UI and frame rate

[Dalisca]

Hello! I'm hoping that someone here will be able to assist.

My husband is new to EQ2, thus me handling this situation. When he is playing, his frame rate is absolutely terrible, so I tinkered with his UI settings a little bit. He was originally getting 3-4 frames per second. I disabled voice chat, which took him from 3-4 FPS to 4-5 FPS. I disabled sound looping, which took him from 4-5 FPS to 5-6 FPS. The odd part is that, when the UI is disabled via F10, the frame rate goes from slow as dirt to being flawless. Turn the UI back on, and the frame rate goes back to being slow as dirt again.

I am going to note that he is playing with Windows XP on a Macbook with an Intel GMA 950 graphics card. I know that this is not a supported card, and that it's more of a business-end card. However, it is bizarre that the 3-D game graphics run perfectly without the UI, but terribly with it enabled. His system runs LOTRO absolutely beautifully.

My question is this: Is there an alternative UI that I may try which could provide better game functionality while enabled? Any help or advice on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much!

[Drumstix42]

It's been noticed, noted, and experienced by a lot. The UI scripting engine isn't exactly system resource friendly.

The less windows of the UI that you have showing at all times the better. IE less chat windows, and extras.

I think it's like every window showing will take between 3-5 FPS on average; depending.
I would probably change the in-game settings and tweak them for the most part before messing with the UI.

[tknarr]

In large part it's text. The graphics card's 3D engine basically can't render text characters, ditto bitmap graphics. All it can render is textured triangles. So to draw a text character the game has to create 2 triangles (which fit together to make up the rectangle of the character box) with a texture for each one that's the correct half of the character's image. Ditto for every UI element in every window. That adds up to a lot of triangle really fast. My guess is the UI takes more GPU resources to render than the whole visible game world. On a lower-end card that's not designed to render huge numbers of elements at once, it gets really obvious. You can turn down texture resolution, triangle resolution and such for the game world, but you can't do much about the number of elements needed to render the UI beyond removing visible windows.

[Dalisca]

Thanks for your help so far, folks!

I suppose I could turn off the clock feature, which would be only a mild inconvenience... then, maybe the compass feature, which would still leave the game playable with another slight inconvenience. I could also turn off one of the active effects windows, which isn't too useful anyway, and as a final step, completely remove the "Frames Per Second" window.

However, a lot of the UI elements really are required to be able to play. He needs to be able to see his life bar, he needs to be able to see the life bars of his group members and their targets (really necessary for a tank). He needs access to the chat feature in order to communicate on a basic level. He needs to be able to see his current level. He needs access to the EQ2 button to be able to log out properly. A majority of these windows are really needed in order to operate.

Would it be helpful to turn off the text smoothing feature?

I'm wondering if there may be a workable alternate UI out there which would be less taxing on the system.

Thanks again!

[Valerian]

Originally Posted by Dalisca

Would it be helpful to turn off the text smoothing feature?

YES. The fonts may look like crap with it off, but it should gain you 5-10fps, and after a couple days the crappy fonts look normal to you anyway.

[Dalisca]

Okay... after getting rid of all unnecessary UI and turning off the text shader, I haven't even gained a whole frame per second. The only difference is that, on occasion, it'll pop up to 7 fps on very rare occasion instead of just hanging out at 5-6 fps. It's now 5-7 fps.

Does anyone have any more advice?

Are there no other UI options which are less taxing on the system than the EQ2 standard? Am I just out of luck on this one?

I very much appreciate the help. None of it is working yet, but I will be willing to try anything once. Thanks again.

[Drumstix42]

From what I remember, anything with opacity takes more resources. So, if everything isn't already at 100% visibility, try changing it to that.

Otherwise, not really sure besides using a more game-oriented gfx card.

[nluerdarea]

Would putting a window on min opacity tell the card to render a window but make it invisible? or would it tell it not to render it until it is moused over?

[Drumstix42]

Originally Posted by nluerdarea

Would putting a window on min opacity tell the card to render a window but make it invisible? or would it tell it not to render it until it is moused over?

Good question, my guess would be it's still being rendered. But not sure.

[MrSmite]

Originally Posted by Drumstix42

Good question, my guess would be it's still being rendered. But not sure.

It depends on how they wrote their engine but a window with 0% opacity or
100% opacity is much easier to render than something in-between.

The reason it is harder to render a window with opacity >0 and <100 is
because you first have to render the background and then the window with
blending options which is typically more GPU intensive, especially when you
have a lot of windows.

IMO a "good" engine will look at a window's opacity setting and if it is 0 then
it should skip the rendering process altogether. Again, depends on what
approach they took.

[Drumstix42]

I'm sure if they would get on the ball in making the game more GFX card resourceful than CPU-resourcefall, and possibly take advantage of mutli-core CPUs, that the UI wouldn't be such a burden on each individual's system.

I bet it could use a lot of optimizations though. But who knows how easy, or possibly a lot if is. No idea what it's coded up as, or it's possibilities/limitations.

[gm9]

Originally Posted by Drumstix42

I'm sure if they would get on the ball in making the game more GFX card resourceful than CPU-resourcefall, and possibly take advantage of mutli-core CPUs,

You didn't read the test update notes recently, did you?

[Drumstix42]

Well, I usually read them all here, but not so much on the EQII forums. I noticed when they were mentioned, it was a reply on the same day as other patch notes, so it didn't get parsed here I guess.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/p...opic_id=429911

Good stuff. I like the recipe filter and L&L stuff for the UI.
Multicore support is a good step forward, since a lot of users go for mutlicores before faster processor. (blegh)

[tknarr]

Originally Posted by Drumstix42

I'm sure if they would get on the ball in making the game more GFX card resourceful than CPU-resourcefall, and possibly take advantage of mutli-core CPUs, that the UI wouldn't be such a burden on each individual's system.

I bet it could use a lot of optimizations though. But who knows how easy, or possibly a lot if is. No idea what it's coded up as, or it's possibilities/limitations.

I recall a dev (red name) mentioning part of the reason for EQ2 being CPU-bound and not using the GPU so much. His example was some of the particle effects on avatars. To do them, they need normals for every polygon on the avatar so they can tell the GPU how to render the particles around the avatar. If they let the GPU handle the avatar rendering, they can't get that information (the GPU computes it, but doesn't make it externally accessible). And the GPU doesn't have a way to describe the particle effect as part of the surface to be rendered, so there's no way to hand the effect off as part of the surface rendering.

I run into that all the time. "Yes, it's very elegant to move all the error-detection code into the report generation, we just get back the formatted error message and put it into the report list like any other report. Except for this bit over here where you've asked our application to process things differently depending on which error happened. To do that we need to know which error we got, which means knowing what error the report generation module detected. And if we've got to do that, it's easier for us to do the error detection ourselves rather than try parsing apart a PDF document for error messages.".