How is Everquest 2 Performing for You?

Processor: AMD Athlon x2 dual core processor BE-2300
Ram: 4gb
Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce 9500 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 Ultimate Professional
Screen Resolution: 1280 x 1024
Frames Per Second: 18

This is with 10 players in the zone. However, I run most often on "High Performance" (I get about 25 FPS there) because anything higher is hellaciously choppy and laggy. And forget about running through Toxxulia Forest or raiding on anything higher than extreme performance. Its a slideshow.
This is the second machine I've run EQ2 on since launch which, even though I don't have the best system in the universe, there's really no performance difference between my old Pentium 4 and my AMD. *shrugs* I just assume I need a top of the line machine to run a 5 year old game efficiently.

Ironhide@Oasis wrote:

QFT!!

How is Everquest 2 performing for me?

Like utter crap!

You said it all, We can just hope SOE Eventully comes to their senses, a major engine update should have been done ages ago, they could even charge for an engine update (include it with a future expansion) and I'll pay for it.

Ironhide@Oasis wrote:

I left the game for about 11 months. I come back and it's worse. I run an older PC. I have to use my raid settings to just quest now.

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 2.70 GHz
Ram: 2 x 2 gig DDR2 Ram (4 gig ram total)
Graphics Card: ATI Radeon HD4350 512mb
Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Internet connection speed: 10mb+ cable connection

Frames Per Second on Balanced (mid setting): 10-16 fps
Frames Per Second on Extreme Performance (lowest setting): 27-33 fps

I purchased this game last week... considering my system specs... this game runs horrid.

I've decided not to continue playing this game for this very reason. ( For the record - this is an awesome game, i'm truly dissapointed i can't play it)

I have played this game since launch and really haven't ever had a problem with running this game, i started off with an amd athlon, and currently use an i7 975. Personally I'd check on the drivers your using ATI maybe changing something in them to make your performance worse, possibly and older one would be better. I have always run Nvidia cards on this game and even with my old 7950gt i could get 30 fps in balanced.
Currently I use:
Intel i7 975EE
6GB Corsair Dominator GT DDR3 ram
EVGA x58 Classified Motherboard
Corsair Nova v128GB SSD
EVGA GTX480
On Extreme Quality it runs 60fps mostly cause i use the Vsync, but with shader 3.0 there are a few issues not so much with fps but some the older shader1 models try to overlap the 3.0 ones and so you just get black screen under your ui and names.
Over the years tho nvidias drivers have been tweeked and tweeked so it has progressively become better on their cards.
TWIMTBP for the win i guess.

Processor: AMD Athlon x2 3800+ (2.0 GHz)
Ram: 4 GB
Graphics Card: GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB
Operating System: Windows 7
Screen Resolution: 1920 x 1080
Frames Per Second: 17
That's using the High Quality preset at the Moors of Ykesha airship dock, as the OP suggested. Going down to the "High Performance" preset only gets me to 20 FPS in this spot, and even "Extreme Performance" can't even get me to 25 FPS. Oddly, going to windowed mode and moving my curser outside of the game gives a boost to performance. The UI is just a massive resource hog, I guess.
EDIT: That's with Shader 1.0. Shader 3.0 lowers performance for me (and makes some things look worse, in my opinion).

AMD Phenom x4 20, 3.2 Ghz (Phenom X3 720 Overclocked and Unlocked)
4 GB PQI DDR2
Radeon 5770
Windows 7
FPS: around 30ish
Setting: Balanced, with textures on all max.

It varies quite a lot with this game. This is a fresh brand new install on the system above on a new HDD. I get around 25-45 most of the time. Wish the game ran better, but whatever, I'm just glad I can play it now, I came from an Athlon 3000+ with a Radeon 3450 and a gig of RAM.

Was surprised (after using the trial) that EQ 2 runs smoothly at default settings on the following:
Processor: Intel i3
Ram: 6 gig DDR3
Graphics Card: Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator HD (Core i3) (yes, that is integrated graphics)
Operating System: Windows 7 Premium
Screen Resolution: 1680x1050 (HP w2207h)
Frames Per Second:
I did not go to the recommended place because I had not figured out how to get there, but since the game ran well on this budget desktop PC, decided to go ahead and subscribe.
Antonia Bayle has a ton of people running around and although the FPS is not stellar compared to others (around 25-40), it is smooth and very playable (much like playing a console game).

My rig:

AMD 6400 Dual Core 3.2 gig.
XFX GeForce 8800 GTS 512.
4 gigs Atlas RAM
2 Seagate HD's - dual boot XP (with SP 3) and Ubuntu Linux.

As far as performance goes.... terrible right now. I have an open CS ticket to resolve an issue (that hasn't been looked at yet). I'm one of the many that is suffering from random screen 30 second screen freezes about every 1 to 2 minutes of game play. Basically, I log in run around for about a minute or two - then the screen locks up for about 30 seconds - then it "let's go" and the game runs smooth again for another 1 to 2 minutes - then it locks up again for another 30 seconds - then it releases and back to smooth play - goes through this cycle continuously.

