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System Specs for High Graphics Settings
Solkin
Member Posts: 25
Hiya!
I've been playing EQ2 for a while now and really like the game. I am about to upgrade my computer and wondering what kind of system specs are people running at the highest graphics settings with, or even if it's possible?
With my current setup, I can run on the "Average" setting fairly decent, but it will still chop and lag pretty harsh in certain areas. This is what I am currently running:
Intel Pentium IV 2.53ghz
1GB 266mhz DDRRAM
ATI 9700 Pro 128MB
Sound Blaster Audigy 2
560GB Hard drive (Total with 3 drives)
...and various other things, which are top notch like dvd writers and stuff, which really doesn't matter for the task I want it to perform.
Anyways, yeah, It's time to upgrade, just wondering if anyone can run this game at the the full graphical settings well, and what they are using to do it with.
Thanks!
~Solkin
Comments
I run the game at the second highest quality setting with the following specs:
AMD 64 2 Ghz
2 GB ram
NVIDIA 6800 256
It can lag at some times (when there are 12-20+ people on the screen at once), but it runs pretty well most of the time
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
There are no machines currently on the market that can run EQ2 at Maximum Settings.
I have a AMD 64-bit dual-core mobo and a nVidia 7950 GX2 video card and I can only manage High Quality with some additional tweaked settings. The only thing keeping my rig from being the best of the best is that I'm not running in Quad SLI.
Anyone saying they're running EQ2 at maximum EVERYTHING, simply put, is lying.
However, at High Quality on a good monitor (Dell 24" LCD), looks fantastic. No worries.
My pc lags in raid on highest settings all over.
Need to lower it to medium settings to run smooth in raids.
Specs:
3.4 GHz Intel
4 GB Ram
ATi x1800 xtx
and raptor HD
I posted this a few days ago in regards to a PC I built for a friend who wanted to play EQ2, it plays on High Settings with Teak Up (lighting/shading/distance) as smooth as can be done. Fraps is notoriously inconsistent but we tested FPS Cap in low populated areas and 65 to 75 FPS in large group raid scenarios.
Hope this helps:
I just built a computer for a friend because she wanted to be able to play EQ2 properly and unfortunately her old PC just wasn't up to the task. She was on a fairly limited budget, around $1,500.00 taxes in (Cdn.) so while we didn't have to be overly cautious but price watching was important.
Heres what's important when your putting together a PC for an MMO. A decent graphics card is important, certainly, but most of the geomety, phsysics and file paging that comes with these games come at the expense of three things. Your CPU, Memory (RAM) and Hard Drive.
So here is what we put together for her:
- Motherboard: Asus P5N32SLi SE Delux $240.00 (Linky) We go with a strong mobo for better ram voltage, dual 16x PCI-E Slots, Phased piping Arch and ease of overclocking.
- CPU: Intel Conroe Duo Core2 6400 $250.00 (Linky) We're going with the 6400 instead of the 6300 for the extra pipe badwidth (from 7 to 8), a few extra natural clocks and it's OC potential.
- Memory: 2GB OCZ DDR2 PC2-5400 667 Mhz Gold $225.00 (Linky) With a natural CL of 4-4-4-12 at 1.9 Volts these things are MONSTERS waiting for clocking, yes you can spend MUCH more on Corsair, Kingston, Patriot and yes those DC Decks are awesome but OCZ will do it just as good if not better most of the time with a little less cost.
- Video Card: Asus Nvidia 7600 GT SLi $218.00 (Linky) All the power of a 6800 Ultra in a tiny little card, alone this card litte punch through pretty much any game you have. Remember that fancy mobo we bought with dual 16x PCI-E's? Well in SLi with these cards and that board, it's a match made in gamer heaven.
- Hard Drive: Mastor 160Gig Diamond Max10 SATA-II/3.0 GB-16MB Buffer $74.00 (Linky) There's lots of good hard drives out there but none, IMO, have the speed and agility these things have. Save probably the Raptor 10k RPM drives, no other HD can pump out that data BW to the CPU like the DM10 can. Awesome choice, amazing price. Only downfall, LOUD AS HELL.
- Sound Card: Sound Blaster Audigy 4 SE $49.95 (Linky) Sound cards are important and here's why. While mobo intergrated sound cards are pretty good now days, when used they take cycles from the cpu (of course) and while they may be minute in measurement, the cpu is still trying to figure out all the fun stuff related to pumping out 16 Bit sound. A small investment and you get quality 24 Bit playback and take away the responsibility from the mainboard.
- CPU Cooling: Zalman FS C77 $79.00 (Linky) We're going to be OC'ing the poor little Conroe until it begs for mercy so... at least as much as you can do that on Air-Cooling and for that we need dependable, quality air flow hitting the CPU.
