Very Low Framerates

Im having issues with very low framerates playing EQ1 and boxing 6-7 chars in large and newer zones. Im pretty much at a wall so Im turning here for suggestions - Ive tried the chat room 3-4 times with no responses.

Im running: XP Pro x64, 12 GB RAM, Core i7 CPU 3 GHZ (hyperthreading enabled), GTX 280 1 GB video card, and no other programs running in the background. Each box has 1 dedicated CPU thread and my warrior gets the leftover thread (for a net of 2 on him only). My monitor is running at its native 1900x1200 resolution. For me, the game is perfectly playable at 20 or more FPS, 15 FPS starts getting very difficult, and at 10 FPS its nearly unplayable.

Here is what Ive tried so far:
1) I capped framerates at 30 FPS for all instances - both within EQ and in ISBoxer

2) Turned ALL in game video settings to low or off with no appreciable framerate gains.

3) I upped my CPU cores dedicated to my warrior from 1 to 2, and nothing improved.

Im open to any and all suggestions, so please dont hold back ideas. Im not sure if there is a setting within ISBoxer/Innerspace / EQ1 that I can try and manipulate or if Im just bound by my hardware (and if it is hardware, is it my video card or my CPU thats holding me back).

Thanks for any and all advice.

Ron

Here is my postbin link:

http://pastebin.com/7UNbjdbp

I had 3 setups that it listed and tried to just copy the one I actually use. If its missing something, let me know and Ill post an unedited version.

Thanks

Ron

I'm having similar issues, your computer is slightly better than mine but I'm running a

Q9650 (oc'd to 4.2ghz )
8gb 2000mhz ddr3
GTX295
2 WD Raptor HDD in a raid 0

My game usually runs decently at first and then progressively slows down, this is with all graphics settings turned to minimum. I'm completely willing to upgrade my system but I'm like .. what can I even upgrade here? 6 sessions never seems to completely fill up my memory, usually it runs around 5.5gb of ram used so its not ram. My processor is pretty much as good as it gets, but it does seem to be under a good load .. so maybe I need to get a server board and go with dual Xeon's?. Or possibly its my graphics card but I don't think EQ1 uses much graphics. At any rate I'd love some kind of feedback on this, if I just need to get a better system I can do that but I'm not sure what exactly needs to be better. Ideally I want to be able to run the game at max settings, my machine can do this in WoW with 5 instances running but somehow EQ is much less efficient ( granted its one more window ).. so much so infact that the game doesn't even run well at the lowest settings.

[lax]

I'm having similar issues, your computer is slightly better than mine but I'm running a

Q9650 (oc'd to 4.2ghz )
8gb 2000mhz ddr3
GTX295
2 WD Raptor HDD in a raid 0

My game usually runs decently at first and then progressively slows down, this is with all graphics settings turned to minimum. I'm completely willing to upgrade my system but I'm like .. what can I even upgrade here? 6 sessions never seems to completely fill up my memory, usually it runs around 5.5gb of ram used so its not ram. My processor is pretty much as good as it gets, but it does seem to be under a good load .. so maybe I need to get a server board and go with dual Xeon's?. Or possibly its my graphics card but I don't think EQ1 uses much graphics. At any rate I'd love some kind of feedback on this, if I just need to get a better system I can do that but I'm not sure what exactly needs to be better. Ideally I want to be able to run the game at max settings, my machine can do this in WoW with 5 instances running but somehow EQ is much less efficient ( granted its one more window ).. so much so infact that the game doesn't even run well at the lowest settings.

I would try disabling SLI on your GTX295 and see if that helps.

I don't have SLI on my card, sorry its a GTX260 not 295. I have a 295 sitting in my closet because it never ran right. This is my gfx card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814127464

Im still looking for feedback/advice/suggestions if there are any out there on this issue - especially if people think its a hardware limitation, and if so, CPU or GPU. What I find surprising is that WinEQ2Pro never really had this issue (tho it has other limitations).

