upgrade computer for eq2?

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realmike15

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I really wasn't sure whether this should go in Gaming section or here, so I guess i'll see if my post gets moved or not.

I bought Everquest 2 the other day, was bored with my current MMO, and most of the game the performance is great. When I go into areas that are thick with graphic textures and models like Qeynos (main city), my performance is dropping significantly. At first I figured, well it's probably just their servers (on high population server). I opened up windows task manager and found the program using all my memory (1 gig), and PF usage was listed as 850+ MB.

I purchased another gig of ram about 6 months ago, knowing I wouldn't get much of a performance benefit. Now I'm thinking I maybe should have kept it, for games like this that require massive amounts of resources.

As you can see from my sig, I couldn't do much better with my video card, and my CPU usage is well below capping out to 100% ever, while I'm playing. Overall Task Manager was reading something like this while playing.

CPU Usage 0%-80%
PF Usage 850+ MB
Available Memory 40 MB (I imagine that the minimum for the OS)

So I guess my question is, since I can't do much better with my video card. Do I upgrade my RAM, will that help? My system tray is clean, I have numerous unnecessary window services disabled, I can't think of what else I could do. My computer is free of viruses, ad-ware, etc.

Also just a side note, the graphics settings in the game are set to what would be considered a medium setting. For those of you who have never played it, it's a pretty intense game on your PC, and task manager only seems to be pointing out, that memory usage is the only issue here. I know PF usage is very slow compared to actually have the amount of RAM required instead, so I figured this may give me a significant performance increase just in this particular game. Agree, Disagree?
 
More RAM may help a little bit, but 1 gig is pretty good. It looks like a better graphics card would really help you out, as that seems more like the bottleneck.

What kind of budget would you have to buy a new card?
 
I actually forgot to update my sig, I have a Radeon x850 xt plat, I should be fine in the video card department :)

Everything else in my sig is correct though.
 
Oh, OK.

Well, it shouldn't be your card then...

2 gig ought to boost it some.

Be sure that you have downloaded any and all pstches for the game, as well as the latest drivers for yoru card.

Have you eleminated all background apps and processes?
 
Ya vid drivers are up to date, as well as patches.
I've tried disabling Norton AV2005, as well as completely removing it from startup in msconfig. It only seems to use at most 10 MB of memory, so it really didn't make any noticable difference. Aside from that I have MBM, which I also tried turning off while playing, but again it uses such little resources, it didn't make a difference. Finally I my ATI control panel, which is the only thing I let run 24/7. That one only takes up about 1MB in resources.

I was just hoping since physical RAM from what I remember is considerably faster then PFing, would stop all my choppy frames I'm getting in major cities in this game. I'm not expecting to get 40+ fps everywhere I go, just some of that choppiness to go away.
 
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