- Case and PSU: Here we got REALLY lucky, we managed to pick up a Lian-Li V1000 Case and Seasonic 550Watt PSU off of kijiji.com for $100.00 and only slightly used.
- Everything else we had, DVD-RW, keyboard, mouse, UPC, speakers, mic, webcam and of course a perfectly legal copy of Windows XP Pro... uh, yeah
.
Bad Girl Total: $1,235.95 and with Taxes: $1,408.98 and Please keep in mind this is Cdn.
After putting everything together, some testing and breaking in period, she runs like a charm. We did manage to OC the Conroe 6400 to 3.2 and that's at starting from 2.18 (these cpu is a sadistic over clocker for people interested) but we fianlly decided on a 3.0 OC to minimize the wear and tear.
She runs EQ2 on High Settings with some tweaks going up, FEAR runs at or around 60 FPS at High, BF2 is just a simply a joke to this computer and a few others like Homeworld2, Oblivion, Rainbow Six were all smoth as silk.
All that for under $1,500.00.
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I have an intel 3.4GHz w/2gig of ram and a 6800 ultra.
I want to run at max settings (I want spell effects at least in raids) so have been watchin thoe quad SLI setups. I've not found a MB yet that supports it but I know dell has system coming out with it. I plan to wait till I get get the MB myself (not a fan of dell).
Imagine having 4 of those 1 gig video cards in you pc. I can't imagine your system would have any problem running anything. Right now my CPU and RAM is fine ... even during raids but the video goes sloppy in said raiding environment.
Gonna keep watching this thread and see what other people find out... I'd certainly like high end graphics in raids.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
Running Max setting woudl be fairly easy with slightly altered version of the PC I built up above.
Don't got above a 1280 by 1024 Resolution, replace the two 7600 GT's with two 7900 GTX's, clock the freq's at around 1600 mhz, either keep the 6400 and OC it or go with the 6700 for $300.00 and play around the clocking. Get yourself an Enermax 650W PSU.
Turn on PC, log into EQ2, Set the Max settings.
Your done. no quad needed.
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Funny how you ppls always talk about the graphics of EQ2 like its the best we have ever seen and no game will match it even in 10 years or something. In fact even on highest settings the graphic is looking worse than for example Guild Wars, Half-Life2 and I could name alot of more games which runs smooth at highest settings with alot better graphics. I really must have something with my eyes ..... technically it may be better cause of having more polygons, effects and so but I dont care about that if Iam playing I just see the graphics and my eyes telling me its looking not good ...
Iam just playing the Trial of Isle currently and Iam lvl6 but really dont see how the graphic would change alot on the main land. I have to admit the spell graphics of my mage looking really good and charakter models as well but thats all, tress, landscape and all doesnt really look good it just lookin weird, lightning effects also looking somewhat wrong to me ... hmpf
In response to various posters,
First off to those saying they are running on High settings, maybe you are. But I imagine your sacrificing alot of playability for Eye candy. This is my 3rd attempt to try and play the game, each time I have quite not becuase I dislike the game (infact the opposite) but rather becuase it runs so poorly even on good systems.
My current set-up is:
3.6Ghz P4
2.Gig DDR2 pc2 662Mhz ram
N-Vidia 6800GT 512mb card.
I can run the game on Balanced, or atleast I can try. The choppyness of the gameplay is something left to be desired by Sony, I don't care how technically advanced their engine is becuase in all honesty its not that good, technically maybe but it sure ain't efficent.
I'm playing now on this set-up with frequent laggyness when lots of ttons are on the screen, referencing WoW here becuase I think I'm used to it's silky gameplay but World of Warcraft runs at at constand 70FPS silky smooth and imo looks just as nice some times, granted the graphical styles are different.
Other horror stories I've been reading lead me to believe that EQ2 will be largly unplayabale for me at end game raids, people say to me I'll have to drop my settings right down.
Think I might be closing in on my 4th failed attempt to play EQ2 due to technical reasons. Pity, as its a great game.
Then there is something seriously wrong with your rig and you need to take time and filter through the possible problems.
I've seen much lesser machines then yours, play on Balanced settings within EQ2 and get great frames per second. For example, I know someone still playing on an AMD 64 3500+ 939, 1 Gig Kingston KVR, 6800 Ultra (AGP), SB Audigy SE, at 1280 resolutions, she plays on balanced with cloth simulation tweak up's at or around 40 to 50 FPS in raid situations.
I love how when people get bad performance in EQ2, it's always the game engine. Yeah it's not the best in the world and I don't buy that whole, "it was built for the next generation" crap that SOE hands down either but the fact is that on a reletively modern system, EQ2 can be extremely pretty and get good performance.
