Particle effects and massive slowdown

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Originally Posted by Yarly

For whoever is wondering, I'm using ATI/AMD Catalyst 11.2 drivers with an ATI Radeon HD3850 and the slowdown for the maws is much less than when I used anything from 9.5 to 11.1

Prior to switching to Catalyst 11.2 I got fairly decent results with Catalyst 9.4 drivers. Give it a shot if you have an ATI/AMD card.

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Interesting. Do you have a link handy?

Edit: Tried it, on an i7 920 with 12GB of RAM and a Radeon X4890 card I'm still taking a 10 fps hit per object with that effect on it that's close to the camera. Incidentally, Camlann's Torment uses a similar effect and due to the proximity of the glowy lance thing to the camera I drop to ~10 FPS towards the end of that animation. Why SE felt the need to start using problematic rendering techniques like crazy after no modern computer can run them properly anymore is beyond me.

Seriously, this slowdown is stupid, modernize the game some already SE. I've payed you around 1000$ in fees, start putting some of that into a guy's paycheck to put in some modern era DX support. The PS2 is 11 years old, its time has passed.

On my XP SP3 32bit machine with a core2 e8400@4.2GHz, using a GTS250 and 266.58 drivers, I don't get any slowdown anywhere, even in front of confluxes with 2048x1536 background -- but only with shadows off. With them on, I drop down to 24fps in port Jeuno due to a CPU bottleneck. Same thing with an X1950XT and 7.11 drivers at 1024x768 background.

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Originally Posted by Diraco

On my XP SP3 32bit machine with a core2 e8400@4.2GHz, using a GTS250 and 266.58 drivers, I don't get any slowdown anywhere, even in front of confluxes with 2048x1536 background -- but only with shadows off. With them on, I drop down to 24fps in port Jeuno due to a CPU bottleneck. Same thing with an X1950XT and 7.11 drivers at 1024x768 background.

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That fits in with what we've been saying about no modern rig being able to handle those effects. The latest version of DirectX you could be using would be 9.0c. Vista shipped with 10.0, and 7 shipped with 11.0.

Incidentally, I believe FFXI uses DX8.1?