This will be my final post on this, in the interest of keeping OT posts to a
minimum, but I'm under the impression some may find this useful.

I did my tweaking last night, and my disappointment in performance stands.
I have tested my system, using 3DMark 2000 and 2001, and overall, it tested
fairly average within it's class. To recap, my system is:
1.0 GHz, AMD
256 MB PC-133 RAM
Creative Ahnniliator Pro (GeForce 256 DDR)
SB Live Xgamer 5.1
20GB 7200 RPM Drive
DX8.1
Win98 SE (fully patched through Windows Update)

My testing was not comprehensive. I did a comparison 3 different ways.

The first thing I did was defragment my hard drive. After that, I started
to experiment.

UseTnL=FALSE - I've had to leave that in my eqclient.ini file. When I
enable hardware T&L, all the colors look faded, and washed out. Keeping it
set to false, my colors look the way they should. I switched back and
forth, and the washed out colors appeared to be the biggest issue.

Option Settings - I have the new textures loaded. All tries were at
1024x768 resolution, and texture compression off. The third checkbox on
that screen (lower left), can't remember what it was...hehe...but it was ON
for all tests.

First - No models checked, except horse and elementals. Socials off,
dynamic lighting on, level of detail high, color depth 32 bit. Very choppy.
Unplayable.

Second - No models checked, except horse and elementals. socials off,
dynamic lighting off, level of detail medium, color depth 16 bit. Choppy.
Probably playable, but not in any raid situation.

Third - 15 models (the number recommended at the screen) enabled, socials
off, dynamic lighting off, level of detail low, color depth 16 bit.
Playable, but still not what I expected. While turning with the keyboard
was fairly smooth, with occassional video skips, using mouselook to quickly
turn and look cause pretty bad video skips.

There is hope. From what I've heard guildmates say, the immediate solution
is RAM. I will be upgrading immediately to 512 MB of RAM, and then after
the holidays, will be running with three, 512 MB sticks. It's cheap.
Approx February or March, I will be splurging for the GeForce 3. At that
time, I will do a test with EVERYTHING maxxed, and every option on. Heh..it
better be perfect. :)

I am also hoping that, as time goes on, Verant tweaks their EQ dx dll.
There is no reason for me to have to disable my hardware TnL. I hope they
fix that soon.

Atonal