Specs;

6870 crossfire (custom cooled and OC)

AMD 1090 six core (OC to 4.2) on an Asus Formula IV board with a corsair H70

12GB DDR3 running at 1200mhz but latency has been lowered almost by half

1080P 120hrz monitor though vsync is turned off

Windows 7 64 running on raid 0 SSD

My windows rating is 7.8 and the temps of my CPU is 18c idle and my GPUS are 33c idle and 55-60c under load. No viruses and all my drivers and BIOS are upto date and no need to defrag because it's SSD. I've also downloaded the full version of Everquest 2 extended.

Yet when running the game on Exteme it's a slide show and very high it's only 22FPS. I have to turn it down to the one below balanced to have 60 FPS without vsync. The game doesn't even look good, it's very dated looking and yet it is the worst running. I've got Crysis, GTA4 and tons of system demanding games running perfectly. My CPU is barely under load running EQ2 and my GPU is even less.........

Why is it running so badly? I've reformatted and installed all the drivers again and cleaned the PC of anything running in the background using msconfig.

I just don't get it.

Thanx.

I don't know how it is now adays, but when EQ2 was released it was based on a dx8 engine. I.e. several of the graphical features was based on the CPU and not GPU. For instance, shadows were calculated using the comps processor and not on the graphic card, which led to almost no one could actually run the game on full settings.

because the eq2 dev in their infinite wisdom.... made EQ2 for their vision of the future where we all have 12ghz Pentium 15's.

they foresaw  Huge processors( which never made it to reality) What we got were huge leaps in Video cards instead. So EQ2 engine was created for future proccessors that never appeared.

I could understand if the game looked good, but it looks so dated now I expected coming back to it that it would run nicer. My old Single core CPU from 2004 ran the game better with an ATI x800 and 2gb ram lol.

That's odd. I've got a 3.0 C2D, 4gb ddr3, an ATI 3850 (512mb) and this thing runs smooth for me on high settings o_O

Sounds like a driver issue.  DL and run Driver Sweeper which will remove all the fragments of previous {video} drivers that can conflict and cause this issue you're having.  Then do a clean install of the latest drivers and try again.  With your PC specs you should be running this on maximum very smoothly!

At max? No, you still cannot run EQ2 on max smoothly mainly thanks to inherently flawed engine.

You sure? I'm pretty sure I did a few years ago, although I'm also sure that this new rig wouldn't be able to run it max, its just a very odd situation. But if you like the game, it shouldn't matter THAT much if you run it on high or max. And there is also many good tips and hints on the forum on how to make it run the best you can. It just takes a little research, which in the beginning should be unecessary.

Could not resist posting on this topic.  EQ2 was the most disappointing game of all time for me.  I couldn't wait for it to come out and then was shocked by what was actually released.  There are so many things I hate about it, I won't even begin.

But as far as the engine goes....it is a piece of junk and always has been, thats why it still runs like garbabe on next next next next gen hardware.  There is nothing wrong with your computer, it is just a steaming pile, don't waste your time with it.

I'm really hoping if there is an EQ next that they get back to their roots,

Funny because the game runs better with crossfire turned off and even then it's only using 60% of that one card. Soon as I turn crossfire on my FPS drops by 10 and I see weird shadows and things, so I doubt the game is optimized for it. I've tested both cards and they both work fine and other games they increase performance. Also it's only using 2 of my 6 cores and cpu usage is at 30%, so I doubt it's optimized for multiple core CPUS. 

The game is so depressing to play now though. 

There are 4 versions of one of the new starting zones, yet there is no one around. Surely there only needs to be one if there is so little people around. The content is so boring and feels pretty poor, the new zones feel rushed and they're missing voice over work. So I went back to Qeynos to level up around there but lots of quests have gone and so has a lot of voice over work. I remember SOE making a big deal of voice overs, now it seems like they don't want to bother. 

