EQ2 uses PS/VS 1.1 only

Perhaps that's part of the fundamental performance problem of these games. They can't performance profile them worth a damn.

 

Fox5,

Take a look at Hardocp, they have been using City of Hero's for a few. This was quite nice because at the time I was playing CoH with my Ati 9500 Pro and I was getting terrible FPS. Online games are very hard to get repeatable benchmarks but it would be well worth it to the many people that play these types of games.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=Njg5LDc=

Dr. Ffreeze

 

All,

Did we ever figure out if EQII only uses 1.1 PS? If so, any info from Sony as to why? Any idea of the speedup in performance if/once these 1.1 PS get converted to 2.0 PS (could we get an idea from any other game's increase in performance that switched from 1.1 PS to 2.0 PS to get a vague idea)?

Dr. Ffreeze

 

I have tried it with my 9800 Pro, Geforce 6800 GT, Dumped shaders for over an hour. Ended up with a 2 megabit shader.out file and saw no evidence of any shader above 1.1 calibre. I'm not sure how complicated it would be to reprogram EQ 2. But I suspect its pretty complex engine.

 

looking at eq and swg , sony will just let hardware advance to make up for engine problems

in a year or two with the r600s and the nv60s no one is going ot care anymore

Sony did this with eq1 when the geforce 2s came out and the problems were largely solved

With swg the x800s and 6800s came out and no one has performance problems

 

thats if you asume that the game will be shader bound at any point and its not , its def ram starved .

 

Eh EQ 1 was programmed with Voodoo2's in mind. It wasnt until the Luclin engine came out did T&L become an optional requirement.

 

who was talking about tnl ... the fillrate and bandwidth increases solved the problems of the engine by the time the geforce 2 came out .

 

Hahah, T&L for those 200 poly chars...

I think the Unreal 1 engine may be less demanding than EQ's engine. How high is that on the disgustometer?

 

I would beg to differ. By the time Geforce 2's were mainstream. The engine become bottlenecked by its new engine.

 

i disagree , its new engine came out almost 7 months after the geforce 2s and it wasn't widly used for another year after that.

I remember as i bought it for my sister the first day it ame out and there were a handfull of people in the new zones for many weeks and months

 

Wasnt widely used? EVeryone updated there engine to play on Luclin. It's not like EQ 1 expansions were really optional if you wanted to enjoy them. I Said Mainstream By the time Geforce 2's were readily available from top to bottom. The game was already out and it ran like crap on them.

Hell Luclin was huge. Back then it needed 512 megs of memory + 1 Ghz processor to run at full quality and even it still slowed down.

 

Food for thought,

I put up with more in EQI as I was both hooked and because EQI was the only game in town (that I liked). I will not as easily gloss over engine issues with EQII. I was unhappy with how crappy EQI ran on raids and in the bazaar much longer than just after it was released.

EQII is kinda on probation with me, I canceled the account and I hope to prove a reason why I want to renew before this billing cycle is up. I did just complete Zec and EL access quests, was both fun.

JVD, does this mean that 1GB is not enough or 2GB (presuming the mem leak is fixed)? I am running 2GB and don't notice it swaping (not really paying attention to it though). I forsee a time when EQII is not ram starved, that is if 2GB is not more than enough right now.

Dr. Ffreeze

 

Nother Thought,

If Sony takes that attitude of writing a sub par graphics engine and will just wait until hardware gets a few generations better, I don't think they will do as well as they did when they did the same thing in EQI.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE how EQII looks but if it is using only PS1.1 and as a result those shaders are running much slower than they need too then I am not interested. If however they had some killer shaders that actually needed PS2.0+ (maybe even some that only ran full speed on PS3.0) then I would be more understanding.

Again if EQ2 would run +20% faster (made up number) OR run with many more effects if they made are more robust 3D engine that was better able to fully utilize available hardware BUT they decided that 3D optimizations where not a priority then I suspect they will lose many customers.

Ahh well,
Dr. Ffreeze

 

which is why people notice performance increases by lowering the texture quality and lod ?


Weeeeeeee

 

My friend upgraded to 1.5GB of RAM and he still gets swapping occasionally on High Quality or whatever the setting is called.

His Athlon XP 2.5GHz, GF6800 GT, 1.5GB RAM, WD Raptor all struggle to play the game decently. He loaded up HL2 and Farcry and was just sickened at how much better they ran (and looked).

It's insane.

 

well its a lot diffrent when u know u will have 20 chars on the map at once and can optimize for it , compared to having times when there are 8 and when there are 500 people in the same place.