What we have is a new game. EQ2-Extended while its the same client it has a huge cash shop. Meanwhile any toons created on the Extended servers will not be allowed to change to current servers.
So saying that, the current servers will not get any new players, what do you think is going to happen. Yea the current servers are going to slowly die off and have to be merged.
This is another company who looking at one thing, cash. At the expense of its vet players.
I'm still trying to figure out what makes people think that some players won't sign up on the f2p servers, decide they really LIKE the game, and want to start over on the paid servers, so as to not have a stats-based pay to win marketplace? If it were ME....and I started playing a free to play game that I could see I really ENJOYED....and let's say I got to level 20 or so and decided....you know, I really like this game...I think I'd like to play on more equal footing where people can't buy their way to the top....I would start over on the paid servers.
Because SOE has already merged standard servers into the exchange servers and left players stranded. Dealing with SOE is a fool me once shame on you, but fool me twice shame on me situation.
Oh really? My server was merged with the Station Exchange servers? When did that happen? Five minutes ago? Because uhm....I've been playing all day and I never noticed that all the servers are now Exchange servers....lol. Last I checked there were STILL only TWO exchange servers. Been that way for YEARS now. Do you know what you're talking about at ALL? No.
That is a lot of nonsense. You can't design a game to not use the graphics card. You can of course rely on the cpu to do more work which is what they did. When EQ II came out it only ran on the high end computers to start with. They lost a lot of subscribers to Wow mainly because many of them could not run EQ II acceptably on their computers. It was just like Vanguard at release, you needed a powerful PC just to run it. Then it took them over a year to get the bugs out and get decent performance.
Sorry I should have been more specific. The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't. The game relied (and still primarily does) on the megahurtz speed of a single CPU.
I know it makes no sense to design a game with cutting edge graphics and exclude the processing power of the graphics card, but that is exactly what happened. It is central to the problems of the games performance to this day. The game engine does almost nothing with multiple CPU cores or graphics cards.
There are so many restrictions you are better off paying a subscription than playing on the F2P server.
Exactly. And this is why most people that end up LIKING the game enough to BUY IT...will LEAVE the EQ2X servers and START OVER on the paid servers. They will NOT LIKE the restrictions. But I'm just speculating here....like everyone else. Time will tell.
Again...only my opinion, and as you can see from all the people that think this is going to just TRAUMATIZE the regular servers....my opinion is not very popular, and not considered logical by some. All I can say is....if it were ME and my first exposure was to EQ2X and I liked the game enough to buy it to rid myself of all the restrictions that are present even at platinum level....I would HAPPILY leave EQ2X and start over as an EQ2 player.
I guess some folks just think most gamers are WAY TOO LAZY to go to all that "trouble." Whatever. Oh yeah...the other thing that seems to make some people consider my opinion illogical is that...."zomg the population is so much higher on the new servers." Oh really? Well...WoW is a good argument in my favor for that. Having a large population doesn't necessarily make playing more fun or pleasant. The regular servers have a stable mid-range population. I would rather play in that kind of atmosphere than the kind you tend to get with larger and larger crowds. If I had the choice to play on a crowded WoW server, or a mid-pop EQ2 server....my decision would be VERY easy.
This change is all about soe putting full blown cash shops into EQ2, not about going free to play. That is why they have effectively said they are not going to support the growth of the old server by removing the free trial there and by only allowing people to go away from those servers with copies to the new EQ2X servers. It is a squeeze play to get old players to cave into agreement for cash shops one way or another. Soe "heard you loud and clear"... so this is what they get.
SOE is going to make whatever changes are necessary to promote the servers with cash shops. Make no mistake that this is what soe is counting on. They do not want a subscription only game anymore. They want subscription + mega cash shop game and that is the goal they will be pushing. One way or another that is how all the servers are going to end up.
It is possible that masses of people will suddenly try EQ2 for free, enjoy it enough to purchase the game and then start over from scratch on a completely different server. We live in a world were anything is possible I guess. Seeing that people can do that right now without having to lose characters and transfer to new servers, I fail to see how this would suddenly change by allowing people to get involved in another server with more options. Possible, sure. Probably, not likely.
On the EQ2X servers, your characters will always be available to play regardless of if you subscribe or not. You don't get that on the legacy servers, but I do agree with you that the extended susbcription restrictions are to restrictive.
