What causes -you- to lag?

[Caliana]

I'm making this thread in the hopeful attempt to perhaps provide some simple suggestions to the dev team that actually have a reasonable chance at getting implemented.
I think I can speak for most of us when I say that if a post was made saying an update to directx was seriously being looked into I would be overjoyed, but since that is unlikely at this point in time I want to find some simple things that would help. When the last update gave the option to switch between new and old icons on the spell list, which I assume are simple dats, I wondered if this would be possible to do for some of the actual ingame models.

So with that being said, what makes you lag?
Here are a few examples for me personally:

1. Confluxes.
I have terrible lag anytime I go near one of these. I'm no specialist in graphics, but I hear the glow effect has much to do with this even though I don't know why.

2. SMN Avatars.
Most likely the same reason as the confluxes, although not quite as bad for me unless there are multiple smn at once. Fenrir and Diobolos seem to be the worst for me for some reason.

3. Telepoints.
Again, likely the same issue.

4. Random spots in, of course, Port Jeuno and Port Sandoria.
I always assumed it was the larger number of people gathered there, but even with the character loaded bar at its lowest setting it still seems to skip and stutter at times.

5. Certain AoE Fire spells.
Fire seems to be the worst for me, at one point way back when they would almost lock up my whole pc, but driver updates have calmed that for the most part.


While the usual explanation is update drivers ect. All of these cause issue still except for the fire spells. So, if we are not likely to get an update to the core engine or what not would it be possible to get some simple dats we can switch via the control panel perhaps that would be easier on the current one?
Just throwing it out there, what does everyone think?

[Frankbrodie]

Nothing..

Pay 3k for your machine. (3 years ago fyi so it's hardly state of the art) and it lags NEVER..

I dual box with two accounts and all of the above lag my second comp yes.
But nothing lags my main comp. So it's your fault. And yours alone.

Not trying to be inflammatory. Just saying. A 3 year old machine which was built by Jesus himself (and it was) does not lag ANYWHERE in FFXI.
Buy a new machine. BUY IT NOW!!

Oh and a quick btw.. This is UK 3k price. so 4.5k to the US users sorry.

[Caliana]

Nothing..

Pay 3k for your machine. (3 years ago fyi so it's hardly state of the art) and it lags NEVER..

I dual box with two accounts and all of the above lag my second comp yes.
But nothing lags my main comp. So it's your fault. And yours alone.

Not trying to be inflammatory. Just saying. A 3 year old machine which was built by Jesus himself (and it was) does not lag ANYWHERE in FFXI.

I'm curious what specs your machine has. In any case, I came up with this while my main laptop was in the shop and I was playing on my old one. At the moment I have no interest in building a desktop as it doesn't fit well with my current needs, but my normal laptop is:
Dell XPS m1530
T9300 Core2Duo Processor @2.4Ghz
4 Gig Ram
Nvidia Geforce 8600M GT w/256 mb
Windows 7 pro
OCZ vertex2 SSD

I bought that laptop in '08 and it was still running strong up until a couple weeks ago. I ran the game at 1280x800 overlay and background (my max screen res) and had little to no lag in regards to the above, except for a few weird glitches with bird/wyvern wings flashing and armor kinda glitching.

I figure though, people who have such a pc have no need to change anything, but for people that have older machines the option would be rather nice to not need to worry about it anymore.

[Antanias]

Lately it's fishing, I seem to slow down a LOT for some reason.

[Krashport]

Yeah this is a cheap build, But it will surely play 11 on full w/o skips and stutters. As for lag, You might want to check with your ISP. I didn't bother adding speakers, keyboard, mouse or monitor. Grand total seems to be just under $600.00!

[Doombringer]

alliances, or other situations with lots and lots of people packed in tight (port jeuno) but i play on a laptop with relatively high settings. otherwise i'm usually pretty good.

oh, and itunes. if i have itunes running in the background that makes it worse.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Nothing..

Oh and a quick btw.. This is UK 3k price. so 4.5k to the US users sorry.Exactly what I did.
Also...
Get better internet.

