I've just made a character in Cabalis, seems like an easy graphically intense starting area. I see spikes of 30% GPU utilization here and there but mostly sits under 10%. Also if I sit and spin my camera until I'm sea sick (using right click hold) my CPU utilization sits around 20% all cores. You've said you only see 1 core being used so thats something to look at. There is a line people have added to eqclient.ini to force the use of 1 core 'CPUAffinity#=-1' (where #=each CPU core and -1 means to not use it). There were bugs in older wine versions with multiple cpu cores and directx9, but I feel like those have been fixed since wine4.0 and up.
You have also said your game detects or at least shows a mislabled video card. It is possible it could be you have a rare video card and its picking one that is generally close in family. (I have seen this in laptop video cards) But it is something to raise an eyebrow at.
What video card does everquest detect for you? In the back of my head when I see nouveau I can't help to think you might have onboard video not fully disabled.(the module needs to be blacklisted , usualy nvidia driver install will do that for you)
Also you said really bad lag with 100+ people, I assume you mean low FPS (also how bad is bad? for me anything under 20 is rough for a non shooter game) which further makes me think you still migth be using nouveau drivers.
I know the game is old. But that video card isn't much better performance wise than a GeForce 7900 from 2005. Definitely woulden't expect amazing FPS all the time.
For a point of reference I am using Wine 6.0 64 bit , Linux 5.11 , nvidia 460.56-6
|