I have a bit of a rant.. sorry. Follow

I'll definitely sign on to optimize Text and GUI. I've wanted to seperate the GUI from the game world display ever since I saw it done in UO and felt it worked GREAT there. I too have a nicely built P5N 32 E SLI, with a single 640 8800 gts. I did go to 4 Gig and, well honestly, built it with 64bit Vista. So far when wandering the world and having a nice walkabout with just 2 or 3 people I can happily run Extreme Quality no worries. 6 Group and I go Balanced or High Quality. Raid I'll still turn it down to Performance. But all this is because I've never sat down and thinned out the opacity of particle efx and other spell splash to the point it's an enhancement of the visual space and not a fricken psycodelic melange of color overlaying everything to the point of obstruction.

Now, having said all that, there is a flaw with drawspace updating and this often happens when I'm running through an area in Extreme Quality at speed and someone with a very ornate set of armor comes by. My computer will gag on a 1 meg drawfile being added to the queue even when it says there's "only" 2 gig of space to add it to. That will result in an abnormal termination of the client and bounce to desktop. Picking up from there is no big deal. But it does remind me to turn down all the eye candy if people are depending on me to be there in the thick of a raid or instanced zone.

By the by, I don't know much about how computers 'plan ahead' for new zones or new drawspace dumps when moving into complex new texturing areas. As like in north freeport coming up from the lower areas and into the temples... that short hard drive seek and load as you add the new textures to the drawspace. That seems like it will always be there until you either have ramdrive buffers that can load the entire game or static ram hard disks doing same.

Edited, Aug 15th 2007 12:38:41am by MerleFR