Everquest 2 and 6800 cards problems

[Guest Rickyrockfish]

hey there everyone... I have scoured hundreds of threads on the EQ sites and it seems that EQ2 has a serious problem with 6800 cards... I was wondering If I posted some of the facts that I see maybe you can point me in the right direction to try and clear this up.

1. GPU temp does not go up when running maybe 3 degrees difference... Cpu is taxed to the max.

2. Video "stutters" when moving in high detailed levels... but works fine on lesser cards! and I notice the harddrive light is really busy like maybe caching video data?

3. Older gen cards run much better than the 6800 cards do LoL!

here are some theories that are floating around... Possible memmory leak with the game and drivers... that would explain the runaway harddrive when the "stuttering" is happening. Kind of Ironic that Nvidia has it's logo all over EQ2 loading screens and it's next gen GPU gives up the ghost on it!

I am running the latest .72 drivers which according to Nvidia has special eq code in it!

I now you guys understand video cards better than EQ support and any ideas you have woould really help out!

Edited July 1, 2005 by Bill

[Guest rickyrockfish]

in line item 1. cpu = GPU :)

Edit: fixed :)

Edited July 1, 2005 by Bill

[Bill]

I have some ideas, for starters what drivers have you tried with this? You are installing them with Pieter's moddified INF using the device manager right?

One thing to comes to mind is, you could maybe force the game to think that you have a different card, like the 6600 go or something?

This program can do that, you unzip it somewhere, and then select the game exe, then your settings, you could just enter a device ID to trick the game, then hit run.

You could then generate a batch file, that will run the game with the settings override automatically.

I searched around and just found this forum for 3D-Analyze.

So while asking here might be nice, that might be the best place to ask about that program and game.

It would be interesting if you messed around with that program and then reported back here.

Bill

Edit: I wish I could tell you more about what settings you could try, but I really don't know myself.

[Guest RickyRockFish]

great ideas there bill, that app to trick the app in thinking it is a different card sounds very interesting indeed....

I think I know the problem. Yes I am using the modded inf it rocks!

I think the vid card is being starved to death... I think with only having 512 megs of RAM and EQ is caching 750+megs in VM, I think that the video card is having to wait around for data from the harddrive.

I did a test where I disabled virtual memory and loaded up EQ and it worked great... until 30 minutes later when I ran out of memory :)

But this proved that the lag was being caused from a throughput problem. I ordered some more ram but for the mean while limited virtual ram size to only 300 megs instead of letting windows manage it. It ran great last night minumal lag only when accessing the VM.

EQ2 is a freaking memory hog!

[Guest X-Ravin]

Yes EQ2 is a major RAM hog. I've read that most people don't feel the game is "smooth" unless they run 2gb of ram. BUT RAM is not your problem. The 6XXX series of GF cards have a stutter pproblem. Ironic, because the startup logo says "nVIDIA, the way it's meant to be played." HaHa! Anyways a partial solution was found by modifying the way the game updates the cubemaps. Not only does this fix appperently cut way down on the stutter, but It is said to also add about 10fps to all zones, even those without the cubemaps (water zones). Here's the link, good luck, my go 6800 laptop arrives today so I'll post my results ASAP.

EQ2 Stutter Fix