresh it even makes a POS video card look amazing. The monitors with a 60 - 75 MHz refresh will also have a much higher " millisecond response time like 5,6 or 10 or higher. You don't want a monitor with a high " millisecond response time" or a monitor with a low refresh rate Think of monitor refresh like frames per second and follow this analogy: You have a nice video card and this card is pushing lets say 150 FPS " frames per second" but here is the problem your monitor can only produce 60 - 75 FPS " frames per second" aka 60 - 75MHz. If you thought your video card alone produced all that you see then your wrong because if that was the case then a monitor would not be required. Being it takes two pieces of hardware to produce what you see " video card and monitor" then both must be up to the task. Hope you find this helpful
For what it's worth, I get a much higher framerate on Windows 10 than I did on Windows 7. Forcing me to finally give up Aero did wonders for EQ2's framerate. XD
some details that are missing from the original poster is, "Error messages;" "Operating system(s);" "actions taken just before issue occurs;" etc. None here on these forums (that I know of) are clairvoyant, we can not read minds,... and I for one, will NOT take things for granted. Providing the exact details of the occurrence should greatly assist in finding its resolution.
Well yes, but I was having problems running EQ2 (have a monster gaming rig, go figure, and even on reduced settings I often dip to 12-16FPS, ugh), so I did a search for a bunch of Video settings info/fixes. The only problem is, sometimes I get 144FPS and then randomly it still dips to 12-16FPS (even on a cold boot, no computer problems, runs well otherwise). Still working on it.
