Ok, this is a new one for me since LDoN. I'm not sure if it's because of a background process I have running, or if it's because of EQ.

In some zones, the LDoN camp zones in particular, I'm now getting this sort of stuttery performance when I run around. It isn't video lag because it doesn't happen necessarily when I'm around a lot of people (objects). It's as if the EQ process wasn't getting the CPU time it needs or something.

It's just a continuous series of fractional pauses. Usually zoning fixes it.

Any ideas?

You don't actualy have to be near a heavy concentration of players for them to affect your turning speed like that. Just facing in that general direction causes EQ to have to clip those players from the scene as long as they are within your clip plane which can be quite large in outdoor zones. If it happens only when facing certian directions this is the most likely cause. If it happens no matter what direction your facing it's probably not. One thing you can try is deleting your texture cache files. I've been haveing a problem with them becoming corrupted lately.

If you haven't already, try dropping in nosound.txt and see if that resolves the issue (yes, sound).

Eeek... I like sounds. :p Ok, I'll try it.

I like sounds too... and it still amazes me how many times I mention some cool sound effect or ambience and four of of six people in the group have sound off and have always had sound off.

Turn your antitropic* filter off, and antialiasing off. Your texture edges won't be smooth but it should sold your stuttering. I experimented with these settings on my gforce 4 4600 and got the exact results you are speaking of. Turned them back off and it ran smooth once again.

Naaa something changed recently. In some zones it's acting like Umbra is disabled. Umbra is the code that stops you from rendering items that are not in your line of sight (behind other objects or past your clip plane).

Last night in HoHB, whenever I turned in the direction of the raid my video lag was worse than it's been in ages. Ok fine you say? Thats normal you say?

But when said raid is on other side of a WALL then Umbra should cause you to NOT have to render what you can't physically see.

Tonight I'm going to check my client.ini and see if something mucked with UseUmbra=True..

I also noticed that using ALT ENTER to reset the graphics (normally causes about 10-15 secs of black) was instantanious in HoHB last night.

Originally posted by Ladred
Turn your antitropic* filter off, and antialiasing off. Your texture edges won't be smooth but it should sold your stuttering. I experimented with these settings on my gforce 4 4600 and got the exact results you are speaking of. Turned them back off and it ran smooth once again.

I haven't fussed with anything on my video card ever. It's not a high end card by any means. How would I find those things to turn off?

Alt-Enter takes you in and out of windowed mode. Yeah, that did seem to speed up a lot.

I don't think that UMBRA= thing is even used any longer. It's always on, or at least, that's what SOE said they were going to do with it back sometime in Luclin.

I played with sounds off last night... yuck, hate it. I feel like I'm missing so many cues as to what is going on. I can't even tell I'm being hit (I don't look at my "Me Being Hit" box all that often). But I didn't have the stuttering either... then again, I don't always have it happen. I'll see how it is tonight.

While different manufacturers vary implementations, you usually
access these settings through Display in the Control Panel. Open it up. Go to Settings and click on the Advanced button. Now find the tab that corresponds to your board. Click the Additional Properties button if present, otherwise hunt for the features. You're in the right ballpark.

Ok, Anti-aliasing was set to "application" and Anistropic filtering was off. I just changed "performace" to High Performance rather than High Quality. And I'm setting Mip map Detail level to: hgih performance.

I haven't really experienced the issue since I turned my sound off like Stormhaven suggested, but I also made some other changes too. I think I'll try putting sound back on, it creeps me out not having it.

You shouldn't need to use Mip Map at all. I might be wrong though. I've never used Mip Map, and have anti aliasing and antistropic usually set to application. When I moved it away from application and manually set it I started getting stutter. Set it back to application and it runs smoof.

The only problem I have is the fog emulation table. Can't get that thing to work at all. I'm using DX9 and it just sucks with the geforce 4 4600. If I turn on particle effects I slow down when the particles with fog effects hit. Like thos birds in plane of air, I get laggy when they are around.

Better yet, best example would be counterstrike. When someone throws a smoke bomb, I'm just dead because my framerate almost stops when running through the smoke. All the tinkering with the settings just won't fix it so I've decided to just deal with it and avoid the smoke bombs in CS. :)

It's gotten better on my main system, but my "other" system is really still suttering at times. I verified it isn't sounds causing it. Did all the video card optimizing for performance. Something seemed to happen around the LDoN release time that just makes my computer run like crap! :p It's zones like LDoN dungeons, at times, or Everfrost or Greater Faydark, ones that don't make a lot of sense for being laggy.

I went from being able to participate in a 72 person raid with particles on and experience no video or network lag at all to having to stare at the ground in any raid type situation and have every advanced display feature turned off.

Unfortunately I took a couple of months off from EQ so I don't know exactly when the problem started occuring.

My system configuration has remained the same, and I've done all the tweaking I can think of aside from reverting back to DirectX 8 (if that is even still possible).

(Just for reference, I'm running a self-built P4 2.4 533-fsb with 1gb PC2700 DDR and a GEForce 4 4200Ti... Latest reference drivers, though I've tried backreving thru a number of versions to see if that would fix the problem.)

if its any consolation, Right around when i got LDon (i was formatting and reinstalling system at this time also) , i was Previously useing DX8, But i tryed 9 this time, When everythin installed i logged in and i was getting about 21FPS (www.fraps.com, to test your frames per second in EQ)

I uninstalled DX9 , and put in Dx8 , i ended up getting 38 FPS (my comp sux, this is a huge improvement on this system)


Mabye u should try that.

How did you uninstall DX9? I thought it was sort of permanent.

I had a hard drive laying around, so I installed a fresh copy of Windows and EQ without "upgrading" to DirectX 9. Same graphics driver from nVidia but under DirectX 8.1 the game runs much more smoothly than under DX9. I was able to actually see the fights last night in the Plane of Time instead of staring at the ground blindly casting.

Unfortunately, I don't think DX9 is uninstallable, so now I'm swapping my HD out when it is EQ raid time.

Oh! Forgot to report back. One of my machines I hadn't upgraded to DX9. I had the worst stuttering of either. So I'm not convinced it's DX's fault.

Camping out and rebooting your computer might help. It works for me when my framerate gets real bad. It's only a temporary fix though.

Oops, I take it back. The other machine with the DX9 that was the worst, is now even worse. Almost unplayable, I think I'll try a system restore and see if it gets rid of DX9.

There are supposed programs out there that will remove any version of direct X and enable you to reinstall an earlier version. I guess it just depends. I have an ATI Radeon pro 9800 now and im using dx9 with no problems. before I was using a g4ti4600 and dx8.1 because the card doesnt support dx9. EQ doesnt support dx9 and I heard some people had issues after upgrading from dx8.1 --> dx9.0

The System Recovery function in XP works to remove stuff like that too. It rolls back system files only.