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Old 03-13-2003, 07:25 PM   #10
Caleal
Enhanced Imperial Golem
 
Join Date: Sep 2002
Posts: 201
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Reducing your viewport will only affect your system performance if your vidio card is what is causing your slowdown.

I have been messing with a program called fraps that will display your framerate real time in D3D games. Interestingly, in every zone I tried it in, I got no difference in framerate on my main system regardless of what resolution I set in game.
I have vsynch enabled, so my maximum framerate is 75, well above what is detectable by even the most sensative of humans. 30fps is above what like 99%+ of humans are able to detect.

In the Plane of Water deep in, I was getting 15-17 fps in about a 56 person raid. My fps stayed consistant throughout the range of resolutions from 640x480 through 1600x1200. This was with all models off exept dark elf and wood elf males, and horses and elementals on.

In the plane of tranquility, I got 50-75 fps consistantly regardless of resolution. Looking up from inside the waterfall in tranquility, I got 9-10 fps regardless of resolution.

This is all with an AthalonXP 2700+ cpu, geforce4 ti4200, nForce2 motherboard with 1 gig of 400mhz ram.

I actually got VERY SIMILAR results on an AthalonXP 1700+ system with a via KT266 motherboard wtih geforce3 ti500 and a gig of 266 mhz ram.

When I turn all models off, the performance of both systems goes up, and is ALMOST IDENTICAL.

When I turn on all models, both systems performance goes down. It is with all models on that I start seeing a big difference in performance between the 2 systems. All models on with the xp1700+ system is nearly unplayable on a raid, heh.

Both systems also have a sharp dropoff in performance if I remove any ram from them, regardless of is models are on or off. The 2700+ had a higher percentage dropoff than the 1700+. I suspect the higher dropoff of the 2700+ was because removing a stick of ram dropped it down to single chanel DDR, thus reducing the memory bandwidth. Single chanel DDR actually comes very close to maxing out the available bandwidth to the cpu, so upgrading to dual chanel is actually only a minimal performance boost.

I do not own a pentium system to do any testing with it, but I suspect there would be similar results based on what some folks in my guild were telling me.

I'm really starting to think that its rather pointless go with anything over a geForce3 vidio card at this time, unless you like running with models on. I hate the Luclin models myself.

It seems like system ram actually has a huge impact on game performance.

I was really suprised that the xp2700+ and 1700+ CPUs had similar performance. That little tidbit, and my observation of what happened when I removed ram, seem to indicate that one of the main bottlenecks for EQ is memory quantity and bandwidth to the CPU rather than vidio card performance.

This would somewhat explain why litterally every single person to ever raid in the Plane of Water has poor system performance, even when sitting inside a cubby hole staring at the back of it. The 3d under water environment just has to many things for the system to track, so the memory and cpu buss gets flooded and performance degrades. No amount of vidio performance or resolution changes will help it at all because the vidio is not the bottleneck.

If this is true, then a P4 system using RAMBUS would perform slightly better than an equivelent speed AthalonXP system using dual chanel DDR, due to the higher memory bandwidth.

I may do some more detailed testing on it. One of the things I want to do is try swapping the vidio cards in the systems, and borrow some ram from someone so I can test more memory configurations. I want to test with 256 megs, but I don't curently own a stick of 266+mhz ram that is under 512 megs.
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