And really, comparing EQ2 to WoW graphically is just completely inane. Don't get me wrong, I love WoW, I love the game itself and it's graphical styling but the two are so radically different from each other, they are quite literally night and day when comparing graphical technology.
I kid you not, my 14 year old neice has a Matel Barby Doll computer that flawlessly plays WoW at mid settings all around.
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There's nothing wrong with my rig man, I play the infamous X3: the Threat and get about 70FPS all the time, I get 70 FPS in most games i play, including online Quake and BF, F.E.A.R ect.
Most of my mates have commented on the same problem, that no matter how powerful their rig's are theres a substancial amount of lag. I get about 55-65 FPS in EQ2, but when I run into populated areas it lags, which makes for a poor gameplay experience.
You say you hate when people balme EQ's engine for poor performance, well I hate when people blame certain rig's for the problem when they can play every other game under the sun fine.
Try tweaking it a bit, turn off shadows, flora etc if you havent already.
I have a rig no where near as good as yours and i play fine on balanced (tweaked) with no lag unless i spend to long in Q Harbour.
Sorry Speedhaak, I wasn't trying to seem snarky in my response, looks like you took a slight offence there and that's not what I was trying to do, I appologize for not wording my post better. My bad.
I'm honestly at lost though, realy. F.E.A.R is no pushover in terms of graphical power, if your running that at high settings with easy, it's a confusing to me why you'd have issue with EQ2. Is it possible you have a corrupt install? Maybe the filesystem is bunk?
Again, I was only trying to point out that I've seen and played on rigs much worse off then yours and have had great success with getting to run EQ2 well.
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i play on High settings, have almost no slowdown or lag and dont have near the power of the rigs u guys all have. btw, its funny to me, cause i can run every1 of those games u all mentioned with no problems. i mean, im not braggin......wait yeah i am, lol.
Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz
1 gig 400 mhz ram
200 gigs hardrive
128 Radeon 9600xt video card
btw, shae, i love ur sig link, its good, lol.
______________________________
Of course Half-Life 2 is amazing, it doesn't need to be able to display 50 people at once.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
I'm due for a pc upgrade so might just bite the bullet and get'm both... I imagine that this would let me do what I wanted (1600x1200 w/Max settings in raids).
http://www.greycouncil.org/
LOL, yup, that would do it
. Your right, those are monster sets and if you have the $1,200.00 + to put down for them, go for it. Take pictures and post please 
.
Just remember though, while GPU's are important, and they reall really are important, they're also not everything. If you get bottle necking from anything else in the system, as good as those bad boys may be, it's not going to be make a lick of difference in those high test situation like Raids with lots of mapping, texturing and filtering going on.
Good quality RAM that's well timmed with a good CPU, strong Power Supply (and for those we're talking 800W + with independent rails) and very solid windows install will be needed to make the absolute most of a SLi set up like that.
Oh and invest in quality cooling 'cause them puppies are gonna be real warm
.
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Of course Half-Life 2 is amazing, it doesn't need to be able to display 50 people at once.
Dude I dont care, yes TECHNICALLY it may be better but if Iam playing then I dont care how many polygons the models have, how many particle effects or wutever I just see the graphic and say its good or bad.
This is how I feel
Sky is looking ok, nothing special tho.
Charakter models looking good.
Spells animations and spell graphics of my mage looking really awesome.
BUT the terrain, trees etc. just looking really terrible / horrible.
Water is ok but dont see how its using much more performance than say Half-Life2 water which looks alot better.
If your charakter is moving / running its looking bad.
What really annoys me is the terrain, mountains, trees etc ... just horrible sorry. GW in this aspect looking alot better. And no Iam not a GW fanboi, combat in this game is so damn boring near no real effects for spells and so /yawn.
Shae,
No need to apologize, I'd like to think we're all mature enough to have a conversation on these boards (even if they do get alittle heated ) without taking offense, maybe I was alittle over zealous in my response.
Anyways, I have been thinking that maybe I', just too used to WoW's smooth engine, I mean Lag is a part of MMO's, like it or not, and some times it's unavoidable - actually, we shouldn't really be calling it lag, becuase its an FPS related problem and nothing to do with Server data (most likely).
My rig might be somewhat balanced on paper, but I am not as intense as you seem to be about system tweaking so I am sure there are things that I haven't taken into consideration, for instance I just defraged my HD and saw some improvement.
Anyways, I'll be upgrading to a new GFX card soon and buying another 2gig DDR making it to 4gig ram (should be no excuse then ), hope the rest of you are all enjoying the game.
To me the EQ II engine is more proof of the fact that coding for "PCs of the future" leads to a poorly optimized engine that is a system hog and only looks OK by the time rigs that can run it with decent framerates are common. For another example see Ultima IX.
