Does SOE have any plans to optimize EQ2?

Poisinivy · Feb 18, 2013

yep they sure do they have had plans to do this for 9 years now

Avirodar · Feb 18, 2013

Sigrdrifa said: ↑

“Honestly, I've been playing EQ2 since the beginning, and with each new alt I make I still find tons of new stuff to do. Visually the game is beautiful. What most people have issues with is because they have some huge graphics card, but not much RAM... and when the game core was designed, it looked like ever-increasing RAM was the future. Instead, graphics processing and memory has increasingly become more loaded onto graphics cards.

Several easy ways to improve performance:

If you have more than one physical HD, put the EQ2 game files on one and your pagefile on the other. I usually put the operating system, pagefile, etc. on one hard drive, EQ2 on another. The slowest part of any computer action is the read/write from a physical device, and by getting the pagefile away from the game files, you can have them both doing R/W at the same time rather than taking turns.

Seems obvious, but a lot of folks don't do this. Defrag your hard drive(s). I put this on the scheduler to do middle of the night once a month or so.

Get rid of trash and temp files. Look for the free utility CCleaner by Piriform, install, and set it to run every time you boot. You can configure what it cleans and how, but just getting rid of temp files, browser caches and the like can make an enormous difference.

The harder one now. There used to be a fantastic guide to optimizing graphics performance which has, alas, vanished into the mists of time is still available on the old forums. The basic principle is: Start the game, click the EQ2 button, and open Options. Turn on the Advanced view. Now turn all the graphics settings to minimal. Then, start with one and see what it does, all by itself, at mid-range and high settings. Turn it off, then check the next. The game will do more spectacular graphics effects than most computers really can cope with. I find that turning OFF bloom, turning foliage off or down, limiting reflections, and limiting particle effects helps TONS. I also turn off third party overhead combat spam (its in the Chat Bubbles settings). Turning shadows off or down can help. Etc. Some effects just don't seem to provide me much bang for the processing buck, so I turn those way down. This makes EVERYTHING faster.

Note to self: See if I can bring myself to write a new graphics optimization guide.”

Before you write a guide, you may want investigate a few things.

As another poster said, EQ2 was not designed with the knowledge of multicore CPUs, or powerful / multiple GPUs. You brought up RAM, which is going to be low down on the problem list for any PC built with a semblance of balance. It is easy & cheap to get more than enough RAM to run the operating system + EQ2. RAM has only ever been a factor for people who have disproportionately spec'd PCs

As far as EQ2 is concerned, the ability to transfer information In and Out of a single core of a CPU, is the single biggest factor. It is far from a conclusive check for a whole system, but as far as CPU's go, you can get a pretty good idea of how well a CPU can handle EQ2, by checking this site:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
And divide the processor score by the # of cores. (the tests run software that takes advantage of multiple cores, while EQ2 does not)

In this day and age, anyone trying to run with 4GB of RAM or under, is going to have problems with much more than just EQ2. Anyone running a 32 bit O/S is in a similar position. To help illustrate the point, I would love it if the old 386 rig down in the shed could run EQ2 like a dream... But times move on, and I will not act all offended because it can't run EQ2 in 2013.

Rotherian · Feb 19, 2013

VeilShard said: ↑

“THanks for this info, my hubby has been saying for a while now I need to get 8 gigs of ram so maybe this will help my performance..

As for what the others say yeah I always have felt this was the major reason why eq2 didn't become bigger at the time it came out and years later. It never plays well even on systems that can run all the latest games on max settings, and at the time hardly anyone could run eq2 on any more then high performance, i remember people quitting left and right because they hated the way the game looked at those settings. Other more stylized games have been making low graphic settings still look good while keeping the artistic look. Unfortunately eq2 things look very blobby so it's a fine line between what's acceptable to look at and what's playable. Personally I like the graphics even though they are very piece-meal as they have changed and evolved over the years.”

Another part of the game that has been fixed in some areas, but not in others, is that some of the shapes you see actually have a surprisingly high number of polygons. (I was talking to one of the designers at SOE Live 2012, and he admitted that as being one of the problems, especially with the older zones that haven't been revamped yet. It turns out that the zone artists back then, instead of using textures to give the appearance of variable depth on objects, actually created the objects with variable depths upon their surface - which increased the polygon count immensely. This is simplifying things somewhat, but polygon count and frame rate are roughly inversely proportionate. IOW, generally speaking, the higher the polygon count is, the lower the frame rate.)

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Does SOE have any plans to optimize EQ2?

Poisinivy Member

Avirodar Well-Known Member

Rotherian Well-Known Member

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Does SOE have any plans to optimize EQ2?

Poisinivy Member

Avirodar Well-Known Member

Rotherian Well-Known Member

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