Random lockups while playing

[dk0]

So this is pretty confusing. I've played p99 on and off for years (contrary to this account date), always played on a relatively low-spec laptop and never had this issue.

Recently purchased a pretty nice laptop: i7-8750H, Nvidia RTX 2070 8gb, 16gb ram, NVMe SSD.

When I play on this machine, I randomly get small video lockups, for lack of a better word. For anywhere from about 0.1 to 0.5 seconds it's basically a full freeze of the game. It happens on all my characters, and seemingly random--I notice it most when panning the camera in 3rd person but not sure if that's related to the cause or not. I *think* it tends to happen when there's more action going on, but it's hard to be sure. Most of the time, it's not a serious issue, but it's basically a guaranteed death if it happens while I'm swarming on my bard.

I can't imagine what the issue could be, I figure this machine should be smooth as butter for a 20 year old game. I've tried tinkering with most video settings in game with on luck. Logs, spell effects, etc etc make no difference. Any thoughts?

[Sivaeb]

i had this problem a few years ago when i bought a new asus laptop. i called their tech support and if i'm not mistaken, they walked me through a BIOS update and it cleared it up.

If it's new, just call whatever tech support and tell them the issue with games freezing and see what they say

[dk0]

Thanks, I'm going to look into that--I've made progress but not 100% confident it's been fully resolved, so anything helps!

If anybody else runs into this, I've been troubleshooting for a while now and have made a lot of changes that seem to have some improvements, and have now done THREE bard swarms without dying.

I think the major one is setting CPU affinity to a single core, because EQ is not good at taking advantage of multiple cores. Duxa all-in-one installer has an option that attempts (but fails) to do this on Windows 10. So: launch EQ as normal -- open task manager -- right click "eqgame.exe" -- click "Go to details" -- right click "eqgame.exe" -- click "Set affinity" -- uncheck everything except "CPU 0." I have not been able to do this successfully via a command line, so it's kind of a pain but helps a ton.

I've also forced EQ to run on the high performance GPU, i.e. my RTX 2070 instead of onboard Intel chip. By default, most systems will switch to high performance card when running graphical intensive programs (like EQ lol). HOWEVER -- Titanium client can not take advantage of a lot of the default features of modern cards, so it gets switched back the onboard Intel GPU. For NVIDIA cards: open the NVIDIA Control Panel -- click "Manage 3D Settings" -- select "Program Settings" tab -- choose EverQuest (eqgame.exe) from the dropdown (or add it if needed) -- set the High-performance NVIDIA processor as the preferred graphics processor -- in the specific settings: DISABLE Anisotropic Filtering, Antialiasing - Mode, Shader Cache, Texture Filtering - Anisotropic sample optimization.

Lastly, I used the Duxa all-in-one installer to create an "EQ Lite" installation, which trims out all the things never used on p99.


Hope this helps somebody sometime.

[Sivaeb]

i started having stutters on my desktop shortly after replying to this. i had a pending windows update that hadn't completed. once i got it updated, totally normal