I think creating something that runs well and looks good on current generation PCs, with the intent of upgrading the engine as needed in the future is a lot smarter (I think Mythic did a very good job with this in DAoC). The obvious downside to this approach is that it means you will have to commit to replacing the art resources in some areas entirely at some time in the future (e.g., as they are in the process of doing in both DAoC and EQ). Still, I'd rather have something that looks good and runs well right now than something that might in the future.
Great post BTW Shae, very detailed. Linkies are a nice touch. Not planning to ubgrade my PC soon, but if I were it would be a good starting point.
I don't want to write this, and you don't want to read it. But now it's too late for both of us.
Dido. AMD64 4000+, 3gig OCZ Plat Ram, 6800 Ultra, Asus A8n-SLI Deluxe, runs everything as high as it goes with no lag. NOTE: I HAVE SHOWDOWS OFF, INCREASING MY FPS BY 15-25.
raiding has a tiny bit of lag, and occasionally when raiding.
I've considered AMD's top chips but after seeing that the price is almost 0 difference I don't want to take the risk. I've used intels for ages and never had issues with them... theone time I got an AMD (and ATI) I had an endless stream of problems. If the performance was a more pronounced or the price was widely different I might have a different plan...
What I've been looking at is the intel 2 duo x6800 EE at 2.9GHz, 1066 FSB 2x2MB L2 Cache... along with 2 gig of kingston ram and the 2 asus cards I previously mentioned. Was also planning to get a SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD drive for the os/game drive.
I am curious, what do you mean a powersupply with "independant rails" ?
http://www.greycouncil.org/
Ok, good to know
. Where I think we completely agree of course is that WoW tends to spoil a player. No matter the difference in technology, graphically speaking of course, WoW's coding is amongst the best IMO. Even in some very intense situations with numbers that can sometimes reach in the 80's of people on the same screen, a relatively tame computer can stand up very well with decent settings activated.
Much can be said about the game itself but there is a good degree of quality enhencements in the coding itself.
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Sure, I can clarify on that Celestian.
As you know a Power Supply Unit (PSU) is graded by it's Wattage, 350W, 450W, 650W, so on and so forth. PSU's, even modern units, are basically fancy switcher modules. So they take the AC power from your wall output and turn it into usable, pure and stable low voltage DC power. These volts, as you probably know are usually split into 3.+v, 5V and 12V.
For our purposes we're looking at the 12v, as the switcher transforms unstable AC into usable clean DC for voltage regulation, it's stored (or charged) onto a rail as Amperage (Amps). This rail thus delivers the appropriate needed amperage through the 12v line and rail to whatever device needs that power.
So here's where it gets tricky. Modern Graphic Cards, such as the N45 GPU on the BFG 7900GTX (I have two of these myself) demand a certain amount amperage over the 12v rail to operate properly. Read the minimum system req's at BFG's site HERE and notice where it says: "A Minimum 400W Power Supply (with 12v current rating of 26A or more). What that is saying is pretty obvious, you need a minimum 400W PSU with a 12v current of at least 26 amps being fed to the graphics card, which on most modern PSU's easily to achieve.
The problems lies when you put two of these cards in your system, if a 12v rail is pushing out 30amps and you have both these cards connected on the single 12v rail then they are both sharring that 30 amps and thus not receiving their needed power.
What good quality PSU manufacters are doing now is putting in "Independent" rails, so that two or three (sometimes more) of the 12volt rails are individually pushing out a number of amps, my Seasonic 635W PSU for example has two Independent 12v Rails rated at 34amps each, which is more then enough to cover both cards happily and avoiding any undeed issues in the future.
So to sum all that up, which is why I always suggest to everyone, most especially when setting up a system such as the one your thinking of putting together, that they pay carefull attention to what they are buying when shopping for a PSU. You can end up paying lots of money for something that wont even let you Post because those monster GPU just aren't getting enough juice.
Hope that wasn't to much info and that it helps.
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Max settings no lag to speak of, system specs:
AN8 32X ABIT Board
3800x2 AMD CHIP
2 gigs dual channel CL2.0
2 HD's 1 harddrive 80 gig 3gbps for OS on one controller
1 harddrive 300 gig 3 gbps on raid cotroller
7800gt 256 memory
680 watt True Power "beast" psu
Can't speak of much lag runs pretty smooth, I however agree the engine is not the end all be all. The game engine is poorly constructed in that if you don't have a super system you can't really turn up the settings and even with them turned up I find the graphics kinda bland to tell you the truth. The art style is weak, not sure what it is but it has a generic fantasy feel to it, in other words it lacks style. One side note poster above me good job explaining what makes up a good power supply. If you pay 20 to 50 dollars for a psu, you get what you pay for, if you're going to build a high end system put the money into a 100 to 200 dollar power supply so your components get a steady supply of power.
Just my two cents...