Increasing Performance + GraphicsFollow

I am no expert in the field of computer spec but what what worked for me was a combination of upgrades based on the holy trinity of CPU/ram/vid card.

I think that to run this game with any kind of style, you need 2GB of ram. This will take some of the texture load off your graphics card and also decrease the amount of time it takes you to zone.

After that, a 512MB card will help (with the understanding that the number of pixel pipelines and shaders is as important as the amount of video ram)

And finally, a fast new CPU couldn't hurt!

Hope this helps...

EQ2 adds the graphics in layers. when you slide the bar one way or another, it either adds another layer of graphics or strips it away.

ASSUMING your processor is sufeccient to process the graphics, adding ram will help immensly. adding more ram to your video card will also improve what you can and cant see.

the more memory on the board and on the card you have, the more layers it can load for your processor without constantly rebuilding the buffer.

so, yes, both would help quite a bit. more is better. infact, the improvement you will get from adding memory will be alot more bang for your buck than upgrading the processor itself...unless ofcoarse, your running a p3 still.....

Grats on your upgrade.

It's also important to note that EQ2 is a resource intensive monster.

I started playing in the original beta with a P4 2.5G processor 500 megs of RAM, and an older GeForce 5200 card. Performance was (not surprisingly) poor, and once I got into raiding, that machine became completely unacceptable.

Upgraded to a 3.6G Pentium chip with 3 gigs of RAM and a 7800 GTX card. Huge upgrade overall, but even at that, there are still locations/scenarios that can tax your system.

At the time the game was released (11/04) there was really no system out there that would run it well with the detail levels cranked up. This is still mostly true. I can crank things up to the highest detail settings, which works alright in most zones for ambience and screenshots, but combat starts to drop the framerates quickly, and raiding in high detail is still mostly unthinkable.

Also, certain zones (Qeynos Harbor) where people congregate tend to tax your system.

Bottom line, for everyday adventure in EQ2 medium performance settings are your friends.