Shader 3.0 before & After

Shader 3.0 Awesomness:

As compared to Shader 1.0

Running on:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 197.45
I'm also getting random hard pauses. I thought it was locking up, but now I realize if I wait 30s to 1min it resumes.

Soooooo Shader 3 means no white robes
From snow white to plain gray
Cloak of scale preety much took all the detail out of the dragon ...cause its now a flat gray
That alone made me turn it off ...


Shader 1 looks better and performes better.....what a waste of time imo.

unfortunatly i dont have the time to read though everyones post to see if someone mentioned this or not but thought i would let u know Vig zones are one of the dark problems zones....just a fyi =]

-Zoria

Imago did his best, as he said, game is huge, there over thousand armor pieces.
it not ready, but can turn on if need for new 3.0 undates, get all the feedbacks to find what missing in next coming months. take your time, Imago.
just 2 things, find out what causing to go dark and why framerates suffer a big drop/or what crashed.

i think it might be light ambient may have pointed in wrong way, it seem the bright light were coming from ground level and instead of standard "overhead" light should had pointed down as we suppose to 'cast a shadow'. so i guess the highlighted ambient were set too bright.

The hard pauses seem to be related to the amount of items being rendered quickly , I logged my 2nd character in in-front of my mystic , as soon as the illusionist on her cat mount appeared...the mystic 'hard paused' , I thought the game had frozen.

I went to close the game instance and closed the wrong one (the illy) , as soon as she LDd and dissapeared , the game ran perfectly well again.

I re-logged her in again and it was fine .

Most Wierd.


The 2nd named (eel) in Vasty Deep , Conservatroy is only in Wire Frame with Shader 3 on as well..

How often will we see updates/fixes for Shader 3.0? Art fixes are only patched at Game Updates. Does the same apply to shaders? Will we get quick patches or only every 3 months?

I'll bug this in game also later on today, but when shaders 3.0 is enabled I can't see my queen gwarthlea hat, the medusa one you get from the door quest. If I enable hood/helm it just shows it as a naked head, where it used to be green hair and medusa type snakes.
Otherwise GREAT job, I think 3.0 looks great and this is the sort of thing that will keep me around.

A couple of observations:

• When I have my personal torch on it used the colour from my weapon graphic instead of a normal torch colour. I have the katanas from the Hua Mein faction merchant with sparkly purple effects. When I turn on my torch the light is the same purple as the weapon.
• Lizard mobs are overexposed.
• Centipede mobs same.
• The Vigiliant zones are a jumble of random colours. Its very hard to make out what the zone is tbh.
• The Library of Erudin is exceptionally dark throughout.
• There is a huge frame rate hit with GPU shadows enabled.
• Some objects in the world are unaffected by ambient light levels such as the "frame" around LON wall hangings.

That said - I did Evernight Abbey last night and the zone looked absolutely amazing with shader 3 on. Very much win there.

i went to befallen cavern yesterday and i got so surprised hahaha
its great... the zone s as dark as a real cave...and u HAVE To turn on the personal torch to see stuffs....and i found it so nice...like old school style i hope people wont complain bout it...
ow and mentionin again....
the game s crashin for some people when u alt + tab or if u change from full screen to windowed or windowed to full screen...
my graphic card is geeforce 9600

Lantis@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Tried 3.0 again using the May Catalyst release. Saw no difference in performance - still losing nearly 40% of my framerate in Moonfield Hamlet. Your FPS boost might be related to HD5xxx-specific optimizations in the new driver release I guess.