[Arcon]

So it's your fault. And yours alone.

Wrong, it's SE's fault for poorly coding fluxes and similar constructs. A ten year old game should not require a PC that costs more than a used car to run properly.

Also, if you buy a 3k PC for FFXI you have the brains of a deck chair. This is the worst advice I've heard anyone give someone else on these forums.

[Kincard]

Wrong, it's SE's fault for poorly coding fluxes and similar constructs. A ten year old game should not require a PC that costs more than a used car to run properly.

Exactly! This game came out in 2002. Just think about that for a second.

That's the year Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights and Warcraft III came out. It would be ridiculous to buy a 1k PC for any of those games, let alone three times that amount.

[Eri]

Whitegate causes me to lag....

I can play 14 an 11 at the same time... but once my 11 char is in Whitegate, it starts to lag a bit.

[Alhanelem]

Nothing causes me to lag...

[Mirage]

What causes me to lag?

Connecting via my 3G phone.

What causes my framerate to drop, however, would be when I try to turn up the image quality to something resembling a decent game. Such as 4x draw distance and 8x antialiasing at 1920x1200 and HQ shadows instead of circular dots.

[Demon6324236]

Any party event involving more than 6 players, namely VW, worm parties when people are grouped up, and Legion. Also occasionally lag in PJ due to amount of people.

[Vandheer]

Port Jeuno causes me to lag like crazy. :X The only "lag free" part of Port Jeuno is the corner opposite the home point crystal. Its where i hide to make my shouts/yells. x]

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Wrong, it's SE's fault for poorly coding fluxes and similar constructs. A ten year old game should not require a PC that costs more than a used car to run properly.

Also, if you buy a 3k PC for FFXI you have the brains of a deck chair. This is the worst advice I've heard anyone give someone else on these forums.If you purchaced the PC solely for FFXI, then I conjecture that you sir, are the deck chair. To reinterate from the previous posts, it's your fault for not having a system and/or ICP that's not "up to snuff." The game runs perfectly fine, no lag what-so-ever if oyu have a good system.
Nothing causes me to lag...I thought galka lag by default.

[Vagrua]

Cut scenes, Weapon skills being spammed all around me, Confluxes, Lamps, Avatars and some NMs cause my computers screen to glitch or freeze up at times. I don't have a great pc though and I don't use any dat replacements like others do.

[Caliana]

First off, thanks for all of the replies so far.
I guess it sounded better in my head then on paper, but what I wanted to get at was that there are certain objects in the game, typically the glowing ones, that tend to put an unnecessary burden on even some of the newest processors. I posted my computer specs earlier in the thread and like I said with that machine I really don't see most of the things I described in the op. I bought that laptop in '08 and it still ran rather well except for certain instances. My ISP does fine as well and I rarely disconnect do to loss of service.

However, my second laptop does experience the frame rate drops when around these objects and typically only then. Since we have a good grasp on what objects are causing this, I figured it would be helpful to point that out and suggest a fix that would benefit most players, because less work for the processor is better in general even if you don't actually see a drop in performance on the high end rigs.

[Arcon]

If you purchaced the PC solely for FFXI, then I conjecture that you sir, are the deck chair.

I'm not sure whether that means that you agree with me or not, either way, it's unrelated to what I said.


To reinterate from the previous posts, it's your fault for not having a system and/or ICP that's not "up to snuff." The game runs perfectly fine, no lag what-so-ever if oyu have a good system.

You don't know what "fault" means. That's like saying it's the Sandy Hook kids' fault they got shot because they knew school shootings can happen and they should have stayed at home instead. Just because there is theoretically a way around something that you didn't do or know abot does not mean it's your fault. It's the fault of the people who caused it, and that wasn't either the kids or the user in this case. It was a lunatic and SE, respectively.

[Mirage]

I find it mind boggling that some people seriously believe that it is all right for a 10 year old game to require a computer that is 100 times stronger than what was available when the game was new in order to play it at decent framerates.

