crossfire & boxing

[Denizen]

I box several characters at times, like 12. With an AMD 7870 and fps of 40/15 (isboxer) it still starts chugging at times when swarms of mobs are on me. So....does anyone have experience using crossfire with boxing? I'm evaluating the possibility of getting another 7870 for crossfire.

Reading reviews it appears that maximum fps is not increased much with crossfire but I was thinking that maybe doing something like running multiple instances of EQ would be something that crossfire would help.

Any suggestions/comments would be appreciated.

Thanks

[kondoor]

Not knowing the other specs of your system, have you already maxed out system memory and are you running from SSD? I ran crossfire for awhile and saw little improvement. Going from spinning rust to SSD and maxing out my memory at 32 GB made much more of a difference than crossfire did. I eventually took my second video card and put it into a secondary machine and run my casters on 1 box and my melee on another box if I need to do more than 12 toons now.

[Denizen]

Thanks for the ideas...

I have an i5 3570 with 32 gig memory with a PowerColor PCS+ AX7870 2GBD5-2DHPPV3E Radeon HD 7870 MYST. Edition (Tahiti LE) 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16. Spinning oldish hard drives so...think I'll take you up on upgrading to an SSD.

Thanks again!

[Longfeathers]

Are you able to place half of your eqgame.exe onto one GPU and the other half on the other 7870, vice running the cards in Crossfire.

~Rahvan/Longfeathers

[Noren]

I play on a 256GB Samsung 830. I love that SSD, but I have to warn you that an SSD has little bearing on game performance. FPS boils down to your graphics card and RAM.

If you have poor FPS when playing multiple characters then you can either a) throw more hardware power at it (more GPUs) or, b) use 3rd-party software to manage background FPS.

I can effortlessly play 12+ characters on a 2nd gen i7 mobile processor with a mobile radeon 6770 using the correct settings. That means turning some graphics down and letting 3rd party software manage background FPS. With full graphic settings my computer would likely melt into a pile of goo.

I only offer this as advice that more horsepower is not necessarily the answer. If you must have max settings on every character, then go ahead with more graphic horsepower. Otherwise I'd say that money could be better spent supporting the server after you tweak a few game settings! Last I saw, I logged on 15 characters on a 2-year-old laptop with old player models and had 40-50 FPS. It can be done!

[denton420]

Hi Noren,

Can you be a bit more specific about which settings you turn down? Just the major ones would be nice.

Currently I turn drawing distance to 5-10% on all but my main tank.

I also turn spell particles off for everyone but main tank.

Which program do you use to manage background FPS? I use eq2emu and I think that uses eqplaynice to limit the fps in general. But I am not sure how much that is limiting my background fps.

If I can just cut down on background FPS sounds like I can make some serious savings on processing.

Thanks,

[Noren]

I forgot to mention Underfoot Client as the key to low RAM usage, but here are the settings I play with:

Code: Select all

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As for background FPS management, I rely on MQ2FPS.dll, which is a plugin for MQ2. Considering that this isn't the proper forum for 3rd party software talk, I'll be brief: many people here use emulator-friendly builds that have all of the cheating plugins stripped away and they get it from http://mqemulator.net/downloads.php . Just make sure you know the server rules regarding its usage here and direct any further questions to the proper area of the forums if you decide to go this route.

[rinze]

Another option is Isboxer for frame limiting. It has a nice foreground and background fps limiter.

[Stickybuds]

something i do to help with boxing on my laptop is i have a 2nd EQ folder that i use for my boxes. My main window is full screen and has graphics turned up and is all nice and pretty, while all my boxes run in tiny 800x600 windows with everything turned off or down.

While you can use Wineq to create additional ini files to also achieve this, my goal is to alter my files and such on my "boxing" eq folder as described in the link below for maximum performance from those windows since I only tab to them for a few things.

This link talks about a LOT of stuff, but the main thing I'm interested in is where its talking about editing the global load and the stickman models. 2nd post down.

viewtopic.php?f=204&t=9195

Regards,
Sticky

[Denizen]

These are all helpful pointers....thanks for all the input. I'll try them...
I do use isboxer.

I found a posting on isboxer forums by one of the developers saying crossfire would not help.

I'd think an SDD would help a bit as the pagefile memory would access quicker etc. but GPU is prolly most of it.

Cheers