Quote:
Is there any hardware out there yet powerful enough to make this possible?
Muhahahahahahaha! Errrrr... Nope!
I'm currently running:
AMD 64 3300+
1 gig of Ram
Geforce 6600
I have played the game with three different cards and I have yet to find a "tweak" where my frame rate does not drop to around 10 to 20 in Qeynos in certain areas. Basically, I loaded FRAPS and benchmarked the game running on the designed paths throughout the Qeynos and tested this over and over with three different cards. Two older cards and one mid range card.
Fx Geforce 5200 128 mb
ATI 9250 256mb Ram
Geforce 6600 GT
Obviously the 6600 blew the other two cards away but the surprising thing is that in some areas of the city THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE AT ALL. I get 10 to 20 FPS regardless of how I tweak the settings. The only differene is that that 6600 recovers faster from the slow down. So if you are looking for a magic bullet you may just have to wait.
Here are my setting now and the game runs the best that I can get it. I almost never dip below 40 to 50 fps except in certain spots in the city.
Profile: Custom
Resolution: 1152x864 (The Gold Standard for any first person perspective game).
Graphics Resolution: Max
Lighting Resolution: Midway
Rendering Distance: Midway
Complex Shader Distance: Zero
Widescreen: Fullscreen
Texture Resolution: High
Character Texture Resolution: High
Character LOD Texture Resolution: Low
Atmospheric effects: Only Bloom is checked.
Water Interaction: All these are set to medium settings.
Paricle effects: average (these really get on my nerves any way and has nothing to do with the performance of my machine. In fact, I hate them).
Lighting: Minimal (to be honest I don't see that much of a difference so I just set it to the lowest setting).
Shadows: Minimal (huge memory suck. Unless you just need to see shadows (I don't) this should be minimal.
Model Detail --
Level of Detail bias: High
Maximum triangle density: right in the middle
High Detail characters: middle
Low detail characters: Near Max (to be honest you can turn this to the lowest since these characters are low detail any way. I doubt you'll miss a thing).
Animation Rate---
Minimum Animation Rate: Almost high...
Fast animation distance: low as possible here.
Animation weighting quality: right in the middle. You could turn this down to the lowest and you wouldn't notice it.
cloth simulation: off (barely notice it when its turned on to be honest).
Flora: OFF completely! Yea I know it makes the game look purty but this is a huge memory black hole. Can't stand it. Besides I like the old EQ carpet look. As long as textures are turned up high it still looks great to me.
Oh yea, I turn the music off of course and turn off the ridiculous chat bubbles and voices. I actually haven't even bothered to check out the game with the voices on since is the first thing I turned off.
Well, like I said I hardly ever get below 40 to 50 FPS and the game looks great. The only thing that really matters to me are the textures and the model details any way. I'm not much into the lighting effects, animations, etc. A lot of the high end stuff such as chat bubbles, voices, animation, shadows, and lighting effects only really show up in the cities any way and are pretty much worthless in other zones.
Edited, Sat Mar 12 08:16:08 2005 by Datheenker