This thread about
Game really twitchy/not smooth has motivated me to try to find out how close to a bare potato you can get and run DDO smoothly.
There's a lot of advice thrown around without any testing, and since "without any testing" is Turbine's M.O., I thought it appropriate to try to find out through testing what mattered.
The wiki claims that the requirements are:
- O.S.: Windows® XP
- Processor: P4 1.6 GHz or AMD equivalent with SSE
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics 64 MB Hardware T&L -compatible video card
- Renderer: DirectX® 9.0c
- Disc Space: 11GB available
As potatoes go, this would be pretty grim. I don't have anything this low end, but I was able to get something not much better put together.
Potato Specs:
- Athlon A64-3700+ Single Core 2.2ghz CPU
- Windows 7 32bit
- ST3160812AS 160gb mechanical hard drive
- NVidia 8400GS Video card
- 1080p primary display (for DDO), 1280x1024 secondary (for monitoring system parameters)
On the main monitor I ran DDO in full screen windowed mode so that I could mouse over to the second monitor. On the second monitor I kept PerfMon (to monitor pagefile %usage and %usage peak),
DBC Task Manager (which is pretty nice if you’re not using Win8 or Win10), and sometimes the
AMD System Monitor (because it’s graph display of memory allocation is easy to interpret at a glance).
I tried running this with 1gb of ram. It was unusable. The machine did start up and eventually got to a desktop, but it was paging so vigorously that starting up TaskManager took minutes. Don’t try this with 1gb of RAM
With 2gb of RAM, this machine is almost capable of running DDO, however even at low resolution and with graphics the detail turned way down, framerates were still very low, and instances such as Market with lots of things to be drawn really slowed to a crawl.
- Load times were terrible. Excruciating if you've ever played using an SSD.
- CPU utilization was always pegged (but not in the sort of "pegging" that gets the attention of Feather-of-suck)
- RAM utilization was as close to 100% as Windows will allow.
- Page File %Usage climbed to a Peak of 56%
Copying the DDO program folder to and running it from a generic USB2 SD card increased the amount of time needed to start the client by a small amount, but greatly reduced instance load times. Watching the Task Manager during load screens it was easy to predict that this would be the case because it would show the drive utilization at 100%, but transfers were nowhere near the drive’s pathetic potential. This meant that the bottleneck wasn’t transfer rate, but rather the random access time.
Further attempts to play DDO from the mechanical drive were not made.
Replacing the 8400GS with a Radeon 6850 resulted in framerates improving significantly. At 1920x1080 Windowed, using whatever “Detect Optimal” selected, the game was much smoother. Framerates stayed above 30fps in most places, and the game was generally playable when played from the SD card. Lowering the resolution improved framerates.
Some areas with long draw distances brought framerates to the low teens, but it’s not news that standing in front of the market bank, facing the door gives much higher framerates than standing in the same place and facing the bridge. This effect is even more pronounced in
The Black Loch’s end fight.
Adding another 1gb of RAM to the potato made a significant difference as well. With 3gb, CPU usage was still 100%, and Ram utilization climbed to 2.8gb, but the PageFile %Usage never went above 11.76 (it was at 5% before launching DDO).
Playing DDO in this environment was much smoother. Framerates did not improve significantly, but movement was more fluid, and effects from combat and the environment were less choppy. The reason for this is probably that even though the CPU was at 100% as it was with 2gb RAM, because the system wasn’t using CPU time to swap to the PageFile and wasting CPU time waiting for the mechanical drive to service PageFile requests, there were more CPU resources available for DDO to use.
The more you upgrade your potato, the better it will play DDO. However, some upgrades are more efficient than others.
I think the best bang for the buck is to get DDO off of mechanical storage and onto an SSD. An SSD for Windows and DDO greatly reduces waiting for nearly everything. Windows boots faster and “settles down” after reaching the desktop faster. The game loads
MUCH faster, and instance loading screens are substantially improved as well.
Migrating the boot drive of a computer from a mechanical drive to an SSD may be too complicated for some people to handle themselves, and if this is the case for you, picking up a 16gb USB drive and running DDO from that will give you many of the performance benefits for very little effort or expense. Running DDO from a USB thumb drive won’t address all of the performance penalty of having your PageFile on a mechanical drive, but it does help in that the PageFile drive won’t be busy serving up files to DDO while it’s paging and vice-versa.
After an SSD, upgrade your video card. You don’t need the most expensive card, but something like the ~$100 R7-260 or GTX750Ti will kick the shit out of
any integrated/onboard video. These two graphics cards are pretty much the lowest end of what should be considered when purchasing a new card. There are MANY less expensive cards, but they’re not likely to be a significant upgrade from integrated video.
Third, make sure you’ve got enough RAM that under typical use cases PageFile %PeakUsage remains low. Don’t guess about it - run Perfmon and see what’s happening while you use the computer.
The last thing I would worry about is the processor if you’ve got something equal to or better than mid-range C2D or Phenom 2. Even a C2D E4500 (2 cores, 2.2ghz) will run DDO without hitting 100% utilization.
If you’d like to compare your CPU/GPU to what is in the potato I used, here are some references:
Searchable CPU comparison page here.Searchable GPU comparison page here.
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Running DDO on a Potato (Read 8766 times)
