Optimum Performance, Modern hardware?

[Knuckle]

Everquest is a pretty dated game, I'd like to share my specs on my current rig to see if there is any tips folks have to get blazing fast load times on zoning, as that's really the only limitation the game presents to a modern machine.

1.) Haswell 4770k CPU (any settings I should disable that could impact everquest with modern intel software in the bios?)
2.) Gigabyte windforce GTX 770 4GB Ram (anything custom I should adjust on the gpu?)
3.) Samsung SSD EVO 840 500GB(I have my EQ Folder as such : C:/Program Files(x86)/Sony/Everquest
I've turned on all the high performance SSD settings that I'm aware of.


I know there is Hyperthreading and Intel speedstep that could perhaps negatively impact the game, so I was curious if anyone had done any testing and found an optimal way for the game to run and load fast with modern hardware.

[talian21]

About the only way to significantly speed up the game/zonetimes with a modern PC is to run EQ from a RAMDisk.

[eqgmrdbz]

EQ was made to run on old PC's, it could run on dial up modem, and old graphics cards. SO modern day graphics or fiber is not going to help cept maybe for connectivity and looks. Having a better processor, using a SSD or like someone said a Ramdisk, would help a lot i think. I am currently not using these 2 things, so i cannot give you a diffrence measurment, but i figure zone loading would be super quick.

[Kaleadar]

This has come up a few times in the life of the game. Even with the best hardware, internet connection, and loading EQ into RAM you still still have about an 8 second delay on zoning. It has to do with the code of the game and restrictions of the client itself. Some rumor that this was put into place by the Devs to prevent the use of zoning as an exploit.

[Kaleadar]

What makes me think it's a forced wait on the client is because the window will freeze and will go into "not responding" mode after about 5 seconds of hitting a zoneline. That happens under 1 of 2 possible conditions for programs:

1) The client code executed the sleep() function for a fixed amount of time and the executable is essentially frozen (windows thinks its hung, hence the "not responding" text in the titlebar if you try clicking and moving the window while its frozen for zoning.

or

2) The client is doing SO much work that it can't process anything else - usually accompanied by 100% cpu usage.

Since we're NOT seeing any extraneous disk usage, cpu usage, or bandwidth utilization, I doubt it's #2. It's gotta be a sleep() in the client to prevent people from exploiting zonelines for quick aggro-drop.

My brother and I setup our own eqemu server to see what was going on server-side. It takes no time at all to transfer a character from one zone connection to another...

One other 3rd possibility could be that the client (being 13 years old) is using mostly non-asynchronous network functions. I have a hard time with that one since the game updates are UDP based (connectionless) and the connection transfers during zoning happen really fast so even if it was non-async it shouldn't be a show-stopper for so long.

This is like one of life's grand mysteries.. why does EQ zone so slow... lol

Source - http://www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30870

[eqgmrdbz]

Interesting :)

[Knuckle]

Must of been patched in at some point, I remember briefly on vztz getting like 4 second zone times.
Thought it was a setting on my software/hardware slowing it down.
This makes more sense.

[Bazia]

i got a SSD and i zone in like 5 seconds now

[Rhun]

I have a weaker PC than you and its blazing fast. However what I found out is that my graphics card gets used the most (GTX660). Especially when I crank up AF and AA I get 100% GPU usage all the time. I had it up to 32x AA and it was very slow when only a little bit was happening on the screen (like a big pull of mobs or lots of corpses). Even 8xAA was still too slow sometimes. So right now I am using 4xAA and its very fast, even in very extreme situations like Chardok 120 pulls. Like that is has around 50% GPU usage on average in EC tunnel.
Oh and I run 16x AF and the upgraded textures. I dont run WinEQ.
So get a fast GPU, if you want to have the best quality!

I also noticed limiting EQ on just one CPU core makes it perform worse (I am lucky that I dont get any stability issues with 4 cores I guess) and it will always perform faster when you run it in fullscreen instead of window. So if I ever get issues with performance I do a swift alt-enter and the game will be much faster.

Loading time is shortened by an SSD, but as said before, there will always be that long delay before the loading bar appears.

[Derubael]

Even with the best hardware, internet connection, and loading EQ into RAM you still still have about an 8 second delay on zoning.

Yep.

I have an old laptop that's a 1.5ghz dual core with 2gigs of ram and windows 7. Onboard integrated graphics. Ran EQ fine except with lots of people on the screen. With loading art turned off and everything set as low as possible my load times were around 6-10 seconds.

On my new computer w/ quad core and 8 gigs of ram i still load in 6-10 seconds :) and I haven't heard anyone report load times faster than that.

[Atalya]

Non SSD loading = 10 seconds +
SSD Loading = 5-6 seconds other than EC