If Battlefield 3 was like FF11 you would need four GTX 690s in quad-SLI and a 5 GHz 16-core CPU to run it at 30 fps and medium graphics settings. But hey, all you gotta do is buy a PC that doesn't suck, right?

[Logandor]

I don't know about some but sense the last update I have been having glitches and weird lag in aby mis. coast around the zone boss pop site and bridge near by. My friend was on the xbox tonight and said he saw the weird glitch as well when the zone boss disappeared where it was an suddenly spawned right on top of where we were waiting to fight it. Was like wtf that normally happens in aby ul. range not here. >.> <.< Any one else had these problems of late sense the last update?

[Mayoyama]

I don't know about some but sense the last update I have been having glitches and weird lag in aby mis. coast around the zone boss pop site and bridge near by. My friend was on the xbox tonight and said he saw the weird glitch as well when the zone boss disappeared where it was an suddenly spawned right on top of where we were waiting to fight it. Was like wtf that normally happens in aby ul. range not here. >.> <.< Any one else had these problems of late sense the last update?

Nope... not even while dualboxing (and a 4yr old PC)

[Jackstin]

Sometimes if I've got like 4 or 5 tabs open in Google Chrome I'll lag in FFXI, other than that, never.

I have a 5 year old Dell laptop. I did however upgrade the ram, I think its now at 3 Gig from 1. Cost me about 15 pounds and it made a ridiculous difference. That's the only advice I can give :(

[Imakun]

Shadows. My PC hates XI's shadows for some stupid reasons.
I figured out how to prevent FPS drops around Confluxes/Crystals/whatever and for me it was the type of AA filter. I had to set it at Multisample AA instead of like Adaptive or Supersample. This is with an ATI card by the way.
I can pump up the resolution just fine and it won't bother me in any way. I can also play games like FC3 or AC3 or even Crysis at almost top quality.
BUT
when I turn on XI's "high" shadows option.. the game slows down to like 2 FPS. I have no idea why.

FYI I bought this PC to play XIV back in the days, payed like 1.3k€ for it. As I already said, I can play recent games just fine at the highest settings but noooo I can't have shadows on XI for whatever reason.

[Mirage]

It's obviously because you don't have 50 video cards in your PC, Imakun, as mentioned by the super tech savvy persons earlier in the thread.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

I find it mind boggling that some people seriously believe that it is all right for a 10 year old game to require a computer that is 100 times stronger than what was available when the game was new in order to play it at decent framerates.Current gaming requires it, the fact that you still play FFXI is coincidental.

[Yrusama]

Too many people in one place, like most of you. Full alliances. Otherwise my computer runs it all well enough. I suppose my overstuffed MH causes me to lag, too. Is it sad to lag in your own MH?

[gothikka]

From what I've seen, the main thing that seems to cause this game to lag is the fact that it seems to only run on a SINGLE CPU core. Since I was curious, I enabled the "windowed mode" option in the FFXI config and ran the game, go into a crowded area, such as Port Jeuno, then open up the Windows Task Manager, go into the performance tab and notice that only a SINGLE CPU core is getting slammed at 100% usage (my comp is using an Intel Corei7 CPU), while the other cores are hardly, if any, being used at all.

This game obviously needs to be recoded to fully utilize at least Dual Core, or Quad Core systems, and for goodness sakes, actually USE THAT GRAPHICS CARD as well, (notice very little usage on the GPU end)

It's very sad that I could run FFXIV 1.x at nearly 60 FPS on high settings (With DoF, and AO turned off), but have Framerate problems with this game.

As for Network lag, I'm practically lag free in that department, just framerate lag is the big problem with FFXI

[Tamoa]

Anything that glows - i.e. mainly confluxes, teleport crystals and avatars. Shadows and weather effects too. It's a lot better on my current pc than my old one though, I remember doing Pandemonium Warden not long before I got my new pc, and when it used AF my framerate dropped to where I could barely move my character at all. But even now I have issues when doing ADL for example, those 2 torches by the ??? drop my framerate by quite a lot if I'm standing near them.

