[Dev] Overtaxation of PC Hardware

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Originally Posted by Rydin

You'd be surprised how many HD5870's (or better) or GTX 470's (or better) are out here that can handle the game just fine on 1920x1080 and tons of cards that can do it on lower resolutions...
The game could be more optimized... but most people still run the game fine.. the main gripe being that it could run better...
and you wouldn't need a GTX 460 or better to even play the game

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With AO on?

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Originally Posted by Ilean

With AO on?

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I don't have AO on, Not really that big a deal for me honestly

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Originally Posted by Ilean

With AO on?

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Ambient Occlusion is a resource hog for almost anything it's in.

I just feel that it's odd that XIV is the only game I can't near max out. I can't even run XIV with AA. Can run Crysis/Crysis 2 and similar high specification PC titles at 1920x1080 with 4x+ FSAA with all settings on ultra/high at 50-60 FPS and I have to run XIV at like 3/4 resolution with no AA and still get visual lag spikes and wildly inconsistent frame rates especially in city states. Average FPS in XIV is like 25-45.

Something tells me it just isn't optimized. I mean it's a really pretty game but I don't think it's realistically pushing that many more polygons than some of these other high specification PC titles.

For reference my machine is a Phenom II @ 4.1GHz, 1GB 5850, 8GB DDR3, Win7 x64.

I'm assuming the 5850 is my bottleneck for XIV, but it destroys just about everything else. I'll try and upgrade someday if XIV ever makes it's recovery. Really hope it does.

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Originally Posted by Darkshade

I just feel that it's odd that XIV is the only game I can't near max out. I can't even run XIV with AA. Can run Crysis/Crysis 2 and similar high specification PC titles at 1920x1080 with 4x+ FSAA with all settings on ultra/high at 50-60 FPS and I have to run XIV at like 3/4 resolution with no AA and still get visual lag spikes and wildly inconsistent frame rates especially in city states. Average FPS in XIV is like 25-45.

Something tells me it just isn't optimized. I mean it's a really pretty game but I don't think it's realistically pushing that many more polygons than some of these other high specification PC titles.

For reference my machine is a Phenom II @ 4.1GHz, 1GB 5850, 8GB DDR3, Win7 x64.

I'm assuming the 5850 is my bottleneck for XIV, but it destroys just about everything else. I'll try and upgrade someday if XIV ever makes it's recovery. Really hope it does.

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You can't really compare an FPS with an MMO...
FFXIV is poorly optimized though...
The best comparisons would be Oblivion (Groundbreaking when it was new), Witcher 2 (Great looking outdoor Environments), Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (Excellent use of lighting and shadows)

Yup, I don't think AO is worth it either, just it seemed to me that this guy who was complaining wants everything maxed.

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Originally Posted by Ilean

Yup, I don't think AO is worth it either, just it seemed to me that this guy who was complaining wants everything maxed.

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Yea, so getting 50-60fps without it... the game would still be playable and fine with it...

I'm not using AO. In the future I'd like to if I can get more than a consistent 30FPS.

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Originally Posted by Rydin

You'd be surprised how many HD5870's (or better) or GTX 470's (or better) are out here that can handle the game just fine on 1920x1080 and tons of cards that can do it on lower resolutions...
The game could be more optimized... but most people still run the game fine.. the main gripe being that it could run better...
and you wouldn't need a GTX 460 or better to even play the game

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5870? Madness!!!

I'm actually running the game on 1920x1080 with a HD 5770 and I really have no problems at all. Running with 4x MSAAA, but with AO off (I didn't really noticed a difference). Even so, for some reason I do believe the game can run better and as others have stated, the game does heat up my GPU faster than the other games I run (the most recent one would be The Witcher 2).

Probably a lot of card can woek well with FFXIV....with a little setting work..but.

For me real problem is with HI-END card and higher settings.

I have now a Gtx 590 and without AA (at 1920x1080 i don't need AA) and without AO....if i max all other setting i encounter a lot of problem like slowing down....

And it's not acceptable that a multi GPU card can't blow this game...

A little more optimization can definitively be welcomed

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Originally Posted by Zephir

Probably a lot of card can woek well with FFXIV....with a little setting work..but.

For me real problem is with HI-END card and higher settings.

I have now a Gtx 590 and without AA (at 1920x1080 i don't need AA) and without AO....if i max all other setting i encounter a lot of problem like slowing down....

And it's not acceptable that a multi GPU card can't blow this game...

A little more optimization can definitively be welcomed

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Increasing General Drawing Quality past 8 is pretty much the same if not worse performance hit as SSAA. It makes the game render at 1.5x or 2x your resolution at 9-10 respectively IIRC which really isn't needed.

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Originally Posted by Tiraelina

Increasing General Drawing Quality past 8 is pretty much the same if not worse performance hit as SSAA. It makes the game render at 1.5x or 2x your resolution at 9-10 respectively IIRC which really isn't needed.

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Definitely worse as antialiasing doesn't increase resolution for textures and shaders like Draw Quality does 9-10.

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Originally Posted by Zephir

Probably a lot of card can woek well with FFXIV....with a little setting work..but.

For me real problem is with HI-END card and higher settings.

I have now a Gtx 590 and without AA (at 1920x1080 i don't need AA) and without AO....if i max all other setting i encounter a lot of problem like slowing down....

And it's not acceptable that a multi GPU card can't blow this game...

A little more optimization can definitively be welcomed

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Set the GDQ (General drawing quality) to 8 (Standard)
That is setting your frame buffer to resolution....
If your 590 (Great great card BTW) is dropping frame rates with no AA or AO, then its got to be that....
Its silly for that to be a numbered slider.... having it set at ten is a double resolution frame buffer... which would hit any card pretty hard....
Also, I get 60 frames most times with my 5870
Is it all the way optimized? no
Is it playable... absolutely....
Without SLI, Crossfire or a dual GPU card you wont see 60 frames on Metro 2033 with full AA and all settings maxed....
and *gasp* that game is DX11
And this game is pretty demanding.... Graphically, the only things I'd improve (About the environment in general) would be lighting (and not even improve it, just make a bigger contrast between light and dark, removing the unnatural lighting all over the game) and shadows (adding shadows to structures like buildings, rock walls and trees)
This game looks great... loads tons of textures... the MOB detail is ridiculous (Better than any MOB detail I've EVER seen) and so in turn... hits cards hard

Ok..with General drawing at 8 I can max all other settings (no AO and AA 8x) and i have a stable framerate

Pushed back, like always..

This is worth another mention. I have a GTX 570 and I can play pretty much anything on Max.

I play FFXIV on "average" settings and my room is an oven in around an hour. This really needs to get fixed.

after 1.18 4-6 degree less on VGA (with same temp in my room)

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Originally Posted by Kaedan

Well, seeing as the average human eye won't notice a significant difference between 30 FPS and 60 FPS... there shouldn't be a problem. This isn't a Fighting game or a Shooter.

That being said, it could probably be optimized a bit better. But they're probably waiting until they've fixed other things before working on that.

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I really wish this old 30->60 FPS jump misinfo would die.

It's VERY easy to tell the difference between 30fps and 60 fps. I can tell when WoW dips below 60 easily, even if it's only to the 40's. 60+ starts getting harder to tell, but you usually can still tell until about 75-90.

Play a game at 60fps and then go log into XI which is capped at 29.9 (or somewhere around there). It is VERY noticeable. It's the difference of playing in the open field at 50+ FPS in XIV and then walking into a city.

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Originally Posted by Shipp

I really wish this old 30->60 FPS jump misinfo would die.

It's VERY easy to tell the difference between 30fps and 60 fps. I can tell when WoW dips below 60 easily, even if it's only to the 40's. 60+ starts getting harder to tell, but you usually can still tell until about 75-90.

Play a game at 60fps and then go log into XI which is capped at 29.9 (or somewhere around there). It is VERY noticeable. It's the difference of playing in the open field at 50+ FPS in XIV and then walking into a city.

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Whole thing depends....
First, there is a difference between average frame rate and max frame rate......
avg 30 frames is playable for the most part while max 30 frames starts to be unplayable...
Also, have you done any double blind tests (that's funny) for frame rates?
I am a songwriter/producer...

Once there was this audio engineer.... One of the best in the industry.....
He was mixing a song form a major artist. He applied EQ to a guitar and started cutting mids and boosting the highs until it started to sit better and sound better in the mix.... until his assistant informed him that the EQ he was adjusting was actually on a track that was muted, so nothing was changing at all

My point is, when the mind knows something has been changed... the mind sees changes, even when there are none at all...
I don't think you could pick out the difference between 50-60 FPS and 70-80fps.... at least not with consistency....
My guess is, over a bunch of tests... you'd be 50% correct.... because they'd be just guesses...
Unless you're getting screen tearing from a 60Hz monitor and no triple buffering
99.9% of screens only refresh 60 times a second anyway

with the 1.18 update the lights are better, and that gives the game a very nice ambient, in my case, without lose of performance and same temp on my vga ^.^!!

You sure anything changed? The graphics seem to be the same for me xD

I know there's a lot of things that make me not want to play this game, but my office bursting into flames has got to be almost #1.

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Originally Posted by Coldfire

You sure anything changed? The graphics seem to be the same for me xD

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yeah...light effect change a little...and a little less charge on newer VGA occurs

Looks like in Q2 2012 we will get our first major hardware revisions since FFXIV was released. Intel plans to release IvyBridge Chipsets which are 8 Cores running at 3 Ghz on a 22nm platter, also included will be PCIE 3.0, which should increase the throughput from 500mb to 1GB from the video card to the PC, Also included as well is DDR3. analysts are stating that this should be a 30% increase in speed over current hardware.

Also apparently AMD plans to release the Bulldozer chipset near the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012 which may provide similar performance increases, if not better as it is supposed to be 8/12/16 core processors.

Now if FFXIV runs abundantly laggy on this then idk wtf to do.

Well AMD already brings out their octocore 3.6Ghz CPU this fall afaik. And PCIe 2.1 has definately more than 500MB/s... think it was 8GB/s. The 500MB/s is per lane and the GPU slot usually has 16 of those lanes. The Problems with ffxiv come from the crazy high polygon count (no low spec models for faraway objects) and the bad (yes just bad) data loading mechanism.
So I have my doubts a faster CPU or NB will fix this. :/

Rewriting the engine to use more cores is likely the most difficult thing they could do. Actually on the CPU side they can comfortably let moore's+ law sort performance issues out. GPU they can still do a lot for this game.

The game is definately in need of some more optimisations. I just spent a small fortune on building myself a new high spec PC and im still getting some minor hiccups within the game, you'd think a £1600 Custom build PC would run this game flawlessly at max everything on a high resolution, but clearly not.. Looks like im going to have to blow an additional wad of cash getting a second card to SLI and something to cool the damn system.

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Originally Posted by Rydin

Whole thing depends....
Also, have you done any double blind tests (that's funny) for frame rates?

I don't think you could pick out the difference between 50-60 FPS and 70-80fps.... at least not with consistency....
My guess is, over a bunch of tests... you'd be 50% correct.... because they'd be just guesses...
Unless you're getting screen tearing from a 60Hz monitor and no triple buffering
99.9% of screens only refresh 60 times a second anyway

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Even on my 2004 LCD I can tell the difference between 45 and 60 FPS without having an FPS counter up. Above 60 FPS and it's pretty much impossible, on 60Hz LCDs at least.

If I hook up my CRT and throw it at 100Hz I could probably see differences between 60-80 FPS, but I may need a counter for that, who knows.

For games, I haven't even played SW:The Force Unleashed because it's locked to 30 FPS and the game is so incredibly sluggish it really irritates me.

As for FFXI, I was set on going back due to nostalgia since I finally re-purchased the game with all the expansions; I was just waiting for the time to do so.. until I remembered it's locked to 30 FPS (and the servers were still in Japan), so that killed my will to go back.

I cannot play a game below 45 FPS, I just can't. (although saying that, I played Crysis on an AGP system with an average framerate of 25. Crysis was good at masking problems with low framerates.)

If you have a costant 45 fps you can play..ploblem is 60-->45/40 drop that probably you (not all people) are able to see.

I'm running 2GTX 570's and I just played the game at max settings, it was fine out in the world, went to LL and it went from 60 to 20 from 60 to 20, noticed my lights in my room flickering and then looked at my GPU's, both were at 99% usage and 99 degrees. Wtf?

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Originally Posted by Alancode

I'm running 2GTX 570's and I just played the game at max settings, it was fine out in the world, went to LL and it went from 60 to 20 from 60 to 20, noticed my lights in my room flickering and then looked at my GPU's, both were at 99% usage and 99 degrees. Wtf?

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Turn your general draw quality to 8....
And your lights are flickering because your dual 570's draw more power than Neverland Ranch

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Originally Posted by Rimmer

The game is definately in need of some more optimisations. I just spent a small fortune on building myself a new high spec PC and im still getting some minor hiccups within the game, you'd think a £1600 Custom build PC would run this game flawlessly at max everything on a high resolution, but clearly not.. Looks like im going to have to blow an additional wad of cash getting a second card to SLI and something to cool the damn system.

