Horrible Lag while loading a City environment?

Does anybody else have this problem? I don't think it's my graphics card because I have turned down the settings to a medium setting and the game runs smoothly, even when I'm doing behest or something that involves running around with lots of people.

What happens is whenever I run into a city - I'll use Limsa Lominsa as an example since this is the last place I was today - the whole game literally just freezes up badly from lag. I would swear that the framerate goes down to 1FPS for about a minute. I'm pretty sure it's not related to the number of characters that needs to load, because this happens in Gridania and Limsa Lominsa too (I know Ul'Dah is crowded).

Just now, in LL it happened about when I ran into the area where the Chocobo is (you know, where that fountain is, and then there're the stairs that go up to the adventurers' guild) and it was running smoothly, but then just froze up to that 1FPS speed. I ran around for a bit until it got smooth again, and there weren't even any characters, except for the NPCs that are normally there. I ran up the stairs to the guild and it was also empty; there were 2 or 3 player characters up there.

I'm wondering if this can be fixed. Since it doesn't seem to be related to the number of players in the area, I'm thinking it has something to do with the city itself or maybe the loading mechanics in these areas are just poor. I have no idea what the real situation is, but can it be fixed? It happens every time I enter the cities.

your system information please

and is it 1st time you have this issue?

ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB vRAM(can run game pretty smoothly on high settings, but running game on medium settings so I don't strain the computer too much)
8GB RAM, DDR3
Processor is AMD Phenom II X4 945, 3GHz

This issue happens all the time since a few months ago, but I always just ignored it in the past, thinking it would either get fixed or trying to convince myself it's not really a big deal.

But it's getting to me lol

Has it always been like that for you, or just recently? Are you running and Nvidia, or Amd/Ati video card? Xp, Vista, or 7? Reading the boards both recent drivers for Nvidia, and Ati/Amd have problems. Myself rolled back to Amd catalyst 11.5b from 11.6. I also "Use application settings"'in catalyst, I don't know if that helps. Best of luck.

I'm using an ATI video card, and Windows 7.
It's not a huge deal, it just kind of shocked me especially since there are no people running around those cities at all.

I don't really know when I really started noticing it a lot compared to other stuff, but I know it's been quite a while.

Looks like we posted at the same time. Which catalyst are you running? My last stable catalyst was 10.12 before I went to 11.1 bad for me > 11.6 bad for me< 11.5b Ggggggreat ^^ I also run a phenom II X4 though a 965be.

Well now I don't know... I know I used to have Catalyst, but now all I can find on my computer is AMD Vision Engine Control Center... Did I do something wrong when I updated my drivers last time?

Yeah that's the same as before just a different name, I think they changed name on 11.4 but not 100% sure. You might want to try out another catalyst. When I went from 11.6 to 11.5b it was night and day in terms of lag in ul'dah. I know up/down grading amd's catalyst takes a while but it's worth it.

Hey

I have identical specs as you and also get this.

Its when characters are loading, if i log in middle of Uldah then when i come back on it takes foreverrrr to load, and then when im running around and its still continuing to load people it is very choppy. Until everything is in memory then it seems to be okay.

If I log like out in middle of no where its fine.

I think its just our cards or maybe our processors.