I just want to start at the Isle, with that great boat ride and then going to Qeynos. That blew everyone away and I youtubed it and it still looks great today. Now we start with some rushed content that just feels so bland. I loved them old quests that had you going around Qeynos doing things for people. I just saw the big magic tower in Qeynos and it's still as beautiful as ever. Funny because the game looks dated in a lot of places, however with this old stuff it still looks great because they put a lot of effort into it. The textures look amazing in lots of places and so does the water in the ponds and rivers around Qeynos. What I noticed is in a lot of the new zones the textures look really dated and plain bad and they've just put a water texture down or something without paying attention to how it should look. Just a shame all this old stuff is dead now and what's even worse is how easy the game is. I remember the forest ruins in beta and how we'd have loads of people grouping up and getting wiped in there. Now there is no tension to the gameplay because you can solo it all. What I noticed about the new content is a lack of group dungeons, with the old game we had one right away at the end of the Isle. 

I'm disappointed that the crafting has lost it's depth. My friend just told me that it isn't what it used to be and I checked it out and you don't have the different ranged of quality if you fail now... Humph. The one thing that needed doing to the game was a character remodel and yet they've managed to make them look worse with the alternative models. So now we have two sets of horrible looking models, especially the Humans. 

I'd love to play the game if there was a classic server without any expansions but maybe the first. I'm just not a fan of the new art style of the expansions or how it all feels rushed now, the game feels like a mess of different quality content. All the old world feels broken because they've had to make quick make shift changes to fit in with the expansions. 

Just a sorry state it's in now. 

The client is an old and clunky one. Just like the one from Vanguard. Both rely more on CPU power then graphics. Preferrably a fast single core CPU (no multicores back when it was developed). This is why multicores dont seem to add much for this game.

I just bought a new PC and because Im mainly playing EQ2X and some Guild Wars atm, I deliberately didnt buy 2 graphics cards for Crossfire. Because I know it doesnt add anything for EQ2 and GW doesnt even need my new PC's power. When SW:TOR releases I probably replace the graphics card and put 2x newer ones in for crossfire.

Originally posted by HumanHorn

The game is so depressing to play now though. 

There are 4 versions of one of the new starting zones, yet there is no one around. Surely there only needs to be one if there is so little people around. The content is so boring and feels pretty poor, the new zones feel rushed and they're missing voice over work. So I went back to Qeynos to level up around there but lots of quests have gone and so has a lot of voice over work. I remember SOE making a big deal of voice overs, now it seems like they don't want to bother. 

I just want to start at the Isle, with that great boat ride and then going to Qeynos. That blew everyone away and I youtubed it and it still looks great today. Now we start with some rushed content that just feels so bland. I loved them old quests that had you going around Qeynos doing things for people. I just saw the big magic tower in Qeynos and it's still as beautiful as ever. Funny because the game looks dated in a lot of places, however with this old stuff it still looks great because they put a lot of effort into it. The textures look amazing in lots of places and so does the water in the ponds and rivers around Qeynos. What I noticed is in a lot of the new zones the textures look really dated and plain bad and they've just put a water texture down or something without paying attention to how it should look. Just a shame all this old stuff is dead now and what's even worse is how easy the game is. I remember the forest ruins in beta and how we'd have loads of people grouping up and getting wiped in there. Now there is no tension to the gameplay because you can solo it all. What I noticed about the new content is a lack of group dungeons, with the old game we had one right away at the end of the Isle. 

I'm disappointed that the crafting has lost it's depth. My friend just told me that it isn't what it used to be and I checked it out and you don't have the different ranged of quality if you fail now... Humph. The one thing that needed doing to the game was a character remodel and yet they've managed to make them look worse with the alternative models. So now we have two sets of horrible looking models, especially the Humans. 

I'd love to play the game if there was a classic server without any expansions but maybe the first. I'm just not a fan of the new art style of the expansions or how it all feels rushed now, the game feels like a mess of different quality content. All the old world feels broken because they've had to make quick make shift changes to fit in with the expansions. 

