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I think you're right. I reduced my GDQ to 8, and I notice no difference, except the fan on my graphics card no longer starts screaming after 2-3 minutes. :)
One thing I have noticed since upgrading to the 580 is character and NPC models load quite a bit faster, too.
The main visible difference between 8 and 10 is the foliage and trees. There is MUCH more flickering (lower quality) foliage and trees when set at 8 than when set at 10. Problem is its hard to get good frame rates when set at 10 if you turn other things up. My settings now are exactly at what Franziscas are set to, I run a 5870.
When you are standing still his observation is correct, you can't tell the difference. But when you are running you can see a big difference in background foliage quality when set to 8 instead of 10. It is not worth the performance hit IMO though.
i think there is a bug or the game isn't well optimize on the tree and foliage. cuz i been testing and messing around wit hthe General drawing alot. u say there less flicker at 10 but that not true. i think its pretty random. cuz i try login into the game at 8 general drawing alot of time and the flickering is pretty random. sometime it flicker more and sometime it flicker less even at the same 8 drawing setting. at time when i use the 8 general drawing when it doesn't flicker much and seem stable it would look really thick and rich on the foliage and tree. but like i say i think its pretty random each time i log into the game. i agree with franziscas on the 8-10 general drawing setting though. u can' really tell the difference between them until u start using really big screen at a high resolution or when u use a screen at such resolution that u can actually see the pixelated graphic.
just did some more testing. Jibe u say there are flickering in the folaige and trees i notice that too. and i just figure it out. i think the flickering is cause by turning on Depth of field check box. when u turn it on it make the tree and afoilage look thicker and richer. but i think its bugged cuz it make them flicker. its prolly not fully optimize cuz when i turn off depth of field the flickering on the tree stop. however it doesn't look as thick and rich. but considering it flickers when u turn it on i rather have it turn off and not flicker.
I was testing again as well, here are 2 screenshots i made just now (was looking for a difference while moving as Jibe mentioned), the game however is hardly playable with GDQ 10 for a single GTX580, its stuttering so bad ><.
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z...na_07/GDQ8.jpg
http://i191.photobucket.com/albums/z...a_07/GDQ10.jpg
I'm in Ul'dah and out of Anima, this was the best place i found for decent comparison screenshots at the moment. Ignore the slightly different daytime please, i logged out to change settings and back in as far as i could.
I7 920 2,6Ghz
HD Radeon 5850
Fullscreen
1920x1200
2xMSAA
General Drawing Quality 8
Background Drawing Quality 5
Shadow Detail Highest
Texture Quality High
Texture Filtering Highest
No AO or DoF
No Vsync No Triple Buffer.
40~45 Fps in town
60 out of town.
@4xMSAA It still runs at 35 fps in town but it is stuttering.
For the trees I use Adaptive AA.
It seems to me less flicker during night times, you only get the really bad flicker during the day especially at high noon. Depth of field doesn't seem to make a diff to me.
Adaptive AA does get rid of the flicker especially over GDQ8 but its a resource hog and very hard to use with a single 5870 with vysnc and triple buffering on, and I refuse to play without those 2 settings as the wavery lines and tearing are too bad. The game does look awesome with Adaptive AA on, but I refuse to deal with the tearing and wavery lines to use it.
Back with to the original point tho, I think its more the time of day and lighting direction/intensity in the game that make flickering bad at GDQ 8 rather than it being "random". And it is definetely less noticeable at GDQ 9 and 10, at least to me.
o jibe ur using ati card maybe the cause of the flicker is different for nvidia cards cuz after turning off depth of field the flicker on trees stop for me doesn't matter what lvl of general drawing. maybe nvidia card are just different.
Guess that could be possible yuzuha. I've never used an Nvidia card before.
To all the ati users: I had/have an ati 5870 with better cooling oc to 900 (so not so much).
Ati's AA options in general use more hardware then nvidia does - they look a bit better but not compared to the fps hit.
I was able to play the game pretty well if i didnt go over 2X AA (used adaptive for trees since they look crappy without).
But like i said, that was with oc 5870 and another cooler (accelero extreme) without the cooling also the ati card was loud and hot. I think the 6-series does that much better but it is a tad slower atm (im not talking about 2-3 card solutions which FF doenst support anyways, at least not good).
Benchmark programms are more or less just s slight direction but in my experience pretty useless when it comes down to actual smooth gaming since it only counts the frames all together. Doesnt say much about smoothness in gameplay.
thats why i stopped useing sli/x-fire since only few games really have a good profile for that the rest has more problems then benefits. And heat/power consumption also doenst feel right (6 series is better there though) :) Sli and x-fire unless it really gets developed on more and supported more by the games, which is essential, isnt more then e-peen contest for most of the time.
The 6870 is a good card but its slower then then 5870 and much slower then the gtx 580, so its only natural that ffxiv isnt as good on ati atm. Ati just doenst have a card comparable to the 570/580 atm and the dual gpu card is something different and shouldnt be compared imho.
They win the prize for power and less noise though :D
And the 580 still isnt optimized a lot and furmark gets my card to mx 75C ffxiv does it to 85C (all other games, crysis, AOC rift, or maxed games are at around 72C in full load with stock cooling).
im a bit nerdy with hardware sometimes but i wouldnt recommend looking into so much new hardware if you dont have the money atm, since the biggest problem for ATI and NVIDIA is the unoptimized game engine which eats everything no matter what ... So wait for optimisations from the developer side.
the 6(ati) series as well as the 5(nvidia) series are still babies and will get optimized. so if ff , nvidia and ati optimize on it,
i think the higher 6 series should be fine with ff.
Damn i always write so much... but i tweaked around the game since beta lol