Sorry I should have been more specific. The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't.
Must be nice living in an alternate universe. Google "everquest 2 benchmark" or "everquest 2 review" to learn some more about the game's graphical performance in the early days. EQ2 specifically made use of features of high end cards of the time (though you could turn them off).
Sorry I should have been more specific. The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't.
Must be nice living in an alternate universe. Google "everquest 2 benchmark" or "everquest 2 review" to learn some more about the game's graphical performance in the early days. EQ2 specifically made use of features of high end cards of the time (though you could turn them off).
There is a reason the EQ2 devs talk about CPU's and how much of a dramatic effect it has on the framerate of the game as seen in that link above. The game was coded to push the majority of the game onto the cpu and underutilize GPUs. Thats just how the eq2 team designed the game. I'm being a bit over the top by saying all, but it still stands true of how the game engine works and what it doesn't fully utilize.
Here is what Rothgar said about game performance (emphasis mine)
Frames per second - FPS indicates the number of 'frames' processed by your client per second. A frame is a complete loop through the game cycle. This includes receiving/sending network messages, processing game data and drawing what you see on the screen. The higher the number the better. Your FPS is affected mostly by your graphic quality settings and the speed of your computer hardware. Setting the graphics to lower settings should improve your frame rate. Specifically, the settings that seem to have the biggest affect on frame rate are shadows, and particle effects. EQ2 is a very cpu-intensive game, more so than the graphics card. So if you're looking for ideas to improve your hardware, upgrading your CPU will probably give you the biggest increase in performance over purchasing a very expensive video card.
You're just a late comer to the game. You'll notice that the quotes are from 2008. The game came out in 2004. At the time the graphics card mattered. Since then graphics card performance has gone up a lot more than CPU performance, making it less rewlevant. That still doesn't make the claim that all rendering is done on the CPU true.
It sounds from the post about multicore support that the game doesn't take advantage of vertex shaders very well. It would still use a lot of pixel power, and that certainly is GPU dependent (but as said, even low end current CPU's have more pixel power than high end card of old).
I haven't followed the updates of EQ2 that closely, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a graphical update to take advantage of new technologies.
Yeah you totally got me. I quoted the devs talking in 2008 about the CPU dependancy of the game for framerate performance. Obviously soe changed the engine after releasing the game to not fully utilize the GPU and instead push the work onto the CPU.
Yeah you totally got me. I quoted the devs talking in 2008 about the CPU dependancy of the game for framerate performance. Obviously soe changed the engine after releasing the game to not fully utilize the GPU and instead push the work onto the CPU.
I guess my previous explanation wasn't clear enough, so I'll try to make it clearer.
The game used the CPU and GPU fully, and more than that, in 2004. Suppose the game was designed for a CPU and GPU twice as fast as available at a time. By 2008, GPU's were perhaps 10 times faster and a single core of a CPU was 1.5 times faster. So that top end GPU was 5 times faster than the game needed while the CPU wasn't yet fast enough.
The figures above may not be entirely accurate, but they should give you a general idea how a game which taxed both graphics cards (when not run on low settings) and CPU could become CPU bound.
Oh I understood what you were saying. Massive increase is video card technology, not so much advancement in terms of single core CPU speed. Result, game still suffers performance issues after 6 years despite massive video card advancement.
Hmmm... I wonder why that is...
Lets see what the developers have to say about the EQ2 engine.
"Gu53 shaders 3.0 graphic upgrades to eq2 engine. *moved to GPU for any shaders 3.0 card" LINK
"Most players must turn their graphics down to very basic settings just to group or raid. This is partly due to the inefficient Shaders 1.0 pipeline which was originally intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards, and partly due to the even more inefficient Particles engine used by EQ2."LINK
"A new shadow system has been implemented for the game. This new system uses your graphics card to build the shadows rather than your CPU and it comes with a few extras as well." LINK
So, the game engine was designed for powerful CPUs and designed for weak video cards as I said. I wonder how they did that. What is that about the particles, shadows, etc? Lets see
"Particles is more complicated than it seems because apparently, particles are bound to the character and NPC models, rather than separate geometry. As a result, it is my understanding that to revamp particles will require rebuilding spell animations. That very rebuild was hinted as a feature of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, but it was later revealed that this was a “we’d like to” rather than “it’s scheduled” situation."LINK
Oh, particles, character models are rendered seperate from the geometry and something that hasn't been changed. I wonder what renders the particles, animations and charaters?
