Hello, I've been a player since EQ2 was launched and over time I've done some rather large PC upgrades. A few months ago I built this: - AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990 WX 32-Core - 128gb PC 2800 Ram - 512gb PCI-X4 SSD - Nvidia Titan X - Nvidia GTX 980. I use this machine primarily for application development as well as Cities Skylines. However, I still raid on a regular basis but am disappointed with the rather side-way upgrade (if any) I seen when I moved onto this new system. I was wondering if anyone could give me some pointers on what to change, update or some specific values I can change within the eq2_recent.ini to help my FPS. For what its worth I like to play with most settings as max with the exception of flora and spells per character. I typically have to go back to pure performance mode when raiding otherwise my FPS is near 20. Standing in Doom Fire right now and I am averaging a pathetic 43fps. Screenshot to prove build specs: That one core at 100% is the core EQ2 is currently deciding to run upon. Thoughts?
WOW ...... looking at my mass of computers, sigh ...... This won't be a consistent platform, but here goes. You're likely aware that 'EQ2 is CPU bound.' It's ridiculously CPU clock speed bound. Here's FPS for four different systems: Four characters standing next to each other outside the Doomfire portal. ~100 FPS - i7 6700 3.8 GHz ~120 FPS - i7 6700K 4.0 GHz ~120 FPS - i7 7700 4.0 GHz ~135 FPS - i7 8700K 4.4 GHz No numbers, but I remember an i7 2600K 4.5 GHz running faster than the i7 6700 3.8 GHz. So it's the usual faster clock, more FPS. Running EQ2 at 1440p, with dual monitor 1440p and 1080p setup. Different graphics cards, but with the graphically sparse location it makes little difference. The same four standing near the portal inside Doomfire: The Burning Lands, optimum graphics setting. 52 FPS - i7 6700 3.8 GHz - RX 580 8GB 62 FPS - i7 6700K 4.0 GHz - GTX 1070 Ti 8GB 52 FPS - i7 7700 4.0 GHz - RX 580 8GB 67 FPS - i7 8700K 4.4 GHz - GTX 1070 Ti 8GB The graphics card does make a difference here. But overall it's clock speed determining FPS. Compared with your rig: 43 FPS - 3.43 GHz You have the superior rig. In any other game you'd burn through the competition. Unfortunately EverQuest II is all (mostly) about clock speed. Leaving the Intel i9 9900K 5.0 GHz as the chip to get the most out of EQ2. Until July 7th, when AMD Ryzen 3000 one ups Intel. Hopefully others with chime in with numbers.
Sorry. Forgot to mention there was no one in the zone. When people were in, out, and about, FPS dropped 5 to 10.
I am a bit rusty on this, but I remember two settings in EQ2 options that might help. One is to allow dual cores and the other is to shift shadows to the GPU. I can't remember exactly where those options are, but they were buried somewhere in the Advanced settings. My system is seven years old with: i7-4790K CPU at 4.00GHz, 16 GM RAM, and 8 cores. I don't get great FPS, but better than you are getting, so I suspect the settings I picked way back when help.
As mentioned above EQ2 is stuck in the past with CPU rendering for the majority of its graphics, But also unfortunately the rendering of the zone and its population has a very large impact on your FPS. Running a single 1080ti at extreme quality in an empty Village of Shin zone I am averaging 125-130 FPS. Intel i7-8700K 6 core OC 4.4 Mhz, 16 GB RAM, Turbo GTX 1080ti 12 GB Soon as I it a raid I am standing still at 3 FPS on those settings, reducing it to raid settings while in a raid zone I sit around 40-50 FPS depending on the zone and if contested its around 25 if the zone fills. You mentioned two video cards in your build, but they are very different speeds, I suspect you are bottle-necking your performance and would do better removing the 980 card since the Titan is going to be throttled to the slow speed of the 980. The titan can can be OC'd quite well. I run three monitors off a single 1080ti without any hassle. Without starting a troll war on the age old battle. I have tested multiple builds using AMD vs Intel and none of the AMD's have ever run EQ as well as the Intel's. AMD's superstructure does list high core counts, but without going into boring details they are not constructed to perform the same as the Intel hyper-threading. But that's just my two cents. You can always revert your in game settings to the very basic and start working your way up to get to the peak performance that you would like. I hope this helps some.
There's a Guide to Optimizing Display Performance here in the forums. It's a bit dated, but it explains the various settings and what they do. Even on a very high end system, because the way the core EQ2 game engine uses CPU for most graphics rendering, there are some settings that just aren't worth the very slight graphics improvements they give,because they're expensive in terms of performance.
