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Loading effects the Hard Disk Speed/size, as well as your overall ram size/speed for the most part. Well not so much your Hard Drive size unless its almost completely full.

*sigh* I did a long article about this a while back, with regards to someone who wanted to know if his 56k modem would prevent him from playing MMOs... let me see if I can dig it up.

*15 minutes later*

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Video quality has no effect on net latency. If you've got a system (and especially video card) that's powerful enough to handle it, you can turn every single video effect in the game up to max, and it won't impact your connection in the slightest. Whether you're running old models or new, turning off all special effects or turning them all on, it makes no difference - the data packets that are going from your system to the server and back are exactly the same, either way.

People complain about two completely different things when they talk about lag. One is internet latency, and the other is graphical lag.

Internet latency is all about your connection, and the connection at the other end. Your latency will get worse if you run in a high-traffic network (like older Cable Internet providers), or if the server you're connecting to is logjammed. A dial-up connection will actually work quite well for many MMOs out there, if this is your only problem. This can sometimes be a brief problem with high-traffic areas in MMOs, when you have to download data for a lot of different models in a short time.

Graphical lag, on the other hand, is what happens when your CPU, memory, and video card aren't up to the task of rendering all of the data you're dealing with. As you get special effects, more models, and more activity going on in the game, your system's resources start being taxed, and if too much happens for your system to cope with, your game will freeze while it gets the data in, and back down to a manageable level. This is especially the case with high-traffic areas. Think of the old Bazaar in EQ, for example. Your system bogs down because there's too much data for it to handle all at once, and the game is demanding that it handle it... so the game freezes until it gets the data it wants. This is also why running through areas like this with your view pointed at the ground ("looking at your feet") helps.

Much of the time, when people complain about, "lag," their problem is the second case, not the first. A modem, in and of itself, is not going to be a problem for most MMOs, if the rest of the system is powerful enough to handle the graphical requirements.

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That doesn't fully answer your question, though. Judging by your questions, I think you already know the difference between latency and lag.

You have three components that each can be a bottleneck on your overall video performance. Those three are RAM size, processor speed, and video card quality (and the video card's onboard RAM, as well). Any one of these, if underpowered, can be a problem component causing lag.

Your processor power is actually the least important factor these days. As long as you're running at least a 1 Ghz processor (and 2 Ghz processors are dirt cheap these days), your processor is probably the least likely bottleneck of the three critical components in your system.

Ideally these days, you want a bare minimum of 256 megs of RAM if you're running Windows 2K or before, and 512 megs of RAM if you're running Windows XP. That's enough memory that the operating system itself won't cause you problems in basic gaming situations. That's not good enough for graphics-intensive games, however... for most situations, you want to double that to 512 megs for Win2k, or 1 gig for WinXP. However, EQ2 is not "most situations." While EQ2 will run fairly well with 512 megs of RAM in Windows 2K (as my girlfriend and I can attest), you'll really want more memory. Double it again to 1 gig for Win2k, or 2 gigs for WinXP, and you'll be just fine.

Finally, there's the video card. People will spout brand names and numbers at you all day long, but ultimately, it comes down to this: Buy the best video card you can comfortably afford. If you can double the onboard RAM by dropping down a little on the card speed (going from a GeForce FX 6500 to a GeForce FX 5500, for example), do it. More RAM is good. Do not underestimate the importance of the on-board RAM.

If you want to zone quickly, RAM and hard drive speed are both important factors, and unless you're using an old hard drive, your drive is probably already as fast as they come, or close to it.

Edited, Wed Dec 7 23:06:25 2005 by Nekojin

Edited, Wed Dec 7 23:07:34 2005 by Nekojin