There's nothing wrong with my internet connection, it's very stable. My pc and graphics card is more than sufficient to play this game.


I fully agree with Mirage here:


I find it mind boggling that some people seriously believe that it is all right for a 10 year old game to require a computer that is 100 times stronger than what was available when the game was new in order to play it at decent framerates.

If Battlefield 3 was like FF11 you would need four GTX 690s in quad-SLI and a 5 GHz 16-core CPU to run it at 30 fps and medium graphics settings. But hey, all you gotta do is buy a PC that doesn't suck, right?


and as far as this statement goes:


Current gaming requires it, the fact that you still play FFXI is coincidental.


Personally, FFXI is the only game I play. So why should I have to cough up 3k for a pc to play it without experiencing lag?

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Personally, FFXI is the only game I play. So why should I have to cough up 3k for a pc to play it without experiencing lag?Dose lag bother you?

[Tamoa]

Yes it bothers me, and with my current pc which is less than 6 months old and an even newer graphics card, I really shouldn't need to experience lag whenever I go near a conflux or the magian moogles in Ru'lude. And it so happens I actually can not afford to spend 3k on a pc. I have a family, I cannot even justify spending that kind of money in the hopes of not lagging when playing a game.

[Prrsha]

From what I've seen, the main thing that seems to cause this game to lag is the fact that it seems to only run on a SINGLE CPU core. Since I was curious, I enabled the "windowed mode" option in the FFXI config and ran the game, go into a crowded area, such as Port Jeuno, then open up the Windows Task Manager, go into the performance tab and notice that only a SINGLE CPU core is getting slammed at 100% usage (my comp is using an Intel Corei7 CPU), while the other cores are hardly, if any, being used at all.

This game obviously needs to be recoded to fully utilize at least Dual Core, or Quad Core systems, and for goodness sakes, actually USE THAT GRAPHICS CARD as well, (notice very little usage on the GPU end)

It's very sad that I could run FFXIV 1.x at nearly 60 FPS on high settings (With DoF, and AO turned off), but have Framerate problems with this game.

As for Network lag, I'm practically lag free in that department, just framerate lag is the big problem with FFXI

That sums it up. FFXI heavily runs on CPU not the graphics card. FFXI is really just a PS2 emulator the way it was designed. If you tax your CPU no amount of GPU power will solve the problem. Only a few things tax the graphics card in FFXI (and that is mainly textures) the rest of the game is run through the graphics emulator that is the game.

[Phafi]

All Raptors. I had to change them to bombs because I couldn't move at all when they were on screen. reinstalling didn't work, neither did getting the dats and manually replacing from friends.

[Prrsha]

All Raptors. I had to change them to bombs because I couldn't move at all when they were on screen. reinstalling didn't work, neither did getting the dats and manually replacing from friends.

Odd, sounds like it isn't a mesh or skin problem but corrupt animation file?

[Chocobits]

I lag whenever a person playing on PS2 joins a party. Known issue. When PS2 users perform actions, their hamster on a wheel gets shoop da whoop eyes and says "I'm firin' up muh abilitayz!" and anyone in a 30 yalm radius gets a lag spike. It's like Meteor, but it targets your router instead of your character. The only option is to exclude PS2 players from any type of event.

[Chocobits]

But in all seriousness, CPU/GPU have no effect on lag whatsoever. This game runs on a pentium 3 with a geforce fx 5000 system with half a gig of PC 2700 ram like a champ, provided you don't try to go over 800x600 resolution. Try playing it on PC at 640x480.. you'll never lag again. It's called running the game on a PS2 emulator.

The only piece of hardware that is going to cause any type of noticeable performance gain for this game is an SSD.

And most people that have lag or crashing during specific times (certain spells/ja, cutscenes, zoning into certain areas), you need to set exclusions to the FFXI path in your security software. Antivirus/Firewall software is 90% of all lag not directly attributed to spaghetti code.

[Midorikaze]

I get the most lag in Whitegate, and Al Zahbi. Mainly the route between the spawn point (where you end up after paying the 300-gil warp fee in your nation) and the Sanction NPC in Whitegate.

