Particle effects and massive slowdown

Certain in-game objects, such as confluxes, avatars, and telepoint crystals hold the potential to cause crippling slowdown on certain common graphics card solutions. I myself have experienced this across multiple computers and operating systems, though at present I am using a Radeon X4890 which otherwise has no problems. This has been a known issue for some time, but I think it would be interesting to get an official perspective on the matter.

To add to this, someone else pointed out to me that this is a problem with newer computers utilizing the newest DirectX.
This game has been built to run on an older version, or somethin' along those lines.
Which makes sense, my old/crappy computer had no lag around Confluxes, but my brand new computer with 6x better specs does lag.

Ah yes, earth weather. Dust storms kill my i7 computer.

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Originally Posted by Zenoxio

Ah yes, earth weather. Dust storms kill my i7 computer.

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Mine too, I have weather turned off. That and shadows. The Maws hurt though. Lots of lag around those.

Aye, that begs the question though; Since downgrading DirectX on our newer rigs is infeasible, what is a reasonable accommodation? I think that if SE made available models that did not make use of those pesky particle effects, i.e. non-glowing confluxes/maws, that would go a long way towards pleasing a lot of people, especially considering that 'avoiding the problem elements' is flat out not an option.

Dust storms bring my i5 laptop with RadeonHD 4430 tons of lag, yet my FPS is at 28-30, also crags and maws drop it to about 10-15 yet my old PC with a 10 year old can handles it fine.

To whoever it may help, Nvidia does have beta drivers for 400 and 500 series cards that improves XI's general performance.

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Originally Posted by Retto

To whoever it may help, Nvidia does have beta drivers for 400 and 500 series cards that improves XI's general performance.

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These drivers are actually no longer in BETA. I strongly suggest any NVIDIA 400 or 500 series players to upgrade their drivers to 266.58 as they massively increase the performance of FFXI (I get static 30FPS with all effects on in all zones).

* Below are English (US) driver links. For international versions, choose from here.

Driver 266.58 Download links for Windows Vista/7:
32-bit Windows Vista/7
64-bit Windows Vista/7

Links for Windows XP:
32-bit Windows XP
64-bit Windows XP

I don't think there are any ATI drivers for the newer cards that have a similar performance increase, unfortunately.

It'd be nice if they added some proper PC support. It's pretty stupid that they still have the framerate capped at 30 and that a 500$ video card should play no better than the ps2 version of the game. I REALLY want them to get to this, regardless of how hard it is. It'd be an invaluable improvement, and I honestly think it's an important contribution that needs to be made to ensure the lifespan of the game in the long run.

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Originally Posted by Coldbrand

It'd be nice if they added some proper PC support. It's pretty stupid that they still have the framerate capped at 30 and that a 500$ video card should play no better than the ps2 version of the game. I REALLY want them to get to this, regardless of how hard it is. It'd be an invaluable improvement, and I honestly think it's an important contribution that needs to be made to ensure the lifespan of the game in the long run.

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I believe the 30FPS cap is related to DirectX 8 limitations rather than just the PS2's capabilities. Removing the 30FPS cap would require the whole game to be remade with a newer version of DirectX I imagine.

PC limitations.

I could've sworn PS2 limitations were the fault of the 30fps cap considering most games on PS2 ran at 30fps. Also, pretty much all actions and animations are based around the 30fps timer. It's assumed you're running AT MAX 30fps, otherwise animations get glitchy by going too fast... aka speedhacking as the only way to get higher than 30fps is by using a PC and adjusting your system's time while you're playing.

Please excuse yonder 'wall o text'

There is a workaround, it's just stupid. You can substitute non-special models for the ones that are causing problems, and there have even been certain player-released avatar models with the glow effects stripped out so that newer rigs didn't strobe out at 5 fps at certain points in, say, Dynamis-Windurst. This is not a viable alternative for confluxes, which have their own unique particle effect tied to their skeletons, and last I checked there were no fewer than 3 different identical-looking flavors (WoE, gateway to abyssea, and inside abyssea). This is not something we should have to take into our own hands, considering that any computer built in the last 4 years or so is going to have these problems.

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Originally Posted by Yekyaa

I could've sworn PS2 limitations were the fault of the 30fps cap considering most games on PS2 ran at 30fps. Also, pretty much all actions and animations are based around the 30fps timer. It's assumed you're running AT MAX 30fps, otherwise animations get glitchy by going too fast... aka speedhacking as the only way to get higher than 30fps is by using a PC and adjusting your system's time while you're playing.

Please excuse yonder 'wall o text'

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The 30 FPS Limit is there to keep faster machines from running the game too quickly. For instance if you were to install an old DOS game on a Windows XP machine, it would process the data much faster than was intended, which would make people run faster, essentially becoming a speed hack. While I can see the issues around the particle effects and crag crystals, all that should need to be done is a re-modeling or removal of some of the effects that are causing the bottle-neck, since they don't always display properly to begin with.

The 30 fps is actually a ps2 limitation and game engine issue.

PAL/NTSC both use 30 fps.
The game engine uses 30fps for timing of events.

If you have more than 30fps you run faster etc.

event timers are not based off of visual timers

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Originally Posted by K0D3R

event timers are not based off of visual timers

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What Kennocha said is, at least in part correct. Incorrect clock speeds can cause you to run faster, as crazy as that sounds.

No but a lot of things are, like how fast you move, how fast some stuff is rendered etc.

Proof of concept:

Load the game and start walking around
Use an overclocking program to increase your cpu speed
Start walking again.

You will find yourself moving faster than normal because of the timing. There was a project that got XI working at 60fps but never made its way out to us.

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Originally Posted by K0D3R

The 30 FPS Limit is there to keep faster machines from running the game too quickly. For instance if you were to install an old DOS game on a Windows XP machine, it would process the data much faster than was intended, which would make people run faster, essentially becoming a speed hack.

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apparently it wasn't read.

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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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?