"Would like to move particles to GPU but due to some design decisions, particles are tied to animations. Will have to go back and separate them out." LINK
It looks like those are also tied to the CPU and in turn a lot of the graphics work in EQ2. Interesting
Need more examples?
All those shadows, lighting, animations, models, cloth simulation, particles, water, widgets, fidgets, bells and whistles all getting put onto the CPU. I'm not sure what "advanced" things are left to be utilized by the GPU. It isn't anti-alias LINK
So I do thank you for your very technical explaination of how you think the EQ2 engine was designed and how things work, but I think I will stick with what developers have said.
Thanks for the quotes regarding the graphics engine updates. They make it clear that not only was the game designed to take advantage of the graphics cards available at the time, which couldn't do much, but was updated since to take advantage of even more modern cards and take some load off the CPU.
I don't know what you're saying "All those shadows, lighting, animations... all getting put onto the CPU" after you quote a change putting the shadows on the GPU.
Originally posted by ET3D Originally posted by Daffid011 Yeah you totally got me. I quoted the devs talking in 2008 about the CPU dependancy of the game for framerate performance. Obviously soe changed the engine after releasing the game to not fully utilize the GPU and instead push the work onto the CPU.
I guess my previous explanation wasn't clear enough, so I'll try to make it clearer. The game used the CPU and GPU fully, and more than that, in 2004. Suppose the game was designed for a CPU and GPU twice as fast as available at a time. By 2008, GPU's were perhaps 10 times faster and a single core of a CPU was 1.5 times faster. So that top end GPU was 5 times faster than the game needed while the CPU wasn't yet fast enough. The figures above may not be entirely accurate, but they should give you a general idea how a game which taxed both graphics cards (when not run on low settings) and CPU could become CPU bound.
EQ2 is a CPU bound game. It murdered the hell out of my 5780, mainly because it barely used it (heat temp programs showed my gpu barely heating up from its idle core temp).
EQ2 has a truly terrible engine by modern standards and that's a real shame because under all that code there might be a good game.
I just want to add that my problem is mainly with you saying things like "The engine was specifically designed at release not to use video cards" and "The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't. The game relied (and still primarily does) on the megahurtz speed of a single CPU."
So first of all, you're exaggerating with "designed not to use video cards". You might say that it was designed for weak video cards, but to say it was designed not to use GPU's at all is obviously an exaggeration. I also think you're misinterpreting what "intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards" means. What this means is that graphics cards at the time the game was designed and written were weak compared to the CPU's. The game was designed to take good advantage of both CPU's and GPU's of the time, which meant that much of the work was put on the CPU simply because GPU's were comparatively weak (in particular, had much more limited programmability compared to current ones).
You're right in that by the time the game arrived on the market there were already much better cards which it didn't take full advantage of, and it took long years to move just part of the CPU processing to the GPU. But your assertion that "A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference" is incorrect according to this benchmark, at least -- a GeForce 6600 GT was much slower than the more powerful cards cards.
Thanks for the quotes regarding the graphics engine updates. They make it clear that not only was the game designed to take advantage of the graphics cards available at the time, which couldn't do much, but was updated since to take advantage of even more modern cards and take some load off the CPU.
I don't know what you're saying "All those shadows, lighting, animations... all getting put onto the CPU" after you quote a change putting the shadows on the GPU.
because we were talking about how the game was ORIGINALLY designed. Also, if you had actually read the links you would see that these changes only affect certain systems and even then only certain portions of those graphics. The bulk is still rendered on the CPU even after this change.
I'm not sure how you can read the developers specifically stating that the game pushed the majority of the games graphic functions on the CPU and then conclude that the game was designed to utilize graphics cards. You question what reality I live in?
Originally posted by ET3D The game used the CPU and GPU fully, and more than that, in 2004.
Originally posted by ET3D
I just want to add that my problem is mainly with you saying things like "The engine was specifically designed at release not to use video cards" and "The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't. The game relied (and still primarily does) on the megahurtz speed of a single CPU."
