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Since launch of this game they always talked about they built the system to be able to scale with upgrading your rig. I was wondering what most people play on. Home built? Store bought? laptop? What has your experience been? I have noticed since I got back into Norrath a couple weeks ago that I take forever to load zones and the game seems to lag out more than it used to. I have a pretty good home built PC but I would think it would run EQ2 better than it does.
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From personal experience, tons of memory helps - I got rid of a lot of laginess when I doubled from 2GB to 4. In theory, the biggest delay zoning is disk access, so the SSD upgrade I'm planning in the next few weeks should make a big difference. From what I've read, raw processor speed is another biggie - it's largely single threaded, so multiple cores don't help too much (other than by giving everything else on your system somewhere else to run!); the more MHz the better. All that said, I'm pretty damn impressed with the smoothness of EQ2 on my laptop; ok, it does have 3GB of memory, but it's a laptop so I'm guessing the disk isn't that great.
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If you install the SSD drive would it need to have windows installed on it or could I run it as a seperate drive with EQ2 installed on it?
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There's no reason why you couldn't run it as a seperate drive for EQ2, and leave Windows where it is - but you'll see a big all-round improvement if you can get Windows on there too. The big thing to remember is that you still want a standard HDD to keep things like your swap space on, because while SSDs are blisteringly fast on read, they aren't so suitable for that kind of heavy read/write cycles that swap files will have.
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ahnlak wrote:
In theory, the biggest delay zoning is disk access, so the SSD upgrade I'm planning in the next few weeks should make a big difference.
My SSD upgrade a few weeks back is the best upgrade I have ever had for EQ2 except my last big video card upgrade. It has increase my zone load times literally by 10x. Battlegrounds is a great way to benchmark this. If you are with a group and everyone hits accept at the same time (and your all on the same server) you can usually see disk access times via who gets into BGs the fastest, you could really do this with any zones, BGs just seem to reload EVERYTHING each time (because you technically move servers?).
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ahnlak wrote:
The big thing to remember is that you still want a standard HDD to keep things like your swap space on, because while SSDs are blisteringly fast on read, they aren't so suitable for that kind of heavy read/write cycles that swap files will have.
Spot on with this. I have Win and EQ2 and some coding stuff on my SSD. Everything else (files, media etc) are all on the NAS.
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Cyanbane wrote:
Spot on with this. I have Win and EQ2 and some coding stuff on my SSD. Everything else (files, media etc) are all on the NAS.
So is that a must have to install Windows on the SSD to improve performance in EQ2? (just wondering if windows routines are constantly being loaded too and from the HD while EQ2 is playing). Currently I have the SSD just on its own running EQ2 and Planetside (for a laugh :D sometimes I hit 360+ FPS). One other thing I heard about was that while EQ2 currently doesn't support multi-cores very well (Imago-Quem the graphics dev did mention that multicore was a hot topic around the office a few weeks back) I did hear that DirectX11 is optimised for multiple processors, what that translates to in extra speed though I'm not sure, but if it can spread some of the GPU servicing routines it has to help. Currently running a PhenonII 955 3.2Ghz Quad core + ATI 4870 1Gb with 8Gb DDR3 (I wanted to try to setup a Ramdisk for the swap file but it didn't really work out - need more ram!), most areas run ok at extreme settings but some do slow it down (typically get 20-30 FPS at extreme outdoors though), Kunzar jungle and the waterfall area in Moors of Ykesha are two such areas. Sundered Frontier does slow down too ocassionally, but that seems to be when its overcrowded (I've seen 4 of them running at once on Runnyeye although most days now its just 2).
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Lomax wrote:
So is that a must have to install Windows on the SSD to improve performance in EQ2? (just wondering if windows routines are constantly being loaded too and from the HD while EQ2 is playing)
No I think the improvement of EQ2 would be minimal by installing Win on the SSD. However you windows speed will increase by a large increment. Thats why I have mine on the same drive.' As for DX11, I don't think that you will see any large improvements in EQ2 as it isn't optimized for it in any manner, and with the way it is lagging on implementing multi-core support I would not hold my breath thinking it would be anytime soon.
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On the bright side, the lack of multi-core support does mean that EQ2 runs almost as smoothly two-boxing as it does with only one instance running :)
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I built my desktop about 2 years ago. I have a 2.4 Intel Quad, 4GB of RAM, 320MB Nvidia 9600 and 64bit Windows7. EQ2 seems to be fine mostly, but since BattleGrounds came out the servers overall have been lagging. Some nights it will take my raid 15 mins for all of us just to zone in somewhere. Its going to be time to upgrade soon... maybe with next years tax return.
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