Title really says it all, and with the client being 64-bit now what is the limiting factor on why this almost 20 year old game not using more than 2 threads of a system? i don't expect you to write the application to use 16 threads but at least 6-8 which is what most people have now a days. it will also let the CPU relax while the GPU takes over more of the workload improving the performance of the game while also letting people like me who love a beautiful game to run at max settings shadows and all.
Feedback It's 2024 where is multi-core utilization?
- Thread starter Llopod
- Start date
Melkior
Member
The problem is that for a game like this that is a rewrite of the game engine. Yes, it is 2024, and if the game were being created today, the engine would support those things. But taking a game that had none of that at the start and trying to restructure it is a very different thing. Nothing is impossible with enough time and resources. Unfortunately, this game is absolutely starved in the resources dept.
Melkior
Member
Hmm, I'm pretty sure the GPU does almost no work in this game. Again a relic from the era of the game. It was designed when the thought was single cores would continue to advance in speed. So nearly all the game resources run off of the CPU. They added multi-threading many years later, but it was pretty limited. I know some functionality comes from the graphics card, but I don't think it requires much.
Bakual
Member
I can say that I have played EQ2 on highest graphics settings on an old PC with a dedicated graphic card without much issues. I've upgraded it since then (it wasn't Win11 ready), but for EQ2 it didn't change much.
On a rather current laptop with 12th gen i5 CPU and only the integrated Iris GPU, I have to dial the settings back to "High Performance" to have it run smooth.
So I'd say a dedicated GPU and especially it's memory makes a big difference. It doesn't have to be a new card at all, just DX11 ready and enough memory.
But then, that is my subjective experience. It's a rather small sample
On a rather current laptop with 12th gen i5 CPU and only the integrated Iris GPU, I have to dial the settings back to "High Performance" to have it run smooth.
So I'd say a dedicated GPU and especially it's memory makes a big difference. It doesn't have to be a new card at all, just DX11 ready and enough memory.
But then, that is my subjective experience. It's a rather small sample
kinda mixed. the only form of multi-threading added to EQ2 was support for it to be able to target a thread to run the game on / for it to automcatically go to the last thread of the CPU so it had a high chance of being on an unused thread by other processes. if EQ2 had true multi-threading support it would be at least like EQ1 where it will use 2 threads. it does seem though that they've been updating the "multi-threading support" as the options toggle goes up to 32 when i looked at it but again, that's just a setting to tell the game what thread you want to run the game on and not how many it is allowed to use.
if EQ2 could use at least 2-4 threads instead of only 1 it'd run extremely better than it does now. especially in newer zones which have more detailed environments / more particle effects etc.
the main issue with the single core limit we have right now on the game is that if you want shadows + ambient occlusion you don't have enough free CPU time on the 1 thread for the GPU to have enough of a data bus to move the information to the CPU. this is why you see massive performance drops enabling it vs a medium to small performance impact.
and i know this is a bad point to make as blizzard makes far more money than DBG etc. but the WoW client even has ray tracing support and true multi-threaded processing support. again, this forum post is more of a question for the devs as to why we don't have at least 2-4 thread utilization for EQ2 and if they plan to bring true multi-threaded processing support to EQ2.
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intel iGPUs are the worst on the market. i can take a radeon HD 7950 from 2012 and run the game on max settings minus shadows no problem. would do it to grab a performance metric but the card died 4 years ago T~T serves as a decoration now in my roomI can say that I have played EQ2 on highest graphics settings on an old PC with a dedicated graphic card without much issues. I've upgraded it since then (it wasn't Win11 ready), but for EQ2 it didn't change much.
On a rather current laptop with 12th gen i5 CPU and only the integrated Iris GPU, I have to dial the settings back to "High Performance" to have it run smooth.
So I'd say a dedicated GPU and especially it's memory makes a big difference. It doesn't have to be a new card at all, just DX11 ready and enough memory.
But then, that is my subjective experience. It's a rather small sample
gambitak
New member
This would be such a massive undertaking that I suspect that the company would rather restart EQ Next than rewrite the entire codebase for EQ2. Further, multi-processing isn't as big a deal as GPU optimization. That's where the real performance increase would be noticed.
Given the age and complexity of this codebase, I'd be surprised if DBG was given the green light to redesign the game from the ground-up; however, if I were to somehow win the $1 billion+ Powerball, I'd be happy to donate the money to make that happen =) (don't hold your breath...)
Given the age and complexity of this codebase, I'd be surprised if DBG was given the green light to redesign the game from the ground-up; however, if I were to somehow win the $1 billion+ Powerball, I'd be happy to donate the money to make that happen =) (don't hold your breath...)