Atan@Unrest wrote:

I couldn't have put it better.
There is a huge problem with the way SOE is handling this mmo. We the people who pay their salaries, operating costs, are also paying for the development of all their other mmo's, meanwhile back at the bat cave they continue to scrimp on resources for EQ2, their most popular mmo.
After i canceled my accounts i felt great, yahoooo, no more coming home and beta testing any and every new feature, Battlegrounds, Shaders, new content, new zones, armor, adornments, the frigging list just goes on and on.Everything they started doing in EQ2 since their new mmo's have been underway a couple years back is reeking of amateur or severely understaffed. Clearly the talent has moved on to other companies or other soe mmo's.
Here is what i want, i want to come home and when i have some time to play, i want to... i know this is going to sound very strange, but i just want to play the game. Yes i know it's a foreign concept to eq2 players after the last few years, but that's all i want to (explicit) do!
I don't want to hear that we the players have to help if we want shaders 3, this is what we pay you for, this is absolutely outrageous. Why would i want to continually pay to help beta test, if this is the case then start paying me to play. Wholly (explicit)!
It's an absolute joke what you are doing to the player base. They come out with exorbitant priced mounts, and tell us they want it to be exclusive so that "ONLY" rich players or people with no money sense are using them and that the money is going towards development, which is honest, as it is clearly going towards development, just forgot to mention that it's SOE's other mmo's.
There is no perfect mmo, i know, there is going to be an issue here or an issue there, but Battlegrounds, Shaders, the last two expansions have had gargantuan problems, they scream not done, not tested, understaffed, i easily accept the odd thing but this is just running on and on with everything EQ2 for far to long.
Dunno what else to say, just glad i'm out.

Imageo, ignore the Troll please, I know you have been working on this for months on Test and have seen the changes there, I also understand that Live particularly on AB is a very different environment.
Skin colors on live are out of whack, and I mean more than just the plastic doll look that the Fae/Arasai have been hit hard with. Perhaps this has to do with the problem with the white tones? I have noticed with my characters that they are darker, or different all together from 1.0 and the hair is simply suffering, again the Fae/Arasai are hit the hardest. Eyes have changed too, my Kerra's red fur went nearly black and her green-yellow eyes turned neon. My Arasai Warlock's wings did stay black and blue but are now dipped in oil, her fair skin is now brown, her white hair turned blue (blue was her highlight color) with no texture, her blue eyes turned grey. My Arasai Rangers wings are now more red and gray than red and white, also dipped in oil (really is hard to fly that way!), her green eyes are grey, her skin did get darker, but not as much as the Warlocks did, but the barbie doll look is very apparant on her. Her hair also lost texture and is now a bright red (sorry, I think her base color was either a darker red or black) so it looks like the base color was removed.
Environments in most places looks great, but there are oddities, the umbrella trees from the rings (Jarsath oak?) is blighted with white squares on its leaves. I was not even able to get into the building of our T3 before I crashed in the courtyard. Yes, I am noticing an overall darkness that did not seem as apparant on Test.
In all, character models and armor need help the worst, this includes mounts, after the crashing issue is fixed.

Keep up the hard work!

Who said you cant enable AA with shader 3.0 on anyway?

Nvidia users can use Nhancer to force AA, look at the big torch in both pics
But it's wierd, in some parts of the pics you can see AA, and in other parts you cant.
with 16xAA



without AA

Look at the balloon in this pic, on the top side you can see AA working, but on the struts underneath looks like it's not
AA Supersampling 2x1
Gamma Correction
Transparency AA 8xsupersampling
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Ambient Occlusion

AA Multisampling x32


Gamma Correction
Transparency AA 8xsupersampling
Anisotropic filtering 16x
Ambient Occlusion

Shader 3.0 is off for me even though my card supports up to shader 4.0.
But then, my card is fairly old - a GTX260 - so I shouldn't really judge. It's like wading through molasses with the shader on but then I haven't experimented much either.

Throw that old video card away, I can't believe you would use a card that's a year old to play eq2. I've upgraded my video card twice since yesterday!

I'm a big proponent of Shader 3.0 but sadly I had to turn it off as well - not so much for FPS reasons as I'm not overly impacted by that - but the amount of things that are either the wrong color (the parrot on my shoulder look like he has a nice sheen of ice over his whole body) or pitch black (the first room in Research Halls looks like it is surrounded by a giant black moat).
C'est la vie - I was very much looking forward to keeping that bad boy active.

Tallisman wrote:

! with a modern card like that you should be seeing an improvement over shader 1 performance, definitely. I would enable then get into playing with settings.

shaunfletcher wrote:

No matter what setting I try, I get a massive loss in performance on my 275.
I really can't grasp why so much time was spent on this project.