Played EQ2 extended a while ago and had Vsync capped fps on super ultra insane settings.

i7 2600k @4.7ghz GTX580

My friend played on a 2600k stock and also said he was fine. <- Maybe he was full of sht tho I cant tell for sure lol

First thing I would lower is draw distance.. I have found it to have the biggest hit in performance without much visual gain. With everything maxxed I get ~25+ fps depending on the area and with the draw distance lowered I get 40-80fps no matter where or whats going on ( except for the Temple of Life in NQ.. those particles kill my frames for some reason ).

Originally posted by psyknx

Played EQ2 extended a while ago and had Vsync capped fps on super ultra insane settings.

i7 2600k @4.7ghz GTX580

My friend played on a 2600k stock and also said he was fine. <- Maybe he was full of sht tho I cant tell for sure lol

So your saying that you have played this game with one of the best CPU availible OCed like crazy mixed up with the best graphic card you can get right now for gaming, and it was ok,whats the point of this reply?

Cause it says good hardware in the title.

EQ2 has never been a well-optimized nor well-performing game engine overall. I believe it goes back to them originally trying to design the game around some new CPU Intel was working on, which ultimately never came out.

They also never took proper advantage of newer video cards and kept a lot of the processing on the CPU (perhaps as part of the above mentioned bit).

Instead of trying to optimize the engine and make it run better, they just kept  adding more crap on to it. I know they implemented Shader 3.0 into the game, but it looks horrible.. especially compared to other games that use it.

Some patches they've implemented over time have greatly improved performance, only to have a subsequent one hurt performance again.

In all, EQ2's development throughout its lifetime has been a schizophrenic roller-coaster of ups and downs, sudden lefts and jarring rights. The main reason I've seen, from my experience in the game, is because SOE has had no core focus on what they wanted *their* game to be, but instead spent all that time hopping from bandwagon to bandwagon, mimicking and implementing whatever someone else was doing (the most common "someone else" being WoW").

Hell, the game was barely out a couple months and they immediately started revamping huge chunks of the game once they saw how well WoW was doing. I think it was stated best in an open letter written to SOE (I think it might have been Wolfshead online.. but I'm not 100% on that), which basically stated that it was time for them to become a leader in the industry and not merely a "me-too" follower... which is exactly what they've been doing.

What does all this have to do with the lagging and engine performance? Well, the fact that it's been an issue, in one way or another, since the game launched, yet they've never made it a serious priority to address it in all those years. They've revised and revamped other areas of the game, some more than once.. but the overall game performance and their unoptimized engine was never a priority for them. Probably 'cause that bandwagon never passed them by.

The problem with Everquest 2 is that it wasn't future proof, meaning they didn't design it around multiple cpu's because back in 2003 nobody knew the future and they simpley thought that in the future we would have 7 or 8ghz single core cpu's. so a 4.5ghz single core cpu works better than a 3.2 dual core.

The engine is pathetic, yes, it's normal.

Originally posted by nerovipus32

back in 2003 nobody knew the future and they simply thought that in the future we would have 7 or 8ghz single core cpu's.

agreed -- from one of the SOE devs

http://blog.gregsplace.com/2008/03/armchair-programmers-4tw.html

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.

---

When EQ2 went into development, they wanted to support GeForce3, and wanted the game to look just as good on lower hardware. So the only choice was to do many things on the CPU since the graphics card couldn't do it.

The idea at the time was that as processors got faster, the performance would improve over time.

Unfortunately science didn't lead us in that direction.