FFXI video skipping problem

Hello, I am having a problem with FFXI (and partially the playonline viewer) that causes it to hiccup every second for about a second. Of course, I updated my video drivers, tried playing around with the resolution, and tried a direct connection to the internet versus a wireless connection, but still no dice.

My notebook has a GeForce GT 330M (ok not so great, but cmon...its FFXI). It has an i7-720QM and 4 GBs of RAM. Any Solutions?

For starters, you may be requested to fill up the template found in the Thread: Welcome to Forum: Technical Support!

And then, some thoughts of the problem.

When and how did this start?
Were you able to play without the issue before?

Check the task-manager (assuming windows OS) for the CPU usage.
See if there is something else than FFXI using a lot of your CPU.

Laptops can be very prone to over-heating, well, any computer system is really but laptops specifically and this will often cause such problems. Without any previous experience or the will to take the risk of destroying the machine by basically tearing it apart to get any dust-balls out, I wouldn't recommend that, so only viable recommendations would be compressed air, and a vacuum-cleaner to clean out the air-vents.

Do heed this warning, however: Both methods may carry substantial amounts of static-electricity which is more than capable of killing components. I personally have never killed anything with compressed air, though. With desktops, the metal frame works well for purging one's body from static-electricity.

If there isn't much dust at all, and the fan is working properly (checking the temps via software would be a great thing to do if your computer supports such software), you could try some testing if it's not only FFXI that has this problem.

For one, I might recommend the free Video Card Stability Test from the Freestone-Group:

• http://freestone-group.com/video-card-stability-test.htm

If you experience the issue with this test as well, it will confirm that there is something non-FFXI specifically related going on. Either over-heating, hardware such as the power-supply or the GPU failing, software misbehaving, or malware using up your resources.


Just some thoughts of what I would personally do.

If you plan to do any stress testing, do try to make sure that it is not over-heating before proceeding as it will obviously generate lots of heat by default.

Didn't look up the spec's on your system, but I'm assuming that is one of the Intel chips that also has a GPU on-die. FFXI has problems in general with those laptops with the Sandy Bridge CPU's that also have a branded GPU in them. nVidia has been working on drivers to address the issues with many games, but I don't recall seeing where they have been resolved for FFXI yet.

Most people have opted to disable the nVidia GPU in the Device Manager, forcing it to run on the Intel solution on the CPU. This seems to work best for most people. So, if you see both Intel Graphics and nVidia Graphics listed in Device Manager, try disabling the nVidia to see if it helps.

Otherwise...it can be any number of things. A lot of the time it is an issue with software running in the background. In the past, there were issues with multi-core CPU's in general along these lines. The solution many resorted to was opening task manager and assigning the pol.exe process to just one core (affinity) by right-clicking it in the list. To do this, you will need to be able to minimize the game. If you want to test for the affinity issue, here's some how-to's for setting affinity (one is using Task Manager, the other is setting options in your shortcut that calls the program):

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows...on-in-windows/
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windo...windows-vista/

I think i know exactly what your experiencing. Go to your device manager in windows. There is a section for HID compliant devices. If you disable them it will not affect the functionality of the computer and will get rid of your little lag spike u get every few seconds. Also since your video card applies to this... try getting nvidia forceware 266.58, as its hands down the only driver that actually works GOOD with ffxi. Trust me... long time figuring this out.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by kasper301

I think i know exactly what your experiencing. Go to your device manager in windows. There is a section for HID compliant devices. If you disable them it will not affect the functionality of the computer and will get rid of your little lag spike u get every few seconds. Also since your video card applies to this... try getting nvidia forceware 266.58, as its hands down the only driver that actually works GOOD with ffxi. Trust me... long time figuring this out.

---

I use laptops for work and have run into this problem on 4 different laptops. 1 Nvidia, the other three AMD. How does the HID device setting affect this? I'll have to try that on one tonight. I tried running it on completely stripped down versions of windows xp, and windows 7, and various different versions of graphics drivers. I finally just wrote it off to memory issues due to shared graphics memory and gave up on playing it on a laptop. Current laptop is a intel Core i5-2410M dual core ate 2.3ghz, with a Radeon HD 6490M Video card. I'll post tomorrow and see if it works.

Mileage on the HID varies, depeding on what is actually installed, and it may be corrected by the driver installed for it. My UPS (APC), cordless mouse (Logitech), USB converter (Gamemon), for my PS2 controller are in there full time, and quite a few things go under this group but aren't always connected (flight stick, steering wheel/pedals, etc) and don't have any frame skipping on my PC. If disabling them nixes the skips/dips in framerate, then you may want to look into different drivers for that device.