EQ2 was never designed to use multiple CPU cores.

[MugHug]

Just a little bit of interesting history

When EQ2 was orginally conceived (prior to 2004), SoE worked on the premise that for the future, CPUs would keep increasing in clock speed far beyond what we even have now.

10Ghz CPUs by 2011
http://www.geek.com/chips/intel-predicts-10ghz-chips-by-2011-564808/

So EQ2 was designed to take advantage of a single CPU like the Pentium 4, etc. and it's performance would improve as CPUs became faster.

As we all know, designers of CPUs found that there were limits to how fast they would run and instead focused on developing multi-core CPUs to share the workload like we have now.

https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2014/02/19/why-has-cpu-frequency-ceased-to-grow?language=ru

That is why EQ2 performance has been a issue as it was not designed to take advantage of multi-core CPUs like the i5/i7 or FX/Ryzen.

I suspect that Daybreak maybe have done a little work on the quiet to make EQ2 use modern CPUs or GPUs a little better but that is only a guess.

But to take full advantage of new CPUs they would most likely have to rewrite the whole game engine which would cost a fortune. EQ2 being 12-13 years old and with populations dropping, it is unlikely they will spend that kind of money on such an old MMO.

Hope someone finds this information interesting :)

NOTE:
I cannot remember where I read this but I believe that it was from an SoE source and I am sure if one wants to do a search they can find it.

[The Yeen Queen]

There was a major patch several years back that enabled multi core support. To a degree, at least. It may still be limited, but the difference was absolutely noticeable.

[MugHug]

Originally posted by Tyger42:

There was a major patch several years back that enabled multi core support. To a degree, at least. It may still be limited, but the difference was absolutely noticeable.

Do you mean the LU49 update?

Runing EQ2 on an i5-6600K 4.4Ghz, GTX 970 and 16Gb DDR4.

Still surprised how poorly it runs on that setup. Can get great FPS maxed out @ 1080p and then the FPS just tanks. Also notice a stutter as one runs around a zone.

[The Yeen Queen]

Don't remember the update number. I just remember it was a huge upgrade in performance on my system. It's still by no means ideally optimized, but it does a lot better than it used to.

[YouTube.com/StoneLegion]

Even with really good per core performance CPU's still blows in performance at least max settings.