So first of all, you're exaggerating with "designed not to use video cards". You might say that it was designed for weak video cards, but to say it was designed not to use GPU's at all is obviously an exaggeration. I also think you're misinterpreting what "intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards" means. What this means is that graphics cards at the time the game was designed and written were weak compared to the CPU's. The game was designed to take good advantage of both CPU's and GPU's of the time, which meant that much of the work was put on the CPU simply because GPU's were comparatively weak (in particular, had much more limited programmability compared to current ones).
You're right in that by the time the game arrived on the market there were already much better cards which it didn't take full advantage of, and it took long years to move just part of the CPU processing to the GPU. But your assertion that "A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference" is incorrect according to this benchmark, at least -- a GeForce 6600 GT was much slower than the more powerful cards cards.
I guess I am not the only one who is exaggerating in this thread. Sure I exaggerated slightly, but what I said was true to the point of being trivial to argue about. I don't think the same can be said about your claims, because they are not even close to the reality of how the game did/does work.
When you say that the game took full advantage of the GPUin 2004you are so far from any truth that it isn't even a believable statement. Even though the developers have specifically said the game doesn't you want to hold onto that claim?
Ok then, lets look at your smoking gun benchmark link to see just how much the EQ2 engine "fully used GPUs in 2004": Just looking at the single video cards from the benchmark
The identical test system benchmarks for Doom3 in the same resolution
Geforce 7800gtx 90.9
Geforce 6800 Ultra 72.7
Net gain = 17.3 from upgrading the video card
The identical test system benchmarks for Doom3 in the same resolution
Geforce 7800gtx 38.2
Geforce 6800 Ultra 37
Net gain = 1.2!!!!! from upgrading the video card
Well that certainly was informative of just how much EQ2 took full advantage of GPUs back in 2004. Look where EQ2 ranks and how much "improvement" the game saw with a video card upgrade compared to Doom3 improvement. Doom3 was a monster of a game that ate top of the line video cards when it released and it still doubled EQ2's performance and saw an upgrade of more than 15 times what EQ2 saw with the same video card upgrade. I guess EQ2 doesn't fully utilize GPUs then. Thank you for that link.
So based on your information I will amend my comments
"The engine was specifically designed at release not to use video cards" and "The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use almost none of the processing power of video cards. Almost all the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made almost no difference and still doesn't"
There you go. Added the word almost and look my claims are still as true as if I had not. There is almot no difference in what I said, but yes I should have reigned in my small exaggeration there. My apologies.
Now, how about your claims that the EQ2 engine fully used CPUs/GPUs in 2004 "and even more".
You guys have talent when it's about going off topic and derailing threads. Thread is about the F2P service, not about the game's performance.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
You guys have talent when it's about going off topic and derailing threads. Thread is about the F2P service, not about the game's performance.
You're right. While I'd love to show Daffid011 the error of his ways, it's probably a good idea that we stop that. Maybe we could take it elsewhere.
Originally posted by Rockgod99
Honestly I never found EQ2 appealing.
Even on those rare occasions when SoE offered a free moths or two i struggled to stay logged in more than two days.
I don't see how the f2p option will bring someone like me back to a game i found below average at best.
I don't think F2P is for people like you. It's perhaps partly for people like me, who felt that the game has some nice things about it, but paying $15 a month isn't justified. I could spend some time in the game for free, and I can even see myself paying some money for features.
Mostly I think it's meant to draw in new players. For many people F2P is a better model than trials because it doesn't require quick commitment to pay.
Comments
Oh really? My server was merged with the Station Exchange servers? When did that happen? Five minutes ago? Because uhm....I've been playing all day and I never noticed that all the servers are now Exchange servers....lol. Last I checked there were STILL only TWO exchange servers. Been that way for YEARS now. Do you know what you're talking about at ALL? No.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Sorry I should have been more specific. The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't. The game relied (and still primarily does) on the megahurtz speed of a single CPU.
I know it makes no sense to design a game with cutting edge graphics and exclude the processing power of the graphics card, but that is exactly what happened. It is central to the problems of the games performance to this day. The game engine does almost nothing with multiple CPU cores or graphics cards.
Don't bother.
There are so many restrictions you are better off paying a subscription than playing on the F2P server.
