[Dev] Overtaxation of PC Hardware

[Elkwood]

Ok i just went out and dropped another 70 USD on a better cooler for my GPU, I can confirm a 40C drop in temp across the board on my GPU while playing XIV so far. Will check it in some Behests and during leves tonight, I can say the Zalman cooler so far appears to be worth it.

Also seems when OC my Card to 750/1500/1701 mhz with the new cooler and setting AA to 8xQ MSAA my card is actually now running at 43C which is even better then the 46C I got Stock with out doing any OC and leaving my game at 2x AA...

[Vanguard319]

I'm not arguing that the game doesn't need optimization, but there are other ways to improve GPU performance. I updated my drivers the other night, my video looks a little cleaner for my settings, and I have noticed that my fan no longer runs at full blast all the time, so I'm guessing it helped the card run better and cooler.

[Sinzfeldt]

Ok i just went out and dropped another 70 USD on a better cooler for my GPU, I can confirm a 40C drop in temp across the board on my GPU while playing XIV so far.

You really do make me lol, a custom cooler isn't the cure to all ills. Guess what, i can achieve 50c too if i set my gpu fan to 80%.

[Kazahashi]

Maybe someone here can help me, considering people are talking about how taxing the game is....

When the game first launched, I bought the CE, and had the game maxed in everything except for Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field....and then I turned Depth of Field on and it still ran just fine....I quit in November to give the game time to get fixed and went and played WoW with my Dad (long story, but in short, it helped me find him again after not talking for a long time....and it was the only way I knew I could get in contact with him)....anyways, so I came back last week, I reformatted my hard-drive, did a clean Win7 install, which is what I was running before....updated the game AND all my drivers fully and got all the up to date stuff....and the game runs WAY worse then it did before....to the point that I can only run it acceptably on Standard now across the board....

It's weird as hell, and has me terribly confused because I had bought this computer (built it myself, not pre-built) specifically FOR this game.....did something happen with the patches that I'm not aware of, or should I roll back my ATI drivers for the older ones? I know my way around computers....a lot, but this has me incredibly confused, and slightly more than irritated. Thanks in advance for the replies and/or tips.

I posted this in the Tech Support forums too, but you all seem fairly active in this thread, so I figured I'd give it a shot here as well.

[Sinzfeldt]

Game performance shouldn't have degraded THAT much, you can try a different driver but it shouldn't make too much difference. What is your setup?

[Kazahashi]

AMD Phenom II x4 965 (with an Arctic Cooler 7 Pro)
6 GB DDR3
ATI RADEON 5850
1 TB WD 7200 RPM HDD

That's really all that matters when it comes to the game....it's really freakin' weird though, and makes me think I should try wiping the computer again....I dunno.

[Sinzfeldt]

Try dropping the resolution a notch and making sure General/Background drawing aren't on max. If that doesn't work drop it some more and if that doesn't work you have a problem

[Kazahashi]

See, someone else mentioned the General/Background drawing were added in the time I was away, so it's possibly that, though I have them set to standard right now, and as for the resolution, I always had it at 1920x1080....pretty much all of my settings I set back the way they were when I played at launch, and it just chugs hardcore....unless it really is that General/Background drawing thing and standard is higher than it was before you could change it (you know, it was really set to like, 4 or something when it wasn't optional).

[Sinzfeldt]

Yeah i'm pretty sure they expanded the options at one point, i just know that when i set it to max i didn't see much difference apart from the game ran a lot slower.

[Ilean]

Maybe it was in beta, but why is FFXIV using more than 50% of my CPU at all times, with a substantial load on all four cores of my AMD Phoenom II X4?

A majority of hardcore gamers might, but not a majority of all PCs.

My client doesn't leak to this much memory, it uses nearly that much just after getting into the game with a character for me.

On a quad core it uses up to 50%. That's because it really is only using the equivalent to 2 cores, although the CPU balances the load between the 4 available.