G400 MAX and EverQuest in WinXP

[Avron]

I have a little problem.. When the latest expansion was released for EverQuest, Shadows of Luclin, I ran a brick wall trying to play with all the new models etc.. First let me list my specs btw..

Athlon 1ghz
512mb ram
G400 MAX
Windows XP

Ok, back to the issue, with all character models enabled, social animations off, High Quality textures, no texture compression, I run out of memory, this includes the 512mb swapfile.. How on EARTH can EverQuest take up over 1 gig of ram for me when I know of other players who run with 256mb physical ram, all settings at max and have no problems? I'm not sure if this is a WinXP issue or if it's the G400, but something is not right.. If I run in medium texture quality it cuts down the memory usage to half, so then I can play EQ with only a little swapping, if I turn on about 5 models I get below the 512mb limit and can play without swap lag..

I would really appreciate any help with this..

[Wombat]

Have you checked for viruses?

Have you run any programs to confirm that everquest is taking up all this RAM?

[Avron]

I don't think I have any viruses, when I check memory usage before I run EQ its at 80mb or so, when EQ is running it's at 800ish, depending on how I set EQ options.. I usually run medium quality textures, most models on and no texture compression to get under 512mb.. As for confirming if it's EQ, well I run nothing else, however the eqgame.exe process says it's only using 300mb when it's infact using alot more than that, I am thinking a bug in the drivers for the G400, but I don't know..

[windigo]

High Quality textures, no texture compression,
thats a lot of memory right there!
try turning on texture compression

[Jon P. Inghram]

I can verify that with all the new models and their social animations, and all new textures set to high quality it'll burn over a gig of allocated memory. I've got 768 megs of RAM, and it still swaps painfully often while playing with all that junk turned on. They would rather you be using a Geforce 2 or preferably 3 and have texture compression on if you want to use all the models and textures at highest quality, but since the G400 doesn't have any hardware support for texture compression we're outta luck. And since all the new models look like they've been animated by people with severe mental disorders I don't see much good in using 'em anyway...

[Avron]

If I had enough diskspace I would run texture caching with texture compression, but without hardware support for texture compression it just takes too freaking long time to load zones... Well I'm going to tinker around with the settings some more, maybe I can free up enough space to run texture caching after all..