Had this problem before after a patch - then upon a later patch it "went away" - now it's back.

Right now, it is not performing well. I've gotten the BSOD three times in the last three days. Once, it was preceded by falling through the world in Lavastorm (not immediately preceded, but that happened at some point before blue doom kicked in). I started my own thread to report the problem, but got no response, so here it is again:

Started the client last night, brief update, character select screen, noticed a brief 'warp' in the background, didn't think much of it. Started game graphics went bonkers, blue screen of death. Restarted computer, everything seemed normal, restarted game, things seemed fine, zoned from guild hall to Lavastorm, blue screen of death. Restarted computer, but the graphics were bad from the get-go, and it was stuck in 800X600 (I think that's right). Decided maybe my BFG NVidia 9800GTX/OC had taken a dive and called it a night. Talked to a friend who happened to have saved the two NVidia 7800GT's he'd replaced a year or so ago, and he gave them to me. Installed one (only had room for one) and got everything back, or so I thought. I had uninstalled and reinstalled EQII in the process of trying to diagnose the problem with my original card, and the game was still updating stuff ast I tried it out today. Seemed okay for the five minutes I was on, but I had somewhere to be. Came home, logged on, let the update complete before I tried to play and the graphics are screwy again, only worse.
Fade out from character select to whichever character I chose doesn't fade all the way out. Lots of stuff (all broken up) on the screen while the new area loads. Hotbars have blotches of open areas in the squares that should be black (full opacity), and what should be black borders on some windows is more like looking through a screen door from really close up. Took lots of screenshots, but they all look perfectly normal. I can't believe that I would have blown two graphics cards in less than twenty hours, so there's got to be something else.
I run Windows Vista64 Ultimate on a Dell Inspiron 531, AMD Athlon 64x2 5000+ processor, with a 19" and a 24" monitor (both flat screen), six gigs of DDR2 RAM, and have had no problems with this or any other game before the latest update. Didn't have any problems after LU57 either. Whatever small change happened yesterday that required a tiny update to the game did it. Any ideas?
Oh, yeah; while I'm here, I should mention that I fell through the world in Lavastorm yesterday. Turned left and all the hills were gone. Not sure where in the mix of the mess I just described that it happened, but maybe the two are related.

Alright, that's the first two. The third one happened just after logging out. I had been in the game for a little over two hours, doing a lot of crafting and moving things around in my game house. I camped, pulled up IE, closed it, realized I'd forgotten something, so I tried to open it again, then came blue gloom. The only changes my game life has experienced in the past week are the EQII updates and increasing the size of my page file. Since I have almost half of a 320-gig hard drive empty, I don't see the page file as causing the problem.
I changed video cards after the first two times, but now I'm wondering if my card was really bad at all.

2 old computers, 2 very different outcomes.
HTPC running EQ2 on high quality with shadows off
Processor: Pentium 4 3.0 HT
Ram: 2gb Dual channel ddr2 533
Graphics Card: ATI HD4350 512mb pci-e
Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP3
Screen Resolution:1680x1050
Frames Per Second: 20-30
computer 2 running on extreme performance
Processor: Athlon XP 3000+
Ram: 1.5gb ddr 333mhz
Graphics Card: ATI HD4650 1gb AGP
Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP3
Screen Resolution:1680x1050
Frames Per Second: 7-12
I don't understand the huge difference in frame rate. Granted, the first computer is a little faster, but there is very little differnce in FPS in any other games on the two systems.

Mohrley wrote:

RAM on the second computer is slower and lower in quantity, plus that Athalon is probably running a good bit slower then the P4, and EQ2 is very CPU-intensive.

Barx@Antonia Bayle wrote:

I know computer 2 is slower(cpu/ram+agp vs pci-e), but it should do better than 7fps on the absolute lowest settings.
I tested on a 3rd computer running high performance
Processor: Pentium 4 2.66mhz
Ram: 768mb ddr 333
Graphics Card: nvidia fx5500 128mb pci (regular pci)
Operating System: Windows XP Pro SP3
Screen Resolution:1680x1050
Frames Per Second: 12-20
This is on high performance getting better than computer 2 on extreme. This with @1/2 the ram and a very old pci graphics card.
I am wondering if the cause is the hotfix agp driver for the HD 3xxx/4xxx agp series of graphics cards.
Anyone else using one of these newer ATI agp graphics cards?

I recently built this:
Processor: AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor
RAM: 4 GB DDR3 1600
Graphics: ATI Radeon 5850
Operating System: Windows 7 Home edition 64 bit
My monitor runs at 1280 x 1024

I get about 20-30 FPS in Very High Quality. Extreme causes weird stuff to happen like characters standing on their mounts and such and FPS goes into the 15-20 FPS range. This makes me very sad. I was hoping that this machine could run EQ2 on Extreme. I've now given up on running this game past balanced on raids. I use High Quality for soloing.