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£1600? I just built a PC for £850 and I can run the game on max. everything (besides AO and Field of deph) with a stable 50-60 FPS. Got Intel i5 2500k & ASUS 6950HD. Tho I do have an issue with the game freezing/skipping from time to time and the only way I managed to fix this was by turning off the CPU's power-saving mode, I had to force the CPU to run at 3600Mhz otherwise it kept jumping between 1700-3400 and lagging the crap out of me

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Originally Posted by Fear

£1600? I just built a PC for £850 and I can run the game on max. everything (besides AO and Field of deph) with a stable 50-60 FPS. Got Intel i5 2500k & ASUS 6950HD. Tho I do have an issue with the game freezing/skipping from time to time and the only way I managed to fix this was by turning off the CPU's power-saving mode, I had to force the CPU to run at 3600Mhz otherwise it kept jumping between 1700-3400 and lagging the crap out of me

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Currently running with:
Windows XP
2GB RAM
Geforce 210
AMD Athlon II x4 620 (2.61ghz quad core)

Game is installed on a 120gb IDE 7200rmp Harddrive that also houses windows.
Also have a 300gb SATA harddrive.

Can currently run the game on default 'standard' settings, runs smoothly in many areas but often drops in frame-rate in heavy foilage areas such as bushes around trees in Thanalan and most of Black Shroud. Weather also causes a drop in frame-rate, which can make it especially horrible in Black Shroud when it starts raining. However most of Thanalan and La Noscea run smoothly.

In cities, Ul'dah runs perfectly, Gridania runs fairly ok, but for some reason Limsa has a horrible frame-rate whenever I'm near the adventurers guild.

I'm hoping to upgrade my Geforce 210 to a Series 4 GT soon, as well as adding an extra 2GB of RAM

I was wondering though, would my loading times and possibly some in-game lag be reduced if I moved my games installation over to the SATA drive instead of running it on the IDE drive that also houses my OS?

Make sure your PSU can power the new GPU. You will also have to install Win7 x64 to safely use the 4GB RAM. And yes a SATA drive will most likely reduce the stuttering when loading characters.

in summer i needed to keep game at 55-65% for playing this game, on top that a full box fan is planted into my pc blowing wind threw it 24/7 and still my cpu is at like 45-58degree's ...my gpu will hit 80-90's in a second without this. ...seriously i can run anything else easily heat wise is nothing. just this game.

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Originally Posted by Coldfire

Make sure your PSU can power the new GPU. You will also have to install Win7 x64 to safely use the 4GB RAM. And yes a SATA drive will most likely reduce the stuttering when loading characters.

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I'm using a 650w PSU at the moment. However it's also running the DVDRW drive, 2x 12" fans on the front of the computer case, 2x 6" fans on the side of the computer case, and the processer fan, and the shiny blue lighting inside the case, and another 30gb IDE harddrive.

It IS using DDR2 RAM though, not DDR3 (sadly) so I figured more = better.

Think that'll be enough wattage for the series 4 GT + 2GB RAM upgrade though?

I don't really get stuttering in the game though from character loading, it's mostly just frame-rate lag from graphic-heavy areas.

Awaiting for the damn Zambezis to be properly benchmarked...

Weeble, get a decent case.

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Originally Posted by weeble

in summer i needed to keep game at 55-65% for playing this game, on top that a full box fan is planted into my pc blowing wind threw it 24/7 and still my cpu is at like 45-58degree's ...my gpu will hit 80-90's in a second without this. ...seriously i can run anything else easily heat wise is nothing. just this game.

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The standard temperature of my cpu is 30-50 degrees after I'd applied thermal grease to the processer, before that it would sometimes reach excesses of 70-80 degrees. 40-50 degrees isn't really that hot for a computer. Heck, the human body is a constant 36 degrees.(or was it 38?)

My old Geforce 9500gt used to rise up to the temperatures you're experiencing, sometimes going into the 120 degree mark, which is where it'd automatically shut off my computer to stop a meltdown. Turned out the reason for this was because old Geforce 8 and 9's were installed with poor quality fans that quite often didn't even switch on when you turned on your computer, sometimes you had to poke the fan with something to make it spin (I don't suggest doing that though, putting your hand inside a live computer is very stupid and only stupid people like me do it)
My Geforce 210 doesn't even have a fan, it has some enormous almighty heatsink and somehow the GPU temperature now rarely goes above 60 degrees, even on FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Alancode

I'm running 2GTX 570's and I just played the game at max settings, it was fine out in the world, went to LL and it went from 60 to 20 from 60 to 20, noticed my lights in my room flickering and then looked at my GPU's, both were at 99% usage and 99 degrees. Wtf?

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I have the same problem, but with a SINGLE ATI video card. My room lights flicker when it runs XIV.

Seriously, Square Enix I am holding you financially responsible for 10% of my electricity bill if this keeps up!

My intel core i7 and ATI Radeon Sapphire caught on fire when I played......... thank goodness I got back ups..