Exactly. And this is why most people that end up LIKING the game enough to BUY IT...will LEAVE the EQ2X servers and START OVER on the paid servers. They will NOT LIKE the restrictions. But I'm just speculating here....like everyone else. Time will tell.
Again...only my opinion, and as you can see from all the people that think this is going to just TRAUMATIZE the regular servers....my opinion is not very popular, and not considered logical by some. All I can say is....if it were ME and my first exposure was to EQ2X and I liked the game enough to buy it to rid myself of all the restrictions that are present even at platinum level....I would HAPPILY leave EQ2X and start over as an EQ2 player.
I guess some folks just think most gamers are WAY TOO LAZY to go to all that "trouble." Whatever. Oh yeah...the other thing that seems to make some people consider my opinion illogical is that...."zomg the population is so much higher on the new servers." Oh really? Well...WoW is a good argument in my favor for that. Having a large population doesn't necessarily make playing more fun or pleasant. The regular servers have a stable mid-range population. I would rather play in that kind of atmosphere than the kind you tend to get with larger and larger crowds. If I had the choice to play on a crowded WoW server, or a mid-pop EQ2 server....my decision would be VERY easy.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
This change is all about soe putting full blown cash shops into EQ2, not about going free to play. That is why they have effectively said they are not going to support the growth of the old server by removing the free trial there and by only allowing people to go away from those servers with copies to the new EQ2X servers. It is a squeeze play to get old players to cave into agreement for cash shops one way or another. Soe "heard you loud and clear"... so this is what they get.
SOE is going to make whatever changes are necessary to promote the servers with cash shops. Make no mistake that this is what soe is counting on. They do not want a subscription only game anymore. They want subscription + mega cash shop game and that is the goal they will be pushing. One way or another that is how all the servers are going to end up.
It is possible that masses of people will suddenly try EQ2 for free, enjoy it enough to purchase the game and then start over from scratch on a completely different server. We live in a world were anything is possible I guess. Seeing that people can do that right now without having to lose characters and transfer to new servers, I fail to see how this would suddenly change by allowing people to get involved in another server with more options. Possible, sure. Probably, not likely.
@shenny2001
On the EQ2X servers, your characters will always be available to play regardless of if you subscribe or not. You don't get that on the legacy servers, but I do agree with you that the extended susbcription restrictions are to restrictive.
Must be nice living in an alternate universe. Google "everquest 2 benchmark" or "everquest 2 review" to learn some more about the game's graphical performance in the early days. EQ2 specifically made use of features of high end cards of the time (though you could turn them off).
http://kriegshauser.blogspot.com/2008/09/eqii-getting-multicore-support-wait.html
There is a reason the EQ2 devs talk about CPU's and how much of a dramatic effect it has on the framerate of the game as seen in that link above. The game was coded to push the majority of the game onto the cpu and underutilize GPUs. Thats just how the eq2 team designed the game. I'm being a bit over the top by saying all, but it still stands true of how the game engine works and what it doesn't fully utilize.
Here is what Rothgar said about game performance (emphasis mine)
Frames per second - FPS indicates the number of 'frames' processed by your client per second. A frame is a complete loop through the game cycle. This includes receiving/sending network messages, processing game data and drawing what you see on the screen. The higher the number the better. Your FPS is affected mostly by your graphic quality settings and the speed of your computer hardware. Setting the graphics to lower settings should improve your frame rate. Specifically, the settings that seem to have the biggest affect on frame rate are shadows, and particle effects. EQ2 is a very cpu-intensive game, more so than the graphics card. So if you're looking for ideas to improve your hardware, upgrading your CPU will probably give you the biggest increase in performance over purchasing a very expensive video card.
You're just a late comer to the game. You'll notice that the quotes are from 2008. The game came out in 2004. At the time the graphics card mattered. Since then graphics card performance has gone up a lot more than CPU performance, making it less rewlevant. That still doesn't make the claim that all rendering is done on the CPU true.
It sounds from the post about multicore support that the game doesn't take advantage of vertex shaders very well. It would still use a lot of pixel power, and that certainly is GPU dependent (but as said, even low end current CPU's have more pixel power than high end card of old).
I haven't followed the updates of EQ2 that closely, but I'm surprised that there hasn't been a graphical update to take advantage of new technologies.
Yeah, I am a real late comer to EQ2. Thats it.
That's settled, then.