Al Zahbi is a given, as half the battles during Besieged are over before the PCs and NPCs even load in. =)

[Dragoy]

There seems to be something special in the way the Aht Urhgan (at least the city) areas as well as the Wings of the Goddess areas have been done. Using Wine to run the game on Linux, if I want to, I can produce a situation where there is a serious hit on the performance when viewing the horizon, so to speak. If I for example go to first-person point of view, and look down or up, the hit is gone. I first thought it was the sky itself, but it seems to be around the middle instead.

As others have pointed out, confluxi and such seem to be a bit special as well. As above, I can notice there is something different going on mostly at places such as the entry area of Abyssea - Misareaux/Grauberg. Perhaps it's due to the amount of NPCs in addition to the Maw and Conflux. Something like Abyssea - Attohwa, however, doesn't have that if I remember right. Looking back to the above, Grauberg is of WotG, but Mixeraux isn't, so it probably isn't connected that way. Or perhaps it is!

Shadows, as mentioned also, is one, nay, probably the most notorious performance blubb of them all.

I haven't been able to do that in older areas as far as I can remember. I've been meaning to test it on a weak'ish machine running Windoze, but meh... It's not that I have issues normally (even though I play on Linux), but if I want to, I can easily notice what things are bad, so to speak.

As for actual “lag”, things doing with the connection to the servers instead of graphical stuttering or slow-down, there are certain spots in the Aht Urhgan Whitegate where I almost always witness a character running with me stop, and jump much further away, such as in the centre with the fountain (as in, their position is not updated for a while, similar to if you lose the connection and everything stops, except it's just that one character (haven't really tested with multiples), and as far as I remember right now, the NPC that moves around there keeps moving at the time, though it does sort of sprint a little rather often). Not really an issue, as I have not noticed it in many, if any other spots, but it is rather peculiar fer sure!

All in all, I don't really have issues with the network even though I am rather far from Japan, in the Europe, which means there always is a bit of a latency to things. I was always impressed of how little it affected my game-play though. Of course there's a bit of a handicap on things like NM claiming of old, such as the Chabit, or Charybdis, as they call it.


Lately it's fishing, I seem to slow down a LOT for some reason.

Not sure if serious... but in case you didn't know, they intentionally limited the FPS while fishing due to the difference between console versus PC. ^^;

[Windblade]

I thought that even the FFXI servers were artificially limited to a 56k output to make the game playable over dialup. I normally play over dialup for faster response times when drawing a sword or interacting with doors and NPCS, but even when I play over a 1.5 Mbps satellite connection (ignoring the expected latency), I've noticed no improvement in lag. It could mostly be a hardware issue. I'll find out in a few days since today I'm expecting delivery of a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. Though I'm on a temporary crap build that's even older than the rig that died (old rig was an Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32x, AMD Athlon II 64x dual core 4200+, 2GB of DDR 800, GeForce 7950 GTOC), I'm replacing the retired Fatal1ty with an Asus Crosshair V Formula Z, AMD 6300 FX Six-Core, 16GB of DDR3 2133, and a GeForce GTX 650, which is not that much more powerful than the GeForce 7950 GTOC, but it's almost twice as powerful in a couple of ways (memory bandwidth and pixel fill-rate), and way more than twice as powerful in one way, that being texture fill-rate. Added to the faster CPU, I'll be able to tell whether the lag is caused by not receiving data quickly enough from the game server or the old hardware. I'll be using the 7950 GTOC until January 8 when the new video card arrives; I ordered it a few days after the rest of the hardware.

[Catmato]

1. Confluxes.
2. SMN Avatars.
These, Magian Moogles, and Cavernous Maws. Everything with that glow effect causes it.


So it's your fault. And yours alone.
No it's not. A GTX560ti, Phenom II X4 955, and 8 GB ram should have no issues running a 10 year old game.


What causes my framerate to drop, however
Drops in framerate are still lag, just not network latency that the term has become common for.


Raptors
I had a similar problem with Opo-opos on my old system. I could never figure it out.