Greg's Place

Bogoa2000

Hey folks I find Greg really kool and thought some of you would enjoy his place. I always wondered why MMO dev.  never took advantage of new technologies=cost+production waste to gain little (for older games). So does this mean buying a $3000 super gamer laptop is just a waste of money to play EQII or anygame that predates 05'? 

Reason for the question:

 https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11200283&postID=7920920586871988302

Nadia

thanks for link

this explanation by Greg gives context

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Rather than focus heavily on splitting the CPU load across cores, I would guess that our biggest (EQ2) performance gains would be accomplished by completely removing some of the processing from the CPU and moving it to the GPU.

Unfortunately EQ2 was written to support Geforce3 video cards which only support Shader v1.1. So all of our shaders are written in ASM and would have to be upgraded to HLSL which is a huge amount of work.

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I do recommend going to the link -- much more is said than this quote

fozzie22

The single worst thing SOE did in regards to EQ2 was saying the engine was "future proof"..ohh how thats come back to bite them on the ass

Nadia

from that link in the 1st post, this commentary was made

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Greg based on reading your information it seems to be a complete waste of money to buy new extream computers for EQII since the technology will remain the same or will the code change at sometime to take advantage of these latest greatist V.Cards?

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and Greg made a recent response

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We're working towards improving client performance on new systems but don't have any concrete information or dates to release at the moment.

Currently, the following hardware upgrades may improve EQ2 performance.

Increase RAM (up to 4gb)
Increase hard disk access times
Increase CPU speed

CPU's with multiple cores and SLI setups don't currently offer significant performance benefits for EQ2.

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openedge1

The quote I find interesting....

" Unfortunately EQ2 was written to support Geforce3 video cards which only support Shader v1.1"

This has started me thinking...

There is a tool located here

DXTweaker

Which as part of it's options has the ability to force shader versions. I wonder if using this would allow the 8800 to run the EQ2 exe more efficiently. May plan on looking into this...

Another part is his quote...

"Currently, the following hardware upgrades may improve EQ2 performance.

Increase RAM (up to 4gb)"

Excuse me, but one of the issues currently with the client is if someone has 4 gigs and a non 64 bit OS, the "Application out of memory" error occurs or various other issues due to a mem leak. That is...unless you alter the code to make it "Large Address Aware"...and if anyone knows what this is...doing it breaks the EULA...so, I lost respect for him for that one...

3 Gigs...a 7x Nvidia card or x19x or 2900 or 3800 ATI series card and a CPU with a 3+Ghz on one core is the optimal setup..(yes, it can be dual core...but each core better be 3+Ghz)

Later

 

 

Nadia

Originally posted by openedge1

 one of the issues currently with the client is if someone has 4 gigs and a non 64 bit OS, the "Application out of memory" error occurs or various other issues due to a mem leak.

I'm running  4 gig  on XP with 8800 GTX 768mb

Dual core 2.4Ghz

- no tweaks or alterations

 

no issues with EQ2

- never had an out of memory error

- never had the application quit on me

 

with XP running

I have access to 2.6 gig free RAM

and it drops down to range of 1.5 - 2 gig free with EQ2 running

 

its my understanding that the extra gig is still being utilized by my 32bit system

(altho I forget how)

 

openedge1

Originally posted by Nadia

Originally posted by openedge1

 one of the issues currently with the client is if someone has 4 gigs and a non 64 bit OS, the "Application out of memory" error occurs or various other issues due to a mem leak.

I'm running  4 gig  on XP with 8800 GTX 768mb

Dual core 2.4Ghz

- no tweaks or alterations

 

no issues with EQ2

- never had an out of memory error

- never had the application quit on me

 

with XP running

I have access to 2.6 gig free RAM

and it drops down to range of 1.5 - 2 gig free with EQ2 running

 

its my understanding that the extra gig is still being utilized by my 32bit system

(altho I forget how)

 

Interesting...and yes...it is being used. The way to tell if your motherboard is allocating it correctly is to right click My Computer and go to properties, and it will state how much the OS actually sees. For example, it will usually state between 2.5 to 3.5 Gigs ram...

The reason for the allocation is for the video card...and with you using a 768, it will probably read closer to 2.5 Gigs.

What motherboard is that by chance? Now, I am interested in why you are NOT crashing...and if it has a bearing on what causes the crash. As well, do you have all the expansions? Do you go to Neriak or Kelethin? How about Kylong Plains? And finally...is shadows off?

Thanks

Nadia

yes I have shadows off

 

I only lag in Neriak if I run *two* EQ2 clients on the same computer

 

my system is Dell XPS 710

www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2058400,00.asp

 

CPU listed on my invoice my last May:

Intel Core2 Duo processor E6600 (2.4GHz,1066FSB) w/Dual Core Technology and 4MB cache

 

 

openedge1

Originally posted by Nadia


yes I have shadows off
 
I only lag in Neriak if I run *two* EQ2 clients on the same computer
 
 
 

And sound card? (Shadows on is one known issue)

Nadia

Sound blaster X-FI

 

I always running EQ2 in "windows mode"  if that makes any difference

I  have all expansions  (already leveled 2 chars to 80 )

 

Originally posted by openedge1 Interesting...and yes...it is being used. The way to tell if your motherboard is allocating it correctly is to right click My Computer and go to properties, and it will state how much the OS actually sees. For example, it will usually state between 2.5 to 3.5 Gigs ram...

states 3.00 GB in the My Computer properties

quaiky

I also have been running eq2 with 4gb ram for some time now without problems, and from posts i have seen i had more the impression that the huge amount of out of memory crashes was a cause of direct x10 using more memory than direct x9 when displaying same things (which has ben happening most often with nvidia gfx cards so might have been that driver). and withthe program not being compiled as  large address aware application windows doesn't allow it to use more than 2gb ram, so it crashed as soon as it wanted to allocate additional memory over the 2gb mark.

So you probably did not really gain anything with more than 2.5gb ram (2gb for game + 512mb for windows) till now.

but now they made the testserver client large address aware with last test patch.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=412209

- The client is Large Address Aware, meaning that you are much less likely to run out of memory if you have 3GB or more of RAM and are running either the 64-bit versions of Windows or have modified your boot.ini to support 3GB user address space.

so i guess the normal cleint will also be large address aware with next patch and then you will have even more advantages with more ram.