What causes -you- to lag?

[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.