The Hidden Forest

I have a 6 month old gaming laptop and I am suffering from severe random drops in FPS in Shadowed Grove.

I so far have tried windows xp compatibility mode as well as setting the affinity but even when I sue the process to set affinity it still swaps between 2 processors 0 and 1.

Anyone else have a resolution to FPS issues with a high end rig in EQ?

A little more info could help greatly in narrowing down the issue.

* System specs (cpu/ram/vid card)
* Which client you are running?
* Are you boxing or running any other resource intense apps in background?
* Is there an obvious bottleneck? (glance at windows task manager and see if ram is maxed out or one core/thread is maxed out.

Lots of different issues could be happening. Titanium is a pretty massive resource hog compared to other clients. Integrated video instead of an independent video card may clog up the system. Titanium doesn't handle multi-core or threaded cpu's efficiently and may not utilize hardware effectively.

I am running a Asus G73JW Gaming Laptop
Main components are...
Windows 7
Video:GTX 460M
8GB Ram
Intel Corei7/Q 740

You say Titanium is bad? Is it better with later packs or is this the same?

Glancing at the system spec... if everything is functional it shouldn't have any problems handling this game at full blown graphics. However, if there is some bad memory you may experience the problems you're encountering.

What about boxing? are you running multiple clients?

My system is high end, I run 12 clients. If I stand around in vale or forest too long with too many clients it starts overwhelming my video cards memory and dipping hardcore into the systems and starts getting choppy. Workarounds include camping/reloading to dump textures from vram, staring idle clients into walls/floors and simply getting out of heavily occupied zones with lots of varies textures.

I can fairly confidently pinpoint the video card as culprit in what I experience ans cpu usage is generally 30-40% and ram usage is generally 14-15 gigs out of 32 used. Neither of those is a bottleneck as there's lots of unused resources.

Titanium is a very popular client but it's a bit archaic, it tends to be a resource hog. later clients utilize resources better and require fewer to run in general. You can try eqplaynice if you're running multiple clients, it'll reduce resource use as well.

Next line of question would be, bottlenecks? have you checked resource use when problem occurs? windows task manager (click on performance tab) will show you a problem at a glance. If your client is running on 1 core and it's maxed, you will experience choppiness. Can also see ram use as well, if system is supposed to have 8 gigs, make sure it still shows that much. if you have a bad stick all kinds of issues may pop up performance-wise.

I get major lag in the forest. My CPU is max around 15-20%. Ram is also in the low range of usage.
I get strange skips and stutters when spells are cast as well.

So getting a later pack for the game may run better?

I can confidently say that UF runs more smoothly and efficiently than Titanium on my comp, and also suggest that any frame issues will likely fall on your NVIDIA card and the drivers handling it.

You can try different driver builds and updates to DirectX, if you like, but even more importantly are the in-game video options.

Alt + O (options)
Display tab
Advanced

and from here you can tweak VRAM usage and shaders, etc. Could do trial and error and see if you get any improvement.

cool i got UF and will try that first.
are there specific NVIDIA drivers that are best with EQ?

Newest drivers will do fine, corrupt driver can cause some issues. Unlikely to need any specific version as updates for a 13 year old game aren't common place. Let us know once you have UF up and drivers updated.

seems way smoother with UF however I still get a split second stutter sometimes and then it goes back to being super smooth.
IS there any resolution or post about this?

If you haven't already you may try turning down or turning off some graphics options even if temporary to see if it solves problem. If it does you may have an issue with vram filling up. could be faulty memory. Think when I glanced at the vid card you listed it was standard 1.5g vram which is a LOT more than the game will need but if it's faulty you may only have a portion of it available. I believe there's an nVidia app to show all actual specs on your card.