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EQ2 looks fantastic! This may help.
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GPU shadows are here. In the options under shadows is a new alternative for shadow rendering. You can now choose between the original CPU shadow rendering and GPU rendering. If you stay with the original all the options are the same. If you pick GPU things are a bit different. The GPU shadows are a mixed bag.
Overall the GPU shadows are very nicely done. What is missing is that they do not react to ambient lighting like CPU do. The GPU shadows are only reacting to the sunlight in Norrath. You are give an option to switch between the two shadow options when you go in doors to get shadows from in door ambient lights like lamps. If you check this option the shadows change automatically when entering and exiting buildings. You are given 3 options for GPU shadows Low, Medium, High. The downside to this is that the distances that GPU shadows are rendered is based on your complex shader setting. You are also given a slider to adjust the darkness of shadows based on your tastes. I have set mine to medium and dark which for me actually look better then the high setting. The shadows look good and there is no impact on my framerate. The shadows are dynamic with GPU so move and react to the enviroment. This for the most part works well but you do get a few strange visual effects.
The result of all this is that GPU shadows look pretty good and have little impact on game performance, which is great. They do add a nice feel to the world. I do prefer them to CPU shadow rendering over CPU. However, they need work. I hope they fine tune them over time and figure a way to have them react to ambient lights. The use of GPU shadows does not change any of the advice I gave in the original post about graphic settings. GPU shadows are a great addition but they do need work.
Here is an example of both shadow renderings . The scene was taken at sunset in Qeynos South. The left picture is CPU rendering. Notice the shadows behind the door lights. You lose ambient light shadows with GPU. The scene on the right is GPU. The shadows are more rich but no ambient shadows. You also have no impact on your game performance. An equivalent look with CPU would have a big impact on game performance. So all in all GPU shadows are a great addition but they could use some polish.
If this has been mentioned I am sorry, I must have missed it.
If you own a ATI/AMD setup, AMD Dual or Quad Core, you need to get Fusion and the Overdrive software. Fusion shuts down non-essintial windows programs, giving you a big boost in frame rates. Overdrive is a over clocking software, it is very good and will increase your processor speed and improve frame rate, but can damage your CPU. Get educated on Over clocking before attempting.
I own a AMD Quad Core, 4 gig of ram, 4870 AMD/ATI video card. I get 62 FPS in Neriak on Antonia Bayle with extreme graphics. During a raid I put in on High Quality and get around the same.
GPU shadows makes shadows essentially a free graphics increase. However flora is still an insane performance hog. Visit GF with and without flora, it's not even funny the difference. GPU shadows almost makes EQ2's engine balanced, but without real multi core usage, its still best core dependant. Ie Single core 4GHz, better than Quad core 3GHz for now anyway. But then that's why my MMO box is an AMD Phenom II 550 at 3.8GHz... with an 8800GTS 512. Fingers crossed at some point character geometry goes to the GPU so I can justify an upgrade
Hi Eccoton,
I just wanted to say thanks to you for taking your time to post this and help others to tweak their game.
Been reading it all
latest expansion is so boring its not worth playing even if it had crysis graphics
Sorry to say but again this has nothing to do with the Graphics of the game. If the game is boring then it's a content problem...
I'm considering coming back and playing soon, what updates to the settings are there with the new shadow system?
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
The new shadow system is in. I'm not sure what you are asking. There is an option to do GPU or CPU shadows depending on your system. So if you got a good cpu and not so go graphics card you can select cpu shadows if you have a good gpu you can do gpu shadows. On my system switching from cpu to gpu got me like 15fps in qeynos.
There are also some shadow quality settings and an option for offscreen shadows.
The big news right now is the shader 3.0 stuff coming in the next update. This updates all the textures and lighting stuff and makes the game look way better while at the same time reducing the hit on your computer!! At least so the devs say and they did a video with before and after shots so it definitely looks much better.
Anyway it should be going up on test pretty soon so people will be able to check it out.
---
Ethion
you have gotta be $h!tting me, you are comparing EQ2s graphics to WoW, and saying its a bunch of crap, sir you LOL never mind.
played: EQOA,EQ1, EQ2, SWG, DAOC, FFXI, GW, WoW, Eve, Vanguard, COH/COV, Pirates of Burning Sea, Pirates of the Carribean, Freerealms, AOC, Warhammer, UO, Secondlife (LMFAO), The Matrix Online.
Waiting for: SWTOR, STO
Blocky, plastic and pixelated? The point of this thread was to help people with that problem. Now you may not like the graphics in EQ2 but it is hardly blocky or pixelated. I think a lot of people see it that way because they do not have the graphics setup right (Hence this thread) or they do not have a machine EQ2 likes. SOE has taken steps to get the game running better for more people but they still have a lot of work to do. EQ2 being a 4 year old game not sure how much more SOE will do to optimize the game. However if you setup the complex graphic options right the game still after 4 years looks great.
This thread was to get others to post info on getting EQ2 running and looking better. It was not a review of the game or ventilo, by the way EQ2 has voice chat built into game now so no need to TS or Vent.
Here are a couple game screens I just took. I simply do not see them as blocky, plastic, or pixelated. I guess we see things differently.
Thanks alot for this thread. I find these screenshots to be amazing. I just started playing this game and am very glad I did.
stop it, that almost makes me want to start up my station pass again....
The new shadow system is in. I'm not sure what you are asking. There is an option to do GPU or CPU shadows depending on your system. So if you got a good cpu and not so go graphics card you can select cpu shadows if you have a good gpu you can do gpu shadows. On my system switching from cpu to gpu got me like 15fps in qeynos.
There are also some shadow quality settings and an option for offscreen shadows.
The big news right now is the shader 3.0 stuff coming in the next update. This updates all the textures and lighting stuff and makes the game look way better while at the same time reducing the hit on your computer!! At least so the devs say and they did a video with before and after shots so it definitely looks much better.
Anyway it should be going up on test pretty soon so people will be able to check it out.
Thanks for the explanation Ethion. I'm planning on getting a new Rig the first part of next year, just prior to the release of Halas. The new rig and graphics card(s) should be able to run the game quite well.
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
You're not kidding. I just re-subbed after almost a year. I enabled shadows on my GPU etc and not only has performance improved, but also the graphics.
I knew about the graphics changes, but had no idea it would look quite impressive.
Think a Geforce 7300 gs Could run this alright? Worried i might get massive lag, Honostly im not expecting it to run perfectly but im hoping to atleast run it smoothly.
You'd be able to run it on "Balanced" or at most "high" but on high I'm almost certain you'll have lag. Balance and high performance is probably where your happy place will be.
I can confirm the information in the first post is still up-to-date and relevant. Thanks a ton!
Check the "Advanced" button top right in options, that reveals all the fiddly stuff. Most of the options in the OP are still there.
On a modern machine, EQ2 can still look amazing for an 8 year old MMO (although of course some zones are better than others, the "ice" area of New Halas looks very 2004, whereas Kelethin is absolutely enchanting
), it was very well future-proofed, graphics-wise, and now that more is done on the GPU it can run very smoothly and still look great.
EQ2 has some nice monster and object models, but world design is absolutely terrible. I just returned to game and ran through few of the old and new zones. It feels like landmass was randomly generated and designers didnt give a crap about making world beautiful or realistic. It is especially noticible after playing games like Age of Wushu where world design is amazing.
No amount of tweaking can change it, sadly
They could use EQ2s water in Vanguard though for sure! Still don't understand how Vanguard got such ugly water. Even EverQuest 1 has better looking water now. Heck, WoW has better looking water :-p Morrowind has better looking water!! Gah!
saw this comment on massively
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/07/26/second-wind-everquest-ii-part-two/
ordegar1
There are a couple of settings that may not be set properly for a modern computer. I had to change them for mine. I have an Intel i7 cpu and GTX 660ti video. Make sure you toggle the setting for Advanced Settings; this opens up all of the settings options so you can optimize properly.
The main things to look for are: toggle ON the setting for multi-core support; the engine still uses the cpu quite a bit and you don't want that running on one core.
Make sure shadows are set to GPU shadow maps and NOT CPU shadows.
Set your view distance way down as low as you can without it affecting your surroundings; I have mine set to 200 to 300.
The EQ2 engine does not do two things that modern game engines do for performance; one is occlusion (not ambient occlusion, that has to do with lighting and is not the same thing), which allows the engine to not draw what you can't see, so EQ2 draws EVERYTHING within your view distance setting even if you're looking away from it and even if it's behind a building or mountain. The other thing it doesn't have that modern games have is Tesselation, where the number of polygons of a model adjust according to distance, so the model becomes more detailed the closer you are to it; the only thing that scales in EQ2 is the texture quality with the LOD setting.
I have almost everything set to maximum except those things I mentioned (textures set to Very High, not maximum) and I get between 50 and 100 fps depending on the zone. Note that some things will move to CPU processing if not set to max, so experiment. Hit F11 to toggle on the performance indicator.
EQ2 fan sites
So it is simply a trade off performance for looks.In reality the game is just badly implemented,players in 2015 should be able to max out everything and still have 100 + frames.
This could be for several reason besides clunky over sized code,it could be the game engine is simply crap,it doesn't allow invisible zones and ways to save on how it draws objects and when.
The "LOOKS" is all about lighting effects well and of course you still need quality textures "Wow need not apply here".Lighting/shaders /shadows are a huge resource hog.
Simply put anyone with some average thought can change the settings to look decent,turn all the lighting down until it looks bad,turn off shadows,turn shaders right down until you feel you need it.Screw around with color settings but even that changes a lot from day>night,i found i had to constantly change everytime the day/night cycle changed.
Bottom line....SOE was a nice starting point for games and game design,they are no longer a factor and are ,has been and always will be a developer that releases a LOT of glitches/bugs and just bad mapping and code.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
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