Just make sure you don't make exaggerated claims in the future.
Yeah you totally got me. I quoted the devs talking in 2008 about the CPU dependancy of the game for framerate performance. Obviously soe changed the engine after releasing the game to not fully utilize the GPU and instead push the work onto the CPU.
I'm convinced now, thanks.
Gameplay, graphics and animation in EQ2 felt dated 3 years ago to me.
I'm not shy to pay monthly fee if I like the game. F2P never appealed to me, free trials for P2P are quite enough.
I REALLY dislike "free-to-play" system.
NEW IDEAS that can refresh the STALE state of MMORPGs
I guess my previous explanation wasn't clear enough, so I'll try to make it clearer.
The game used the CPU and GPU fully, and more than that, in 2004. Suppose the game was designed for a CPU and GPU twice as fast as available at a time. By 2008, GPU's were perhaps 10 times faster and a single core of a CPU was 1.5 times faster. So that top end GPU was 5 times faster than the game needed while the CPU wasn't yet fast enough.
The figures above may not be entirely accurate, but they should give you a general idea how a game which taxed both graphics cards (when not run on low settings) and CPU could become CPU bound.
Oh I understood what you were saying. Massive increase is video card technology, not so much advancement in terms of single core CPU speed. Result, game still suffers performance issues after 6 years despite massive video card advancement.
Hmmm... I wonder why that is...
Lets see what the developers have to say about the EQ2 engine.
"Gu53 shaders 3.0 graphic upgrades to eq2 engine. *moved to GPU for any shaders 3.0 card" LINK
"Most players must turn their graphics down to very basic settings just to group or raid. This is partly due to the inefficient Shaders 1.0 pipeline which was originally intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards, and partly due to the even more inefficient Particles engine used by EQ2." LINK
"A new shadow system has been implemented for the game. This new system uses your graphics card to build the shadows rather than your CPU and it comes with a few extras as well." LINK
So, the game engine was designed for powerful CPUs and designed for weak video cards as I said. I wonder how they did that. What is that about the particles, shadows, etc? Lets see
"Particles is more complicated than it seems because apparently, particles are bound to the character and NPC models, rather than separate geometry. As a result, it is my understanding that to revamp particles will require rebuilding spell animations. That very rebuild was hinted as a feature of the Sentinel’s Fate expansion, but it was later revealed that this was a “we’d like to” rather than “it’s scheduled” situation." LINK
Oh, particles, character models are rendered seperate from the geometry and something that hasn't been changed. I wonder what renders the particles, animations and charaters?
"Would like to move particles to GPU but due to some design decisions, particles are tied to animations. Will have to go back and separate them out." LINK
It looks like those are also tied to the CPU and in turn a lot of the graphics work in EQ2. Interesting
Need more examples?
All those shadows, lighting, animations, models, cloth simulation, particles, water, widgets, fidgets, bells and whistles all getting put onto the CPU. I'm not sure what "advanced" things are left to be utilized by the GPU. It isn't anti-alias LINK
So I do thank you for your very technical explaination of how you think the EQ2 engine was designed and how things work, but I think I will stick with what developers have said.
Cheers.
Thanks for the quotes regarding the graphics engine updates. They make it clear that not only was the game designed to take advantage of the graphics cards available at the time, which couldn't do much, but was updated since to take advantage of even more modern cards and take some load off the CPU.
I don't know what you're saying "All those shadows, lighting, animations... all getting put onto the CPU" after you quote a change putting the shadows on the GPU.
The game used the CPU and GPU fully, and more than that, in 2004. Suppose the game was designed for a CPU and GPU twice as fast as available at a time. By 2008, GPU's were perhaps 10 times faster and a single core of a CPU was 1.5 times faster. So that top end GPU was 5 times faster than the game needed while the CPU wasn't yet fast enough.
The figures above may not be entirely accurate, but they should give you a general idea how a game which taxed both graphics cards (when not run on low settings) and CPU could become CPU bound.
EQ2 is a CPU bound game. It murdered the hell out of my 5780, mainly because it barely used it (heat temp programs showed my gpu barely heating up from its idle core temp).
EQ2 has a truly terrible engine by modern standards and that's a real shame because under all that code there might be a good game.
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I just want to add that my problem is mainly with you saying things like "The engine was specifically designed at release not to use video cards" and "The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use the processing power of video cards. All the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference and still don't. The game relied (and still primarily does) on the megahurtz speed of a single CPU."
So first of all, you're exaggerating with "designed not to use video cards". You might say that it was designed for weak video cards, but to say it was designed not to use GPU's at all is obviously an exaggeration. I also think you're misinterpreting what "intended for powerful CPUs and weak graphics cards" means. What this means is that graphics cards at the time the game was designed and written were weak compared to the CPU's. The game was designed to take good advantage of both CPU's and GPU's of the time, which meant that much of the work was put on the CPU simply because GPU's were comparatively weak (in particular, had much more limited programmability compared to current ones).
You're right in that by the time the game arrived on the market there were already much better cards which it didn't take full advantage of, and it took long years to move just part of the CPU processing to the GPU. But your assertion that "A monster video card or a budget card really made no difference" is incorrect according to this benchmark, at least -- a GeForce 6600 GT was much slower than the more powerful cards cards.
because we were talking about how the game was ORIGINALLY designed. Also, if you had actually read the links you would see that these changes only affect certain systems and even then only certain portions of those graphics. The bulk is still rendered on the CPU even after this change.
I'm not sure how you can read the developers specifically stating that the game pushed the majority of the games graphic functions on the CPU and then conclude that the game was designed to utilize graphics cards. You question what reality I live in?
I guess I am not the only one who is exaggerating in this thread. Sure I exaggerated slightly, but what I said was true to the point of being trivial to argue about. I don't think the same can be said about your claims, because they are not even close to the reality of how the game did/does work.
When you say that the game took full advantage of the GPU in 2004 you are so far from any truth that it isn't even a believable statement. Even though the developers have specifically said the game doesn't you want to hold onto that claim?
Ok then, lets look at your smoking gun benchmark link to see just how much the EQ2 engine "fully used GPUs in 2004": Just looking at the single video cards from the benchmark
The identical test system benchmarks for Doom3 in the same resolution
Geforce 7800gtx 90.9
Geforce 6800 Ultra 72.7
Net gain = 17.3 from upgrading the video card
The identical test system benchmarks for Doom3 in the same resolution
Geforce 7800gtx 38.2
Geforce 6800 Ultra 37
Net gain = 1.2!!!!! from upgrading the video card
Well that certainly was informative of just how much EQ2 took full advantage of GPUs back in 2004. Look where EQ2 ranks and how much "improvement" the game saw with a video card upgrade compared to Doom3 improvement. Doom3 was a monster of a game that ate top of the line video cards when it released and it still doubled EQ2's performance and saw an upgrade of more than 15 times what EQ2 saw with the same video card upgrade. I guess EQ2 doesn't fully utilize GPUs then. Thank you for that link.
So based on your information I will amend my comments
"The engine was specifically designed at release not to use video cards" and "The original EQ2 engine was designed from the start to intentionally not to use almost none of the processing power of video cards. Almost all the graphics were rendered on the CPU which just bogged the game down ever more. A monster video card or a budget card really made almost no difference and still doesn't"
There you go. Added the word almost and look my claims are still as true as if I had not. There is almot no difference in what I said, but yes I should have reigned in my small exaggeration there. My apologies.
Now, how about your claims that the EQ2 engine fully used CPUs/GPUs in 2004 "and even more".
You guys have talent when it's about going off topic and derailing threads. Thread is about the F2P service, not about the game's performance.
"Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars combat, exploration and character progression. In Alganon, in addition to these we've added the fourth pillar to the equation: Copy & Paste."
Honestly I never found EQ2 appealing.
Even on those rare occasions when SoE offered a free moths or two i struggled to stay logged in more than two days.
I don't see how the f2p option will bring someone like me back to a game i found below average at best.
Playing: Rift, LotRO
Waiting on: GW2, BP
You're right. While I'd love to show Daffid011 the error of his ways, it's probably a good idea that we stop that. Maybe we could take it elsewhere.
I don't think F2P is for people like you. It's perhaps partly for people like me, who felt that the game has some nice things about it, but paying $15 a month isn't justified. I could spend some time in the game for free, and I can even see myself paying some money for features.
Mostly I think it's meant to draw in new players. For many people F2P is a better model than trials because it doesn't require quick commitment to pay.