My game usually runs decently at first and then progressively slows down...infact that the game doesn't even run well at the lowest settings.

EQ1 has (and has had) a terrible memory leak and I have the exact same problem Sanza. The more you zone and/or the longer you are logged in the slower EQ1 runs.

I had SLI 8800 GTX cards in years past and they do nothing to speed up EQ1 - in fact, I actually noticed a 10% decrease in performance.

I ran a few tests tonight that may help shed light on the situation.

First, I had task manager running in the background and saw that none of my cores was over 50% yet I was running only 8 FPS in game.

Second, I noticed that FPS skyrocketed (doubled back into the mid 20 FPS range) by having the main screen (active character) looking straight down or into a wall (an old raid trick).

These suggest my GPU is the weaker point in the system, but I really dont know enough to draw that conclusion...can someone else offer an opinion?

I'm still trying to figure out where the "bottleneck" is with everquest. I don't think it could be the graphics card could it? I've always heard that everquest barely even utilizes graphics cards capabilities. Also my graphics card is usually nowhere near peck operating temps in EQ. Has anyone else been able to get descent performance out of EQ running 6 on one machine?

did some testing today in guild lobby, seems like it has to be the cpu causing the bottleneck. Sitting in the middle of guild lobby with like 200 char models around my 6 chrs puts my cpu constantly at 100% usage ... I have 2gb of ram to spare still though and my gpu is nearly at resting temperture. It seems like EQ barely uses the graphics card at all. I've always been told that a lot of the graphics processing gets put onto the cpu in this game ... maybe that is true. At any rate where do you go from a Q9650 at 4.05 ghz? Not sure what would even be a significant upgrade for me, if one exists.

[lax]

If you haven't configured CPU Affinity through ISBoxer, go to each Slot in your Character Set and assign EQ a different CPU core per slot (just rotate between cores). If all of the cores are selected, that's fine -- that leaves it up to Windows to do the load balancing. If no cores are selected, the CPU Affinity selected by the game itself (if it does at all) is used.

Beyond that, I can give you a solution. Whether you like it or not is another thing You may already be familiar with it.

EQPlayNice has a feature called Rendering Limiting. This can be used in conjunction with IS and ISBoxer (just make sure to turn EQPN's FPS limiter off so you can use the one built into IS and configured through ISBoxer). What this feature does is prevent the game from rendering the world every frame when in the background. This will reduce both CPU and GPU usage in EQ1. However, it comes at a cost -- not rendering the world every frame means the game will appear choppy, and since this feature lets the UI render, it will appear to flicker/flash when the game is allowed to render the world. A lot of people interpret this as lag, however it is allowing the game to run at an increased framerate (higher FPS), while reducing CPU and GPU consumption. As another helpful benefit, autofollow performance in EQ1 is based on your framerate, so autofollow should be smoother.

The easiest way to try this with ISBoxer is as follows:
1. Install WinEQ 2
2. Run WinEQ 2 -- if you're on Windows Vista or Windows 7, you will need to right click and select Run as Administrator or it will NOT work with IS/ISBoxer, and in fact you might get a -20 error from the patcher (I have not updated WinEQ 2 to elevate the patcher to admin)
3. Right click the WinEQ 2 icon in the system tray and select Preferences from the Options submenu
4. Expand EQPlayNice in the Prefs. window, and under both Foreground and Background set CPU/FPS Limiter Mode to FPS Limiter and put the CPU/FPS Limit at 100 or more
5. Under Background, the Rendering Limiter Mode should be 1 out of x frames. Rendering Limit can be whatever you please, default is 30 meaning that 1 out of 30 frames will render the game world -- If you get 30 FPS, the game world will update once per second in the background windows. If you want it to flicker faster, drop the number down. If you want it to flicker slower, raise it higher. The lower the number, the more you will be able to see happening in that window besides the UI (which will continue to render each frame)