Just a sorry state it's in now. 

Most new players play EQ2X now. Lot of EQ2 players moved to there too.

EQ2X has a "reasonable" population.

The client has without a doubt the most pathetic render/engine of anything I've ever saw.

It makes JAVA applications look sleek and high performance.

For as dated as it is, 30 FPS on a box that maxes Metro 2033 out in DX11 w/max settings, or Fallout NV, F3 with 100+ FPS shouldn't have any issues, regardless of their excuses.

They'd probably up their playerbase substantially if they'd work on making the engine less of a fail.

Hell, AOC runs better, AND looks fantastic - we all know what a PoS it is.

I don't think SOE will ever realize how many players they drove away with that crappy engine.  Just like EQ1, when there were more pressing needs with the game they chose to put their money into expansions.  Always trying to make the quick buck instead of solidifying the game for the longterm.

It's using one core to the max and everything else is is barely used, frigging not even using 25%... It's managing to get my ram to 4gb but that's ok as I have 12. My GPU when in SLI makes the game run at 20-30 FPS like my crossfire system. So I have to disable it and suddenly my FPS goes to 60 odd and when I record in fraps it all goes to 10. The only game I've known to do this and I can record everything else in fraps with a stable framerate.

Hey HumanHorn, I sent you a PM but I guess you haven't read it, maybe you have though, I'll repost it here either way :)

The problem with Everquest 2 is the graphics engine. I started playing EQ2 two weeks after release with a friend and played it for a couple of months, I've been back now and then since.

The simple truth as I wrote first is that the graphics engine of the game is very poorly optimized, they also made the workhorse the processor instead of the graphics card, which was a big flaw.

If a game's graphics engine is crap / poorly optimized it doesn't matter if your computer is a godlike from another dimension super computer, the game will still run like crap, hence EQ2.

This is something that they haven't addressed in the 6 or so years in running of this game, so most likely they will never, besides, Everquest 3 (Everquest Next) is under development, I just pray that they will use a much better graphics engine / optimized engine on that game.

This is merely my opinion, but I'd stay clear of EQ2 if I was you, I didn't read your whole last post on the subject so maybe you said something about it there, but still.

hmmmmmm trolls out in force it seems...

i run using

core i7 processor

4gb ram

nvidia 250 card... 2 years old.. cant remember exact make...

windows 7 64bit

and i run eq2 in max settings with an average of 50fps... (this sometimes drops to 20-30 during heavy raids)

If you guys are really having this much trouble i suggest you get a tech in who really knows how to configure a computer....

in my opinion the graphics are equal to any game out there..... certainly they are sufficient for an mmoprg game... and eq2 has content that only 1 or 2 other games can even come close to... al round good package.

most of these trolls have never even played eq2....or if they did it was 5 years ago at release...... ignore them.

Originally posted by primalooze

hmmmmmm trolls out in force it seems...

i run using

core i7 processor

4gb ram

nvidia 250 card... 2 years old.. cant remember exact make...

windows 7 64bit

and i run eq2 in max settings with an average of 50fps... (this sometimes drops to 20-30 during heavy raids)

If you guys are really having this much trouble i suggest you get a tech in who really knows how to configure a computer....

in my opinion the graphics are equal to any game out there..... certainly they are sufficient for an mmoprg game... and eq2 has content that only 1 or 2 other games can even come close to... al round good package.

most of these trolls have never even played eq2....or if they did it was 5 years ago at release...... ignore them.

 

They're not trolling at all. I have the exact same setup you have, yet on Extreme I get 12FPS and Very High gets about 18. I don't even play the game anymore as it either (a) Runs like crap or (b) Looks like crap. I'm much happier playing Vanguard.

EQ2 is probably the worst looking game with terrible performance ever released. Even when it first came out I thought the game looked pitiful... especially the character models and animations.