Processor: intel E8400 core 2 duo clock 3.0 ghz ( not overclocked yet )
MOBO: Asus p5k/se emu
RAM: 4 GB DDR3 1600
Graphics: Nvidia Zotac gfx 470
Operating System: Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit twinked for multimedia performance.
My monitor runs at 1400 x 900
im using shader 3.0 with textures maximed, shadows, particles, lightning also maximed tho lightining i enable only 1 source otherwise it eats my cpu.... in peak stress i get around 20 fps and when things are fine 50 +
this cpu s beast and quite cheap in the market nowadays....

I just built this system yesterday, all are at stock speeds:


Processor: Intel i7 950 @ 3.07

Video Card: nVidia 475 GTX

Memory: 12GB DDR3 RAM

Motherboard: MSI X58A-GD65

Operating System: Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

Framerate at Moors of Ykesha landing looking directly Northeast: 26-29fps with Shader 3.0 active, 42-45fps without.


Yeah I was surprised at this too, I should be seeing better frames per second here. I decided to go hunting to see what was going on a bit. Using EVGA Precision to track GPU usage, and Process Explorer for thread usage and Task Manager to monitor the CPU I was seeing some interesting trends:


1. Total CPU utilization was reported at 16-18%.Although the first thread on the first core was showing as pretty much pegged, and the other cores each had a thread active but utilizing very little if any time, this means the overall usage isn't even a single core's worth of processing power. I tried disabling hyper threading to test if this is a threading issue or reporting issue. Although the total usage was now reported at 31-33% there was no actual change (maybe one more FPS?) in frame rate on the client, which suggests a reporting issue.

2. GPU utilization was at 44%, plenty of head room left. When I changed the hyper-threading on the CPU the utilization showed a flat 48% utilization, but this is in the statistical noise area and could be from NPCs/PCs moving through the view. I activated Shader 3.0 hoping to get some of those nice new graphical updates with only a minor hit at best since my card's extra cycles are not being used. Activating Shader 3.0 dropped my FPS from 40-45fps to 25-29fps and my GPU utilization DROPPED from 40-44% to 28-31%. I thought this was supposed to push more content/rendering onto the video card, not the CPU? Definately one more thing to look into.

3. While the landing is pretty intensive I headed over to the Boarfiend Cave ballon landing area in Moors and looked down into the valley/lower area below. The FPS dropped to 8-14 and so I used this to tweak a few settings to get some better FPS. You might want to get the folks to use this or an equal area as a reference point since it has a wide range of graphic/rendering types (water, NPCs, particle effects, distance, etc) to get a better idea of whole rendering engine performance.


Of course shadows still don't work correctly on my card: moire patterns all over, huge amounts of flickering (almost seizure inducing), lighting/shadows disappearing depending on which angle you are looking, etc. I loved the look of Shader 3.0 since it brings so much depth back to the game world that has been missing without any shadowing available, but its just so intensive that I have to return to the bland world settings. Please take a little bit to look into this, I love the work you did and really want to use it.

i7 940 @ 3.2ghz (Minor O/C, bad cooler)
6gb DDR3 (Slight O/C)
Windows 7 updated.
1920x1080
Sapphire HD5970 4gb (stock clocks, essentially an x2)
10.5->10.9a ATI drivers
June DirectX release.
CPU temps are iffy, but they don't go into overheat range so I'm ignoring it.
The video card never breaks 60c under full 100% core load, even under things like Metro 2033 and Fallout 3 with 15gb of mods.


I've been able to get it into a playable range now with alot of tinkering.
Anything related to CPU shadowing is an abysmal FPS hit, as well as 3.0 shader.
The render engine barely uses my video card at all. (30-50% utilization on both cores when enabled.)
Managed to get AA working with some odd combination of settings.

Best performance and appearance is gained by setting it on "Balanced" then cranking everything except CPU shadows back up to maximum. (40-100 FPS in TD, still in the 30-50% GPU utilization range...)
Going straight to "Extreme" breaks pretty much everything, and "High Performance" is flat out too ugly.
Crossfire "works" but is a large FPS hit and causes problems with AA, best disabled. (Cat AI off)
FPS goes up with AA forced in CCC and r_blit whatever disabled. (??)
Small to no effect on performance (various areas and terrains tested, rough estimates, 3.0 disabled, AI disabled):
Lighting max is a 0 FPS hit.
Particles max is a 0 FPS hit.
Texture resolution is a very small hit (5% FPS hit min to max).
Flora is a 0 FPS hit.
Water options (10-15% FPS hit all min, to all max )
Draw Distance is a 5% FPS hit at max, minimal gain at lowest.
Complex Shader (20-40% FPS hit min to max)
CPU shadows (50-90% FPS hit. !!!)
GPU shadows (Usually broken, ATI related, as far as I can tell.)
Model Res (5-10% FPS hit, depending on count)
Animation settings max 0 FPS hit.

I understand the quirks related to ATI cards and drivers, and while it irks me having an idle GPU core that's acceptable as very little really needs two. I do not understand why a game with this much content, and obvious attention to detail and skilled effort put into it - has such a "iffy" engine.

I need some help with screen message displays. I have three characters but one of them doesn't show me the advancement messages like it used to. Also when I enter a new area or have completed a step in a quest I don't get the message in the upper middle of my screen like I used to or like I still do with my other two characters. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks.