On Thu, 11 May 2000, Nat Russo wrote:
> My system is a PIII 600Mhz. 128Mb ram. I'm running a 32Mb Diamond Ultra
> V770D (Riva TnT2 chipset). I have a 20.4 gig hard drive.
Running a lowly celeron 400, 128MB Ram, AGP TNT2 card.
> Now for the problem. In order for the game to be playable whenever I'm in
> Kunark, I have to COMPLETELY lower the clipping plane, and change some of
> the other settings (like particle density, etc). If I do not do this, I get
> the framerate from HELL.
Me too. The old continent is no speed demon, but is somewhat better.
Other 3D games (Quake, half-life) display well over 50fps at 1024x768x32,
but Kunark has noticeable refresh delay - my guess is 10fps at 800x600 in
an open area, and no more than 5 in Warsliks with the clipping slider at
half and 640x480. These are guesses, as there's no timedemo function for
EQ. I think I can get it below 1 frame per second at 1024x768 with the
clipping plane all the way out.
It is strictly rendering (and perhaps memory-to-graphics) speed - the hard
drive isn't getting used during this time and network traffic is pretty
low over my DSL line while doing these tests in a near-empty zone.
> So tell me...did Verant just COMPLETELY drop the ball on the minimum system
> requirements? Anyone with a similar configuration having the same problem?
My suspicion is the dev team was very 3dfx-centric. The only real
evidence I have is that half the features (gamma, mipmapping) don't work
except in Glide mode, and the fact that Voodoo owners seem to complain
less than TNT owners about speed.
Someday I'll have to take my Banshee card out of my Linux box to try EQ on
it. My fear is it'll be faster than the TNT2 card for EQ, and much slower
for every other game on the planet.
Anyone have any more concrete data on Glide vs DirectX speed in EQ? I'd
love to hear that it's just something I've set up wrong. Alternately, I'd
perhaps be willing to go buy a Voodoo3 card if I knew for sure it would
make Kunark a lot better.
--
Mark Rafn
dagon@... <
http://www.dagon.net/> !G